Equine Sleep Disorder Videos

We have an 19 year old ex race horse that was doing CCI** CIC** FEI eventing with my husband on board, and he will do this nap attack thing while he is being held by the groom saddled and ready to go. He also does it in the paddocks. He is out with 5 other horses during the day. He scared us silly the first time we saw it. It happened in the paddock and we saw what we thought was him having some sort of fit or heart attack. He suddenly just starts staggering backwards as he tries to catch his balance without waking up. We have wittnessed him doing easily 50 meters or more backwards before he wakes up. At shows the groom has to stay sharp or the horse just collapses for a sleep. This causes a ruckus as everyone around him panics. If it is a minor show I have to confess we have let him have a little sleep if he has no saddle on. The horse is not easy and he gets huffy if you fight with him to keep him awake and then the dressage was a disaster. He only retired in October 2008 when he trotted out unsound for the Vetting before our National Champs. Now he is enjoying retirement, big and fat but we have noticed that he is not sleeping everywhere anymore. I was always worried he would go down in the horsebox on a long journey but if he fell asleep in there he was held up by the partitions, also his travelling mate spent most of the time trying to nip him. We had never heard of this before and our vet said he had never before seen or heard of a horse with what he called narcolepsy in South Africa, but he did know that some cases had been documented in the States. It is very scary to see, his lapsing into sleep is MUCH more dramatic than the videos shown here and caused a lot of embarrasment at shows. Horsey people can be very judgemental and they like to tell stories. We had to have a veterinary certificate around always in case the silly thing fell over and had a nap.