One of the things that occurs with lightning strike is that animals will bloat more quickly. Organs in the horse will become distended with gas more rapidly than normal. Usually, we find no burns, but if we do find burns, they frequently will be over the withers, down the legs, or will run down the jugular groove on the side of the neck. Treatment of survivors is done symptomatically. Scoggins sometimes adds corticosteroids to the regimen, and occasionally sedatives for hyperexcitable horses.
Prognosis ranges from complete recovery to permanent injury.
If a horse is going to respond, it will be in the first two or three weeks. Levy says he's never been called to look at a horse which possibly was struck by lightning. Scoggins found records indicating that the largest single-strike kill involved 20 head of cattle gathered under a tree. Almost all parts of the United States face some risk of threat by lightning, although the risk is more remote west of the Rocky Mountains and in New England. Lightning's victims at any moment are few in number, so there is not a massive outpouring of publicity as in many other types of natural disasters.