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Prairie Schooner Equine Services

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Notre Dame, NB
Prairie Schooner Equine Services

Veterinarian with 30 years of experience in Equine Dentistry, Lameness, & Wound management.
(11)

06/23/2024

Just another comment on the use of hay nets. “There are nets and then there are nets”. What I have been noticing is that some nets have very tiny holes and they also tend to be the ones with the cable like mesh. I see the horses biting these small hole nets and pulling back on them like they are trying to pinch the hay out of the mesh and often making repeated bites to pull some hay through. And guess what, it is in those barns that I see the horses with the groves on their incisors. Not on all the horses as I said in my initial post, but just another “Heads up” to monitor your horse’s incisors if you are using a net and if you see groves appearing try a different style. The flat strap ones tend to have larger holes and some are even larger than the one example I have posted.

06/19/2024

Just had to share a few images of my wife’s flower garden ( which probably should be listed as a N. B. Attraction). I have to go for a walk through the gardens each day to see what may have just opened. She knows I love poppies with their petals like tissue paper and blossoms that may only last a day if it is windy, but she planted these new colours and they are just too perfect not to share.

05/31/2024

After a lot of thought and seeing the recent unrest in the Equine community, I felt compelled to share my opinion. If you decide to read the attached letter keep in mind that this is my summation of what I see and hear in the halls of the barns I visit. I don’t expect everyone to agree but I would ask that if you read it, please read to the end and just consider the points raised.

Large Animal Veterinary Service in New Brunswick

The letter to follow is the cumulation of a lot of frustration and sleepless nights. I have had to keep a pad by my bed so I can write down the thoughts that are racing through my head making it hard to sleep.
This will be a reflection on my thoughts regarding the delivery of veterinary services by our Provincial Veterinary service. Please note as you read through this that my concerns are not with the individual veterinarians, they are doing the best job they can, given the constraint imposed on them by their employer, The Provincial Veterinary Service, which has been the same mismanaged Public service for over 30 years under both Liberal and Conservative governments.
Over 30 years ago a provincial Veterinary service was established to increase the availability of veterinary services to agricultural livestock producers. The problem developed when they decided to include horses, companion animals, pets of those who had enough money to afford them. That was the beginning of a publicly funded organization providing service to the affluent few who could afford a horse.
I have gone to several, too many, meetings with the administration of the Provincial Veterinary Service (PVS), and never once did I come home and feel they had made any attempt to utilize input from the veterinary community. Not in the next week, next month, or next year. Instead, they continue to go about their business the same old way, ignoring the veterinary community in ways that would result in disciplinary action by the veterinary association for a private practitioner. At one of the last meetings I attended they were actually trying to redefine “Livestock” so it would include horses and then fit their mandate. Only a government organization has the luxury of “Changing the rules” if things aren’t going their way.
My feeling is that if the Province wants to be the provider of veterinary services to all large animals both agricultural (Cattle, pigs, sheep, chickens etc.) and companion animals (Horses; pet sheep, goats & llamas) then DO IT!!! Provide a good service, rather than an understaffed service that has made it impossible for private veterinarians to get established due to the use of public funds paying for all the cost associated with the delivery of their service (heat, lights, hydro, trucks, fuel, secretaries, license fees, etc.).
The government has imposed a service that no one would use if they had a choice. Don’t get me wrong, as I said it the opening paragraph, there are some good veterinarians working for the service and many of you are very happy with your favourite vet, when you can get them. But by forcing out private practice the public has no choice. Believe it or not, I have seen the provincial service buy the same equipment that I have acquired to provide a better service to my clients and when I ask them why, the answer is ‘to be able to Compete”. So now my competition is a publicly funded organization using my own tax dollars to offer a similar service. It makes it impossible for choice to be offered, who can compete with a business that doesn’t have to satisfy customers and exist even when it doesn’t pay for itself.

And now things get really interesting, this Government Funded and Controlled organization has decided that some of you – Life long New Brunswick residents – don’t qualify for service from this Provincial Organization.
Wait, it gets better, under the new protocol if you just moved here and had one of the Provincial Vets out one day before they implemented their new “Triage System” , then you can continue to receive services, but a life time resident of the province who had used the service for 20 or 30+ years and due to a bit of good fortune had not made a call to the service in the last two years , then you are out of luck. A veterinarian will not come to your location no matter how urgent the need. Even though you are paying for the service to exist through your taxes.
How can a publicly funded organization “Pick and Choose” who to serve. I understand they have a staff shortage right now, so does the human medical field. What they are doing would be like the Moncton Hospital refusing services to the public since it has been a couple of years since you were really sick, or maybe our overworked and crowed school system telling parents their child can’t come to school because it has been two years since your last child started.
Sometimes when you are really busy, patients will have a longer wait time, look at the ER room at the hospital, but when a child breaks a leg skiing, or your loved one suffers a heart attack, they aren’t turned away.

And here comes the ironic twist. The public has decided that if that is the game you want to play then so be it. Now owners are calling to have their horses “Vaccinated “so they will qualify as having made a recent request for services. What could be a greater waste of time for a service with limited personnel than to be out doing vaccines. Make no mistake, I am a huge believer in the value of vaccines for animal health, but it doesn’t require a veterinarian to give a tetanus shot. (Rabies is the only exception) How many cow and swine farmers call a veterinarian out to do vaccines of individual animals … very few, if any. They simply purchase the vaccines and administer it to their animals themselves.
Now veterinary staff that is having difficulty to service the demand for situations requiring skilled veterinary services are spending parts of their days doing services that don’t require a veterinarian.

So, what is the solution? There is no easy, quick way out. This system, although it is the only one of its kind in all of Canada or USA, has become deeply ingrained. It should be noted that the rest of this country does just fine without spending public money on a veterinary service. This has been a money losing organization since its inception, costing the province, me and you, several million more than it generates, but people continue to use it for fear of having no service.

But look what it has done. It has kept private practice from developing or investing in the large animal or equine sectors. It has driven away a lot of young new veterinarians, and now in a time of staff shortages no one is happy. Overworked veterinarians are being booked to do routine vaccines while many more urgent calls wait or are told they are on their own.

If the Provincial Veterinary Service just got out of (Quit) doing horses and stuck to doing agricultural animals they might have sufficient personnel to respond to doing what the department was initially established to do … an “Agricultural service providing service to the Agricultural Community”

Many of you may not want to hear it, but you have enabled this organization by continuing to use a sub-par system. I can’t imagine clients calling me back if I provided a similar service. The only solution is to stop using the PVS for ALL Horse work. Yes there will be turbulent times, but private clinics will develop, it may even be a golden opportunity for some of your favourite veterinarians to start their own practice.

05/25/2024

A lot of owners are using Hay nets these days and they do have a lot of benefits. I have seen a large reduction in stabled horse habits since they spend more time extracting their feed from the net, however … I have also started to see a lot of incisors defects in horses whose stalls show no signs of chewing the walls, the bars show no signs of rubbing and the owners tell me they don’t crib on post or feeders. The only thing they have in common is the introduction of hay nets since their last dental visit.
This is not a well designed scientific study, just an observation and a suggestion for owners to monitor their horse’s incisors if you start to use Hay nets. Today everyone has a camera in their pocket so I recommend for owners to take a photo of their hoses incisors before and after a few months of using net.

07/15/2023

Eight years ago after almost 25 years of doing Equine dentistry I took my first course in Major cheek tooth extraction. Then I headed home, bought a couple of tools and scheduled an appointment with a client’s horse that I knew needed attention and with the help of a very competent assistant, Carolyn Train, we were successful.

Now 8 years and 3500 + horses later with a few more tools and with the help of Dr. Carolyn Train another nasty cheek tooth is extracted. Nice to know we have another Veterinarian in our area interested in Equine dentistry.

01/30/2023

Then for the ultimate test, our little granddaughter off to round up the cows in her imagination. Just needed a little leg up on mounting box. 😊

01/30/2023

Then came the day to pick up little “Rusty” from the Repair Shop. The work here was done by Brian Hansen from Heritage Signs, a real artist and craftsman when it come to restoring antiques.

01/30/2023

The frame was sent out to be powder coated and the entire horse was stripped with a glass bead blaster.

01/30/2023

The first thing we had to do was to dismantle the little guy, strip off a lot of rust, and locate a few (hard to find as we discovered) pieces.

01/30/2023

Just for something on the lighter side, if any of you have seen the show called “The Repair Shop” on the “Makeful” channel , well this is a similar storey from a New Brunswick “Repair Shop”.
This little spring horse was picked out of some road side garbage by a client who couldn’t allow the little guy to be crushed for scrap metal but had no place for him. While at their farm I spotted his huge metal feet sticking out of the tall grass beside the barn so I checked it out and was introduced to “Rusty”. Next thing I know, Rusty was delivered to a clinic in Riverview by my client which was the beginning of the next chapter in Rusty’s life.
Turns out he was made in England in the 60’s by MoBo toy company and was sold as the “Prairie King”. Well having both grandchildren and a business called Prairie Schooner I decided to give him the same treatment I have given to my old Landcruiser which is no longer doing daily service after 985,000 km but still shows up at the odd horse show.

01/12/2023

This...

Why should we pay cash everywhere with banknotes instead of a card ?

- I have a $50 banknote in my pocket. Going to a restaurant and paying for dinner with it.

The restaurant owner then uses the bill to pay for the laundry.

The laundry owner then uses the bill to pay the barber.

The barber will then use the bill for shopping.

After an unlimited number of payments, it will still remain a $50 value, which has fulfilled its purpose to everyone who used it for payment and the bank has jumped dry from every cash payment transaction made.

BUT

IF I come to a restaurant and pay digitally via Card,

- the bank fees for my payment transaction charged to the seller are 3%, so around $1.50

( and so will be the fee of $1.50 for each further payment transaction )

-for the owner re laundry or
- payments of the owner of the laundry shop,
- or payments of the barber etc.....

Therefore, after 30 transactions, the initial $50 will exist at only $5 and the remaining $45 has become the property of the bank … thanks to all of the digital transactions and fees!

Use it or lose it folks…

Once it’s gone we won’t get it back!

Cash is king!

09/26/2022

Another good day on the dental trail, and today I had some new helpers, maybe the next generation of Equine dentist.

06/18/2022

After several weeks of trying to service all the request for dental services including hiring another technician to allow appointments on an additional day of the week, we find that there are still too many owners and their horses having to wait for several weeks before we are able to come to their farm. So now I am pleased to announce that we have a haul in facility with easy access just outside Moncton. We have installed a set of equine stocks in a fresh new barn. Now for owners who have one or two horses for whom they would like a dental appointment before we return to your area we offer the option to haul them to Moncton and get a treatment weeks earlier.

03/04/2022

I have had a few people ask “what ever became of the wooden horse? .” Well when I was in college (a few years back) there was a band called American and they had a hit called “A horse with no name”, turns out I can add a new verse to the song as I now have “ A horse with no legs”. Next post I hope to show you my horse in full gallop! 👍

03/01/2022

So this was just a quick tour through some of the incisor issues we encounter. There is an old expression “Never look a gift horse in the mouth” which was a way of trying to tell people to be polite if some one offers you a “Free horse”. However I would like to encourage all horses owners to “ look in the mouth” of their horse.
It is important to note that these incisor issues can be a Primary problem and have negative effects on the molars, or they can be a result of long standing molar issues. This is why it is so important to balance the entire mouth and not to just go after the 1 or 2 obviously abnormal teeth.
The photos included show a “U” shape bite before and after Tx, a Cribber, a horse that liked to run his teeth up and down the bars of the stall front, an “Overshot - Parrot mouth”, and an “Undershot - Monkey mouth”. See if you can figure out which is which, then imagine my dilemma as I try to give these animals some comfort.

02/26/2022

Here is a more typical initial presentation with a before and after one treatment, and although I don’t have any (good) photos to illustrate the pathology behind the incisors further back in the mouth I am sure you can imagine there must be some irregularity of the molar tables that have resulted in these horses chewing more on one side of their mouth long enough to to manifest the issue as “Diagonal Bites”. So all I really wanted to do with these last few post is to illustrate the value of regular dental work for the performance horse. As an interesting note, none of the owners of the horses in these photos reported any issue with their horse’s ability to eat and they were all in good body condition at the time of presentation however everyone one of them were reported as being “Stiff” to to the Right or “Stiff” to the left. In the good old days owners did not worry about dental issues until the animal was Quidding or loosing weight, and we still get these calls every week. The problem is that by the time the horse is having difficulty they have an issue that has been present for years and has slowly gotten worse until it finally gets to the point the horse can no longer deal with the pain or lack of ability to chew their food and guess what … “all of a sudden” they start having behavioural issues or loosing weight.

02/26/2022

Here is another real beauty, imagine trying to turn this horse to the Left.

02/24/2022

I hope you all had a chance to look over the pages from Dr. Mack's article. At the end she list 5 of the most common dental issues known to affect a horses performance. Number One on her list are incisor abnormalities and in this article she dealt with the "Diagonal Bite". We see these a lot and if caught early they can be addressed with one treatment, however if left they may require several treatments at 4 to 6 month intervals. The photos below are steps along a 3 year treatment. I will discuss these further in future post. The brightest photo is after one year.

02/24/2022

Just a quick update on the equipment box that is becoming a bit of a challenge as I have a few tools that are larger than most so one set of drawers had to be extended. Just required a bit more time to make the offsets but it is going to be great to have all my tools on board.

02/19/2022

A little peak at how we make use of every “Cubic” inch of the practice vehicle.

02/17/2022

Wow, February is half over! Last year I described how “Waves” often get started and their significance, this year I wanted to explain another important and often overlooked part of Equine dentistry, “Incisor Alignment”. This is a crucial part of “Balancing” a horses mouth. To start us off I have included a couple of pages from an article by a veterinarian who has a done a lot of research on the affects of Dental Imbalance on equine performance.
I will then post a few photos from some of the many cases we have worked on to try and illustrate and explain the importance of correct incisor alignment.

02/02/2022

After over 30 years in the business, I thought I knew a horse inside out. It appears I should have paid better attention in anatomy class.

01/23/2022

Six hours later I now had a working wooden ratchet designed to make sure the horse only runs in one direction. Nothing worse than a horse doing the Michel Jackson “Moon walk” 😊.

01/19/2022

So what is everyone doing during to entertain themselves when you can’t go to a restaurant or a movie. I have always enjoyed making plastic models of cars and motorcycles so I decided to take it to another level and try to combine my love of woodworking with modeling, let me introduce you to the world of automatons. This is from a kit that said all you need is glue and sand paper!!! I am having a lot of fun but let me pass on a couple of words of advice, a successful build will require a “few” more tools.

12/18/2021

“Places Everyone “. As the colder weather sets in our family likes to gather in the parlour. The Gray cat ( Jack ) never wants to share so he takes a chair all to himself, our dog (Lilly) likes to curl up close to the fire, the Black cat seeks our Audrey’s lap so she often has the “Cat Card” early meaning that I have to fetch treats and keep the wine glasses full. Then my favourite the Calico cat ( Furface 2.0) is always in close proximity but rarely settles on my lap to give me a “Cat Card”. On the rare occasion that she does we then have the debate as to whether a Calico “Trumps” a solid Black.

11/25/2021

I have often been asked why a horse owner needs to worry about sharp cheek teeth if their horse appears to be doing fine. While many horses can continue to eat with existing cheek pathology, improving their ability to chew their food is only one part of Equine dentistry. A lot of what we do is to improve comfort and performance when you are working them. I will have shown many of you the damaged cheeks on the day we did your horse and I have tried to take a few photos but it is hard to get a camera in a horses mouth without the lenses fogging up. But as you view these two photos try to imagine how the horse feels as the straps from your bridle or the shaft of your bit forces their cheeks on these dental points.

08/26/2021

Another great day on the dental trail made extra special by a gift of blue berries from an up and coming young farmer.🙂

06/14/2021

Here is the little guy in action

06/14/2021

My wife’s flower garden has been attracting a lot of visitors lately, you may have to zoom in to see the 3rd image, it is a “Hummingbird moth”

06/03/2021

To all of you who have been so good as to follow our page, I have a treat. Each year my wife transforms our yard into a floral masterpiece. Each day when I get home I go fro the “Walk of the day” to see what new blossom has become the highlight. Here is today’s walk. So fill your Prairie Schooner Wine glass and enjoy.

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2040 South Cocagne Road
Notre Dame, NB
E4V1W2

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A little peak at how we make use of every “Cubic” inch of the practice vehicle.

After over 30 years in the business, I thought I knew a horse inside out. It appears I should have paid better attention in anatomy class.

Six hours later I now had a working wooden ratchet designed to make sure the horse only runs in one direction. Nothing worse than a horse doing the Michel Jackson “Moon walk” 😊.

Here is the little guy in action

For all of you who have been so good to follow our site, I have a treat. My wife does an amazing job each year of making our yard a little piece of Heaven. Each day in the summer when I get home I take a walk around to see the floral “Event of the day”, some blossoms only last for a few days. Here is todays walk, I hope you enjoy it.