29/05/2023
*** CHECKING HORSES AT LEAST TWICE A DAY ***
The necessity to check your horses at least twice a day, is something I’m absolutely adamant about, and make no apologies for.
I saw a social media post a few weeks ago, where someone was asking if it was ok to go away on holiday and leave their ponies, as they were next to a hotel, so anyone could see if anything was drastically wrong. No, that’s absolutely not ok; if you’ve got the money to go on holiday, you’ve got the money to pay a local freelance groom to check your horses twice a day. Most of the comments on the post suggested that was unacceptable, but several were very concerning. Some people were suggesting that it was absolutely fine to only check horses once a day, as what happens if they got colic/were injured, in the 12 hours inbetween the twice daily checks?! How is that justifying not checking on your horses?
And by checking on your horses twice a day, I don’t mean glancing over a fence to make sure they’re breathing…..although that would be better than the nothing that some people deem acceptable! I also don’t mean a 20 minute check over of every part of their anatomy, before anyone thinks that I spend my days performing two stage vettings on all of my horses!
If you’ve only got a couple of minutes spare, then you need to check that
1. Your horse hasn’t got low grade colic. If you’re not feeding him, will he happily take a sweet, and was he eating hay/grazing normally when you arrived?
2. Your horse’s eyes are both open and non-painful
3. There are no swellings anywhere on his body, but especially the legs; this is when it’s important to know the “normal” for your horse.
4. He is walking sound
The above will take no more than a couple of minutes, and may save your horse’s life. That sounds dramatic, but spotting a low grade colic, rather than returning back 12 hours later to an inoperable colic, is just one example. Spotting the start of cellulitis, rather than returning 12 hours later to an enormous leg and lame horse with lymphangitis, is another. There are many more.
No, we can’t watch over our horses 24 hours a day, but we absolutely must check them twice a day. Leaving a horse with a nasty wound, a sore eye, or, god forbid, a broken leg, for 12 hours, is bad enough, but leaving a horse in pain for 24 hours is neglect.
I will never forget the day I was called out to a nasty wound, at lunchtime. They had last checked the horse mid-afternoon the previous day. I explained that I could hopefully save the horse (the wound was over a joint), but that I’d need to do the dressing changes for the next few days. It wasn’t able to be sutured at that point, as it was 24 hours old, and infected. The response was, “well how much is that going to cost, because if it’s going to be really expensive, I’d prefer you put her to sleep now”. I told the (now ex) client exactly what I thought of them, treated the wound successfully, and thankfully never saw them again. (Although they did think it was acceptable to bad mouth me on FB for years later!).
If you’ve got horses, you’ve got a responsibility for their welfare, and this involves checking them at least twice a day.
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