Trust ◊ Education ◊ Professionalism
Our veterinarians are fortunate to have an assistant with them the majority of the time. Their primary duties are to assist veterinarians in countless ways. Depending on the procedure, they may also be called on to handle your horse. For the majority of the time, however, you will be required to handle your horse.
Emergencies
It is very helpful for us to have clear directions to your horse and the ability to have our vehicles close the patient when we get there.
On-site
Dogs can be problematic. They often like our bloody gauze sponges and sometimes can agitate a sick horse by barking or getting too close to the sick horse. If possible, we ask that dogs be kept inside and away from the emergency.
Horse Handling
Please be ready to handle your horse. If you find the situation very stressful or overwhelming please have a suitable horse handler. A good example where this might occur is large lacerations where blood is involved or more severe colics where the horse is very painful and needs lots of walking and possibly the horse trying to lay down.
Work Area
Please have a clean safe area to work in. Small clean paddocks or stalls that are large enough to safely work in are ideal.
For lameness evaluations, we do require horses to be able to jog in hand and have level safe footing ground to jog straight lines and in hand circles. For more subtle lameness and in-depth evaluation, we require soft footing such as grass or arena footing so that we may lunge the horse. If your horse is not trained to lunge on a lunge line, free lunge in a round pen is acceptable. Free lunge in an arena is very difficult to evaluate the gaits well.
The majority of our equipment is cordless, this includes our x-ray equipment, dental equipment, and more.
