What's inside a horse?

Interesting morning at the open day today at the local equine vet hospital.....

Beautiful day so we walked over with Chox

When we got there, Éowyn was fascinated by the cut up horse's leg and hoof......

...the number of teeth they have....

...but most of all by the lady doing the fecal egg counts!! She asked many questions about" going through the motions" and was rewarded with a close up look at some poo.....

Those teeth are things of beauty really when you look at them close up (although reading this story maybe Ross Jacobs wouldn't agree with me...)

There was also a pair of beautiful Shires, and we got a demo of how to plait their mane (Éowyn approved of the sparkly bows)

The owners aren't far from here and do driving lessons and working with the horses (ploughing etc), they said to come and see them sometime so I think I will :-)

Quite unbelievable trip to the vet....

Our rescue ponies, Ruby and Ebony, needed a trip to the vet yesterday, Ebony has an abscess in her foot, the vet came out on Monday to see it and gave us poultices to put on and said to bring her up to him for a check up in a few days. We took Ruby too as she's developed a lump on her neck and we wanted to get it checked out.

So the girls loaded fine and off we went. When we arrived they were a bit on edge, not knowing where they were. The vet started with Ruby, he got the clippers out to remove the hair from around the lump, she wasn't happy about them being anywhere near her. So he shouted at her, not a good start, then decided she'd need sedating. He gave her enough sedative to make her seriously wobbly, then insisted we drag her across to the ultrasound machine to check out the lump which is also an abscess.

Then he turned his attention to Ebony's foot and has basically butchered it looking for this abscess:

When I asked if this was really necessary, he was quite rude! This is the same vet we took Gandalf to about his lump and there were no problems at all and he was very charming and handled him competently. Yesterday it was like he was a different person...... By the time he'd finished with Ebony's foot, Ruby was able to walk more normally but was still obviously under the effects of the sedative. We were a bit concerned about loading her, and were taking it slowly, understandably she was hesitant about going up the ramp in her wobbly state. Next thing we know, the vet has reappeared and after making some condescending comment about English trailers being no good and we should have bought a Fautras, proceeded to fetch a broom and start waving it about behind her. As if this wasn't bad enough he hit her with it, we really couldn't believe our eyes!!

So that is the last time we'll be using that vet, some much for trusting so called professionals........!!

His name is Laurent Duhard, he is in 24700 Ménesplet, avoid him like the plague!