Time to see the vet
Your vet is the first person to call on in a crisis, but (hopefully) the person you’ll see the least. “With performance horses, I do a full examination in-hand and ridden, probably twice a year,” says equine vet Sam. “I can then pick anything up in the early stages. For example, if a horse is struggling with a canter pirouette, it might be a training issue or it could be an early sign of lameness. “For leisure horses, I may see them once a year. It’s worth having your horse trotted up and flexed annually – probably when you haveve your vaccinations done – to keep track of what’s normal.” Your vet will often draw on the expertise of others to get a full picture of what’s going on. “One example is a dressage horse that I worked with recently,” says Sam. “He was doing well at advanced medium, but struggling with training for the more advanced work. I treated him for pain in his right hind, but I also worked with the farrier to alter the way he was shod in order to provide better support to his right hind and even loading on his left fore. “The rider was aware that he’d been weak in his right hind for some time and, as a result, his saddle was slipping and he had secondary muscle stiffness. After a saddle check and work with a veterinary physiotherapist, he was moving like a different horse.”
Dental check
If your horse’s teeth are in good shape, you’ll typically see your equine dental technician once a year. “EDTs maintain a horse’s teeth,” says Grant Chanter, an equine dentist. “We rasp teeth and can extract a tooth if it’s especially loose, but there are procedures that we can’t do. If we find an abscess, we have to refer to a vet. We also can’t do molar extraction. “We can extract wolf teeth, but this is under veterinary supervision as the vet has to sedate the horse and as EDTs we can’t administer drugs. For these reasons, we keep a close relationship with the vet. On other occasions, if we’re called out because an owner suspects a problem in their horse’s mouth, but we can’t find any
problems, we may refer to the physio or saddle fitter instead.”