Everybody has in their mind what a perfect horse looks like. For me, the
racehorse is the epitomy of a horse.
The Thoroughbred
are quite talented they can do lots of
things, but my job primarily is during their racing career.
People feel that a horse injures in its leg is the end of its career, and surgery is no longer a
treatment of
, it's the first line defense of keeping these joints normal and more importantly keeping
these horses performing at the highest possible level.
All of the pictures on the wall and there were champions after
they had
. To go to the Breeders Cup board of the Kentucky Derby and see
a horse that you did surgery on win is pretty exciting!
We have a really full day we got a dozen horses that we have to get done. Racehorses will come from
Chicago, New York, Florida, Louisiana routinely the big racing centers.
Some of them were worth a million dollars some of them are just you know
collar
racehorses.
What I'm doing right now is looking through some
on
horses that have a history of not racing as well as the trainer expected.
The referring veterinarian took these radiographs. This horse has a history of
having some
issue after the exercise lameness exam means assessing
how the horse moves. She's been dealing with a little bit of inflammation in one
of her
, but at first, it just was fluid and then she began to get
lame in that ankle.
It's hard to compete when you're
a race track
whether you're a person or a horse you want to be a hundred percent when you're
racing. we`ll radiograph her and see... what's involved in the inside and what's
causing the problem. When we
her we found these fragments of bone in the front they come
from overextension whenever she's training. Here's the
that's
causing this filly's lameness you can see it here on this view and here on a slightly different view that's the
fragment of bone that will take out arthroscopically tomorrow and it'll make her joint normal.
If she were not going to race, these don't have to be removed, but as a racehorse we want her 100 percent
and these have to come out.
Horses that are racehorses they have a limited time to make the best out of their career; if they miss a few months and it takes six months to recover that and a whole year in the middle of what is normally a three-year maybe a four-year career. It's our job as veterinarians
any time missed- it's an opportunity to test what you do on an additional level; it's not just a matter of being able to make the horse comfortable and dismiss it from the hospital that horse then goes to train and then you're tested against other
horses that may or may not have had a problem or just totally normal. You want that horse
.
"How are you?"--" I'm great." Larry How are you?-" I'm doing good" thank you. "My pleasure it's so
good to see you!" Happy Grace is the
Eclipse Award winner last year considered the best racehorse in North America.
She's special to me because we did surgery
her the year before she was Horse of the Year.
now she was injured when she was a two-year-old I guess and she had
fracture in her knee and we removed it
and she came back and
all we had to do was keep anything from getting in her way; she had the ability.
" You hear a lot of people say that racing is cruel, but you watch these
babies going up there, racing each other in the field; it's part of their nature.
A thoroughbred horse can do anything. Once they can finish here they can be cool
with the hunters and jumpers so they're athletes so they have an athletic way
about. "
This is the horse that we did surgery on both of her
yesterday she'll go
back home today she'll have to spend a couple of months and then she can start
training it's a
, so it's it's time for her to start her training-- so
far so good-- she'll be off about a month. It won't take very long to resolve the
problem and then she's ready to go back and train again.
Those pictures back on the wall of all those champions that's what
. That kind of
return and that kind of result is what we're all after and it's sort of
professionally rewarding.