by Dan Rosenberg

The relationship between a farm manager and the veterinarian has to be a close one, and is at the same time complicated.

I have always wanted to write a song that would surely be a hit, at least in horse country; its title is, "I'm Waiting on the Veterinarian Blues." I can't count how many hours I've waited with horses standing in the stalls, staff standing around, and work literally piling up.

And I've stood beside my veterinarian while he talks on his cell phone to the manager at his next stop and tells him he will be there in 20 minutes, when I know he has at least 30 minutes of work left with me and then a 20-minute drive.

In fairness, there is the other side of the coin. The veterinarian arrives at a farm, the horses he is to examine are all turned out, and he has to wait for them to be brought in. Of course, one of them refuses to be caught.

And then when all the scheduled work is finished, the manager says, "While you're here, Doc, ... ," and presents a horse with an unexpected and time-consuming problem. Dr. Art Davidson contended he paid for his farm with all the "while you're here ... " horses he treated.

At least during the breeding season, the veterinarian visits every day, and frequently several times a day. Working together day in and day out, often all night long through tragedy, failure, and triumph, it is inevitable that a strong personal relationship develops.

Neither farm managers nor veterinarians have a life. We become friends and confidants, and this friendship becomes especially important in working through crises when we are all sleep-deprived and stressed out to the max.

Some decisions are clearly management decisions, and others are clearly veterinary decisions. And when tensions sometimes develop in the gray area in between, a close relationship and some give and take are critical in working out the issues.

Teach the manager

Our veterinarians fulfill other important functions, as well. We count on them to educate us so that we can become better horsemen and communicate more effectively with our clients. They spread the news—be it diseases being experienced on other farms so that we can take appropriate precautions, their experience with stallions' fertility or infertility so that we can make better breeding decisions, general intelligence that impact the market, and, of course, gossip and jokes. And they manage to do this while maintaining a high level of discretion.

I feel sorry for new veterinarians. Pretty much all they are allowed to do is suture mares and vaccinate. I have spoken to numerous veterinary students over the years and always give them one piece of advice. You need to be really good at only two things when you graduate: hitting a vein and passing a tube. We can see that, and if you are poking around, you may not get another chance to show us how good a diagnostician you are. (Sometimes I swear that it seems the only mandatory course in veterinary school must be Throw Your Trash in the Aisle 101.)

When I was working for Melvin Cinnamon at Calumet Farm, one of the mares was dull and had a very high fever. Melvin had faith in only two veterinarians, Bill McGee and Art Davidson. I called the Hagyard-Davidson-McGee office to ask for one of them. Rather than Bill or Art, a new young vet drove up to the barn. This vet is now a world-recognized authority, but at the time was fresh out of vet school.

Before he could get out of the car, Melvin said to him: "Boy, when you get out of vet school, they give you a license to practice, and that's just what you have to do. And you're not practicing on my horses. Why don't you just turn your car around and get Bill out here."

Having learned from Melvin, a few years later I had a yearling with a serious laceration that required suturing. I called my vet, who said he would send out Dr. X (also now very highly regarded). I said: "I want you, not Dr. X." He said: "On a scale of one to ten, I think he's a seven."

And I said: "That's exactly my point. I don't want a seven. I want a ten."

Gets his chance

But once at Calumet a new guy got his chance. A yearling was colicking in the middle of the night, and I woke up Art Davidson, who said: "Dan, why don't you get one of the kids?" Now, in those days colic was treated by tubing them with mineral oil, maybe a little "Bell's Compound" or "Hagyard's Special Colic Remedy" (which only masked the symptoms by relieving pain) and keeping them on their feet by walking them for hours, even if it meant beating them with a broom to keep them from lying down and rolling.

Paul Thorpe was a new vet fresh out of the University of California at Davis and a friend. He had been telling me about treating colic surgically before they were half dead.

I called Paul, who came out, listened to his gut, palpated the yearling (who ever heard of such a thing?), and immediately diagnosed a torsion and recommended immediate surgery.

Melvin went through the roof, called Art, and told him to get right over. We walked the colt for several hours while his condition deteriorated to the point Art also said we might as well try the surgery or euthanize him.

So we loaded him on the van and took him over. By this time the gut had been severely compromised and Paul had to resection several feet of intestine. The colt recovered and was doing well enough a week later that we got the call to come get him.

While the van was on the road, another call came in saying he was colicking again and was going back into surgery. This time, the colt died on the table. Melvin's reaction was, "See! I told you it was a waste of time and money to operate on that horse!" I could never convince him that if we had followed Paul's advice in the beginning, the colt would have lived.

Now, of course, colic surgery is commonly accepted and has a very high success rate, but few of the younger managers would know that it was Paul who pioneered and pushed for the procedure.

New-fangled conveniences

I feel like an old man saying this, but so many commonplace practices and procedures that we now take for granted are relatively new. Think back to the days before cell phones or even pagers. The vets had two-way radios that were often out of range and were no good if the vet was out of his car. There were no breeding shed requirements and no breeding shed forms.

In the early 1970s, there were no disposable speculums. A Caslick speculum was used, a big, heavy stainless-steel instrument with three prongs and a screw at the end to open it up and then was rinsed with a disinfectant before being used on the next mare. The Caslick speculum went the way of the dinosaur, and disposable speculums came with the outbreak of contagious equine metritis (CEM), which required us to use better hygiene to prevent its spread.

I once asked Bill McGee when veterinarians began the practice of palpating mares. "Oh, I guess I palpated my first mare sometime in the late '50s," he replied.

Then I found out that he had been among the first to do so here in the United States. Leslie Combs II had dispatched him to Newmarket to learn the technique from a renowned English veterinarian.

The first pregnancy check before ultrasound was at 18 days, and McGee would pronounce them "PP" or "PB." When I asked if the "P" stood for probably or possibly, he said: "Cut me a little slack, would you?" The second check was at 28 days, when twins might be detected. Fetal reduction was not an option, and twins were not uncommon.

Before the introduction of ultrasound, follicle sizes were reported as 1-firm or 3-soft, rather than in millimeters. One veterinarian I worked with sized follicles by saying, "She has a grape-size follicle."

My response was: "Like a Concord grape or a green seedless? Don't give me fruit!"

When we started using ultrasound, I also was surprised by the number of multiple follicles we were finding. I called Bill McGee again and asked why these mares were having so many follicles all of sudden. "They always have," he said. "I only told you about the ones that mattered."

The quality of radiographs also has improved significantly, even before the recent introduction of digital imaging. It was not until the 1980s that osteochondritis dissecans (OCD) lesions were recognized. There was a firestorm because they were all over the place and nobody had ever had one before. Addition of copper to the diet was supposed to be the answer to that problem, and everyone reformulated their rations, which obviously did not solve the problem.

We never heard of flakes or chips in young horses and certainly never considered an endoscopic examination of upper airways for a weanling or yearling. Truly sterile surgery suites were just coming into existence, and arthroscopy had yet to be developed.

Shaker foals

Many farms had "shaker foals" every year, and morbidity was high. We had no idea of what caused it, and treatment consisted mostly of TLC and support therapy. Once it was discovered that botulism was the cause and a vaccine was developed, the disease essentially disappeared.

I do not know exactly when or why the terminology changed, but it used to be that when a vet said a foal had pneumonia you could see its flanks heaving and its gums were turning blue. Now foals have a mild or no fever, are nursing, bouncing off the walls, and they have pneumonia. Of course, we lost a lot more of them then.

The rise of the vet clinic is also recent. We used to sit up ourselves all night with sick horses, administering fluids and medications and nursing them back to health. The clinics now provide a much higher level of care while allowing managers, farm personnel, and veterinarians to get much-needed sleep. That care, however, does not come cheap.

One downside of the veterinary hospitals is that young people trying to learn the farm-management business do not get the nursing experience that I found so valuable. And I recommend to those aspiring to manage a farm one day to experience working in the clinics.

I think another unfortunate part of the trend to send horses off to the clinic is the necessity in our society to cover our flanks, not only by sending them to the clinic but also in how we care for them on the farm. With horses being so valuable and often under the scrutiny of insurers, we as managers are pressured to call the vet at the very slightest sign of injury or illness.

The veterinarian in turn is under the very same pressures to do something, such as prescribing antibiotics, stall rest, or other regimen. We know, for example, that some horses under stress will develop gastric ulcers. We often do not know which ones until it is too late. What do we do? We treat them all. It is the same with sending them to the clinic. We do not need to send them all, but the first question that will be asked if one dies is why we did not send it in sooner.

Another change I have seen over the years is the rise in veterinary specialties. Then, farm vets were distinguished from racetrack vets, but that was about it. Now, of course we have many specialists in orthopedic surgeons, soft-tissue surgeons, internal medicine, reproduction, imaging, ophthalmologists, and more.  Our veterinarians frequently call on the specialists for assistance. Multiple opinions are frequently sought out, and we work together as a team. The danger here is that some owners may keep getting expert opinions until they get the one they want to hear.

Mary Passenger

The first female veterinarian I remember was Mary Passenger. She was an excellent veterinarian who was gradually gaining the respect of a male-dominated industry before her untimely death as the result of complications from a collapsed lung after being injured by a horse.

The reaction of many managers and veterinarians was: "See what happens when you let a woman practice veterinary medicine?" More compassionately, others saw her death as the tragic accident that it was and remembered her as a competent veterinarian. Now we have many highly regarded and highly respected women in the field. I mention this because I want to remember Mary Passenger and the role she played in paving the way for others, and to remind those who do not remember how recently women were excluded from participating in this industry.

The more things change, the more things remain the same. A lot has changed. The relationship, the shared blood, sweat, and tears, the camaraderie we enjoy has not changed. It seems that the veterinary profession comes under a lot of fire these days, whether it is its fees or its influence at the sales.

They do not deserve the criticism. We count on our vets to be there with us and for us whenever we call, through thick and thin, remaining cool under fire. They teach us and support us. We managers cannot do our jobs without them. They make us look good.

Dan Rosenberg, owner of Rosenberg Thoroughbred Consulting, is a consultant to "Farm Management News" and a regular columnist