Equine Care
Medical Services
We understand that it’s stressful when your companion is sick or lame. Let us help take some of the stress away with our patient and gentle approach to handling horses. By combining a thorough exam, experience and advanced diagnostics, we can help get your horse back to its peak performance and you enjoying spending time with them.
We’re not going to try and pretend we’re specialists – we’re general practitioners who have taken some advanced courses – but we do spend lots of time consulting with specialists on your behalf to get an answer without you having to travel. Thanks to advances in Telemedicine, we can have results and recommendations from specialists quickly – often within 24 hours and sooner.
Preventative Care & Vaccinations
Annual wellness examinations are often combined with vaccination services, and are another important part of proper preventative medicine, as issues like PPID and laminitis are best caught early before it becomes debilitating.
As the saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure – and with good reason. Many diseases in horses can have severe, if not fatal, consequences. We’re happy to help develop a preventative vaccine program tailored to your horse. Which diseases your horse is likely to be exposed to depends on what activities you do together, where you travel, and what we are seeing in the area for diseases.
Did you know that deworming protocols have changed because of growing resistance to de-worming medication? Today, we need to utilize fecal egg counts to determine not only which horse is shedding the most worms but also which worms are present and whether there is resistance developing.
Travel & Pre-Purchase
Taking your horse out of Canada? There are a few government requirements and blood tests before they can go, so it is best to plan ahead to avoid a headache. We can help guide you through the process and are accredited to perform the health exam and blood tests required by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.
Regardless of whether it’s a horse for your kids or your next champion, buying a horse can be stressful. Let us help with a pre-purchase exam. Starting with a simple physical exam and flexion tests to look for possible lameness, to packages that include X-rays of all the lower limb joints, we can help make sure you know whether something is an issue or not. You want your next purchase to be a good investment and a long-term companion, and we want to help make the decision easier.
Microchipping is growing in popularity as an alternative to brands or tattoos. Not only are they being used to permanently identify purebred animals, but they can also help identify your horse during evacuations due to forest fires or floods. They also provide useful permanent identification when travelling to the USA. Microchips can be quickly inserted into the top-line of the neck without sedation in most instances.
Diagnostic Testing
To give your horse the best chance in an emergency, treatments depend on precisely knowing your horse’s internal health – organ function, blood cell analysis, blood gas analysis, electrolyte analysis and more! Our comprehensive in-house lab analyzers can get us those answers within minutes. We can perform complete blood cell analysis, full serum biochemistry analysis, blood electrolyte testing, blood gas analysis, fluid protein analysis, as well as tests for some hormonal diseases, all with results within the hour. Proper analysis of your horse’s internal health saves unnecessary treatments and leads to faster recovery.
Urine testing isn’t just for infection! We do commonly perform testing for urinary tract infection in-clinic, including rapid bacterial testing (under 15 min) and in-house culture and sensitivity testing, to ensure proper treatment of infections. We also analyze urine for the presence of metabolites that indicate other internal organ problems.
Knowing whether your horse has an infection and what is causing the infection is very important – particularly with antibiotic resistance on the rise. We have numerous options available to determine whether your horse has a commonly seen infection. For less common illnesses, we utilize the skills of specialists at referral laboratories to get the answers you need.
With growing dewormer resistance in parasites, it is no longer good enough to simply rotate dewormers. We need to know if your horse actually needs to be dewormed, which worms are present and which dewormer works. By performing in-house fecal tests, we can quickly get you these answers – and it’s a simple as bringing in a fresh sample of poop you’ve already picked up!
We provide in-house testing for antibiotic effectiveness against your horse’s infection, which significantly reduces the wait time for results. Rather than wasting precious time in transit to a referral lab, we can typically provide results in 48 hours to ensure your horses receive effective treatment.
Lumps and bumps are common in horses, and some can be very serious. We focus on finding an answer and treating it quickly before it becomes a complicated illness. With both in-house microscopic evaluation and referral to pathologists and oncologists, we can find a treatment plan that works best for you and your horse.
If your horse has issues breathing or you suspect it may be bleeding in its lungs during exercise, we can perform broncho-alveolar lavage and cytology to determine the cause of the breathing issues and target our treatment, minimizing the risk of side-effects.
To help minimize the stress of travel, we are able to consult with numerous specialists via the internet. From radiographs to electrocardiograms and more, we are able to take the stress out of finding an answer by sending the tests, not your horse, to the specialists.
Diagnostic Imaging
When your horse is lame, you want answers quick. With our mobile high-definition digital X-rays, we can take and read the X-rays on farm, speeding up the diagnosis. We can also e-mail copies to your farrier with hoof wall angles for them to better provide corrective trimming if required.
Our mobile ultrasound unit rounds out our imaging by letting us look for muscle and tendon injuries that don’t show on x-ray. Having a high quality ultrasound with doppler is integral to our ability to fully diagnose why your horse is lame, or evaluate reproductive status. By investing in an in-clinic ultrasound with doppler, and advanced training with our ultrasound, we have rounded out what digital radiographs can’t do. Dr. Ridgway has an interest in ultrasound and has taken advanced training in equine lower limb ultrasounds. We can also utilize telemedicine for specialists to read any images that we can’t.
Surgery & Anesthesia
As with all our on-farm animal surgeries, we always include pain medication as well as local anesthesia (freezing). This not only ensures better animal welfare but also speeds healing. Our on-farm castrations are performed under general anesthetic using proper sterile technique, and the blood vessels are tied off to minimize post surgery complications.
Horses can be accident prone! When lacerations happen, time is of the essence – timely repair speeds healing, reduces the chance of infection, and minimizes formation of scar tissue – all of which are important for proper return to function. Laceration repair is typically performed with standing sedation and local anesthesia (freezing).
Dentistry
Your horse’s mouth is important for healthy digestion and balance in the bit. Equine dentistry has come a long way over the past few years and there are many new interventions and treatments beyond simply floating their teeth. Our dental exams focus on your horse’s gum health as well as their teeth and should be performed yearly to ensure dental disease doesn’t lead to a fractured tooth or worse, because early dental disease has no obvious signs. We offer mobile digital dental X-rays, and can perform several types of extractions on-farm. We use a combination of power- and hand-floats to best suit each horse’s mouth.
End of Life Care
Saying good-bye to a companion is hard. We understand that while we can never make “good-bye” easy, we can make it a little better by providing the service on-farm. Prior to giving any euthanasia solution, we give them a sedative in the vein to relax your horse. The euthanizing injection is given after sedation has taken effect, and is essentially an over-dose of anesthesia which allows your horse to quickly and painlessly pass away.
To help ease the burden of finding someone to perform the burial, we can provide you with contact information of machinery operators we have worked with in the past.