The Yorkshire Vet tonight

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Ruftysdad

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Did anyone see this programme tonight? The vet went to see a horse with sore back feet The owner had recently bought it. It had a severe case of thrush and it's feet had maggots. She said the smell from the horses feet had been awful. I could not believe that she had not seen what was wrong. She must have never used a hoof pick. The vet said he had never seen anything like this before. Looked like a severe case of neglect as the horse could not bear to keep its weight on its feet and kept shifting from one foot to the other. The vet never even said to her that she should have picked this up sooner.
Luckily, with treatment the horse rapidly improved
 
Ruftysdad said:
Did anyone see this programme tonight? The vet went to see a horse with sore back feet The owner had recently bought it. It had a severe case of thrush and it's feet had maggots. She said the smell from the horses feet had been awful. I could not believe that she had not seen what was wrong. She must have never used a hoof pick. The vet said he had never seen anything like this before. Looked like a severe case of neglect as the horse could not bear to keep its weight on its feet and kept shifting from one foot to the other. The vet never even said to her that she should have picked this up sooner.
Luckily, with treatment the horse rapidly improved
Click to expand...

yes I saw it, though I thought the same, maybe for the tv they played it down
 
I didn't get that she never picked his feet up. I assumed he came to her with a severe case and she couldn't clear it up herself. I assumed that was despite picking his feet out.

Off topic but I love that programme!
 
I saw it too. It did,say she had only just got the horse so maybe it wasn't her fault?
I thought how she was holding the hooves up for the vet was a bit odd, never seen that before. Ie squatting down holding the hoof while vet examined it. Looked a bit dangerous.
 
Missed the start of the program and was rather surprised by the state of the hooves especially as the Horse was shod. Something a farrier would have picked up on. I hope there were some strong words of advice off camera!
 
They said she had just bought him. I hope she really had just bought/got/rescued him and was now dealing with the problem. there was also something on his withers which i wondered if it was rain scald. There was blue (presume alamycin) spray in the outside of hooves so maybe they had tried to treat before the vet. What I did find was odd was when vet came back, asked if they had had a look at his feet and they hadn't. I would have been peering at it he minute I got to yard!
 
Glad I wasn't the only person shocked by the condition of that horse. Surely if it had regular farrier visits it would have been picked up on before it got to that stage? The poor horse looked neglected in my opinion. As for the dog with a mint stick in its fur......😂😂😂😂
 
I had a look on the Yorkshire vet Facebook page and the owner was on there, some people were concerned at the condition of the horse and she was saying how she had only just got him and posted pics of him now, he looks in much better condition now! So hopefully she was dealing with issues left over from a less desirable home.
 
I know the horse, but I don't know the current owner, and I'm not sure how many times he's changed hands since I last saw him. In fact, I didn't even know that the owner I knew had sold him. That said, I can't imagine that the owner I knew would have let his feet get to that state (but he did always have smelly feet during the winter, so he's probably unusually susceptible to thrush). He was also a swine to keep the weight on, he's such a big horse, the calories seem to go nowhere! He was eating a bale of haylage a night and 2 during the day when he first arrived!

Big Frank has had a tough life. When I first met him (the thick end of ten years ago) he'd been taken as part payment for a bad debt by a livestock trader and was skin and bone. He was nursed back to health and went on to be a fabulous hunter. The OH took him on his first few days hunting, and Frank was a saint but did get rather excited about jumps! I understand that a couple of years ago Frank had an accident out hunting, when someone cut him up going into a fence and he ended up staking himself on a piece of wood in the hedge next to the jump :(
 
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JenHunt said:
I know the horse, but I don't know the current owner, and I'm not sure how many times he's changed hands since I last saw him. In fact, I didn't even know that the owner I knew had sold him. That said, I can't imagine that the owner I knew would have let his feet get to that state (but he did always have smelly feet during the winter, so he's probably unusually susceptible to thrush). He was also a swine to keep the weight on, he's such a big horse, the calories seem to go nowhere! He was eating a bale of haylage a night and 2 during the day when he first arrived!

Big Frank has had a tough life. When I first met him (the thick end of ten years ago) he'd been taken as part payment for a bad debt by a livestock trader and was skin and bone. He was nursed back to health and went on to be a fabulous hunter. The OH took him on his first few days hunting, and Frank was a saint but did get rather excited about jumps! I understand that a couple of years ago Frank had an accident out hunting, when someone cut him up going into a fence and he ended up staking himself on a piece of wood in the hedge next to the jump :(
Click to expand...
Poor boy,
Let's hope this new home is a better one then. To be fair if he was neglected I don't think they would have given permission to be shown on TV would they?
 
Ok, so maggots don't look good and thrush like that isn't good either. It's awful that the poor horse got into that state, but the new owner is trying to put it right and has allowed it to be shown on TV so surely others will be educated as a result. Not only that but for anyone watching who is new to horses or thinking of getting a horse it has to be good to see the downside to ownership and what can go wrong if you don't take care of the basics. Oh, and while we're on the subject of maggoty feet, the maggots will actually have most likely been doing a good thing by eating the necrotic tissue away and stopping it building up even more. So although it's a bit stomach curling to see, it's not totally bad.

Also, as an aside, if anyone on here has read the James Herriot books and the series is based at the Skeldale surgery (OK I know it's a lot different today to the Skeldale House of the 1940s) they may remember that in one book James was called, very early on in his career, to a horse with an almost identical problem. A lot has changed since then, but it just shows that vets and owners face the same problems today as they did back then. I seem to remember that in the story from the 1940s, it took six weeks of effort from James, Seigfried and the local farrier to get the horse right again.

Anyway, best of luck to the new owner and I very much hope that all gets sorted and the horse recovers well.
 
Also did you notice the white hairs on the horses nose? What was also odd was that the shoeing looked fairly recent. Why didn't the farrier start sorting the issue?
 
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