Vets' indemnity fund and a not great vetting job....

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Mic

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I bought my horse just over a year ago. He was fine when I tried him out and I arranged a vetting for a few days later. The vet came and discovered fairly quickly that the horse had a slight cough. He continued with the vetting and made a big show of squeezing the top of the horses throat and saying it was just an upper respiratory infection which he provided the then owner with antibiotics for. He passed him and sent me a clean vetting certificate and a letter saying he had a slight cough but it was not anything to worry about. I took my horse new horse home after he completed the antibiotics and the cough faded to just a very occassional cough, mainly in faster work. In autumn his cough suddenly got much worse and it has been a disaster since. To cut a long story short, my vet is now saying that he is unlikely to ever get better and will probably need inhalors for the rest of his life, something that will be very expensive long term
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I am gutted. I spent a year looking for a horse and if the vet at the vetting had even suggested there could be a problem rather than reassuring me he was absolutely fine I would never have bought him. I blew my budget for his fab temperament and he was meant to be my new event horse. Has anyone any experience of claiming from the 'indemnity fund'? My vet has suggested I should write to the vet who vetted him as I could claim compensation. Would appreciate any advice / experience of this before I attempt to write my letter! Thanks.
 
there is no indemnity fund. We have insurance provided by the VDS (Veterinary Defence Society). If we receive a complaint, we ring them for advice. They advise us if the person has a case or not. If they do, the VDS will usually settle with the owner. If you want to make the complaint official then you need to go through the RCVS who will then formally investigate it. Again, if the vets are found negligent in any way, then the VDS will cough up - we pay massive insurance premiums each year to cover us against suing.

And from the other side of the court, I had a horse 5 stage vetting at the end of Feb which he passed with no worried. I brought him home 3 days later, only saw him in the dark all week, and come the following weekend discovered a sarcoid on him which I hadn't seen and neither had the vet, but in all likelihood was present. I composed a letter to the vets which I had checked by a solicitor and sent by recorded delivery. I have received acknowledgement of receipt of the letter and am now waiting for further contact. I am asking they refund my vetting and the cost of the treatment. Really, I should be after the cost of the horse but I cant be bothered to take it that far and I dont think I've got concrete enough evidence that it was definitely present at the time of the vetting.
 
I thought the squeezing the throat thing was to see how sensitive they are too wind problems???

Not explained very well, but when we sold our pony the vet did this and he coughed very badly.... had never coughed before, and I was a bit miffed to be honest.

They still bought him and he (to my knowledge) never had issues.
 
I can't find the post - can you let me know what the question was?! Thanks (I know, poor observation skills...)
 
I bought him in February 2007. My ex-vet listened to his lungs within days of him coming home (paper bag over nose to increase depth of breathing) and just kept telling me he was fine and it would take a long time for residual cough to go. I kept mentioning it at each vaccination stage (had to start him from scratch, so pretty regular). Then when my poor boy got worse in the autumn he listened again and prescribed antibiotics and sputulosin. Then he was scoped and found to have some 'laziness' in his larynx and also something else... name escapes me... which young horses have but should disappear as they get older - to do with immune system... My boy still has it at 6... He said this wasn't the problem and put him on steroids - first oral, then inhaled. He stopped coughing, but developed laboured breathing at this point. My ex-vet kept coming out and listening to my horse whilst ridden and trying to tell me he was normal (laboured breathing, exercise intolerent) I changed vet at this point and she has re-scoped. My boy has had further sputulosin and ventopulim - neither helped
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He has a cough as well as inspiratory noise, so not happy it is just the larynx. He is now having another course of antibiotics and going back on inhaled steroids. I am devastated - my vet is being realistic about it and thinks he may have to stay on the inhalors for good (which at the rate he gets through them I can not afford long term) and that he will probably never be much better than he is now. She described the larynx paralysis as grade 1, maybe grade 2 and said he wouldn't be a candidate for surgery at present (not sure I could go through that anyway having read the horror stories on here.) So that's the story so far
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I'm just going through this with a horse I bought last year. My vet advised phoning the vet who carried out the vetting first, which I did. I have now put my case together and he has passed it on to the VDS (veterinary defense society). PM me if you want specific details. I also got advise from an equine lawyer.
 
I am really suprsed the vet was so 'dismissive' of the cough. My horse was on antibs for two months for a cough and then developed the equine equivalent of ME (low white cell count and some of the iffy blood results) and had 9 months of work. She gets a cough every Winter irrespective of how careful I am. There was no way my vet could have predicted what happened on the basis of the initial cough. Good luck.
 
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