Horses-Update!

Fun afternoon with the horses during clinical orientation lab! We went over basic physical examination skills in groups of 6-7 with a horse and veterinarian. We had a chestnut thoroughbred mare. Unfortunately I don't remember hearing her age, so my signalment (age, sex, breed) will have to remain incomplete. I also have no idea what her name is (I don't think we asked for some reason).

She was fairly patient with us and only started getting really cranky towards the end (I think I would too if I had 7 curious vet students poking and prodding me). We noted that she had facial asymmetry between her eyes which the vet thought was likely due to an injury that crushed her left sinus (apparently pretty common in horses because all they need to do is give their face a good whack on something solid). We felt for submandibular lymph notes, the transverse facial artery, and the facial artery (this took me FOREVER to find!). We auscultated (listened to) heart and lungs sounds and noted that her heart rate was within normal limits (36 beats per minute, range of 24-44 bpm in horses) and pretty much didn't hear any lung sounds at all-you could with the stethoscope over the trachea though. At the end of lab, I listened to heart sounds on two other horses and got to hear a diastolyic murmur and second degree AV block (normal in horses-heart drops a beat from time to time). The other thing you do with a stethoscope with horses is listen all over their abdomen for borborygmi (normal gut motility sounds). It was really entertaining to hear the gurgles and bubbling!

We pretty much ran our hands all over her to feel for any abnormalities and to determine body condition scoring. Horses are graded on a 1 to 9 scale where 1 is skin and bones and 9 is as fat as they come (so 5 is a nice healthy average animal). We initially thought she was maybe a 5/5.5/6 out of 9 but the vet kind of scolded us for this. Apparently shes a 4. That's what we get for not knowing anything about horses! Only one girl in our group has any real horse experience.

All in all an excellent lab! No one got hurt (which I happen to think is very important haha). Although apparently at one point when I crossed under her neck (they told us that we could either closely walk behind the horse or duck under the neck if we felt more comfortable to change sides) she reached out and tried to bite me! So it's either teeth or hooves. I'd really prefer neither. One more horse lab tomorrow!