Day 3: equine

I spent today at the equine coop.  In Granada there are many work horses - they pull carriages around town for tourists, they transport materials (they wait in lines outside "home depot") and they help out on farms.  The Coop is a building the owners can bring their horses to for work for example shoeing, or vet work.

                        On a previous trip one of the vets had given a halter to this horses owner.He was very proud of it, though didn't quite know how to put it on.

Almost all the horses that came through got vaccinated (west nile, tetanus etc), dewormed, and vitamins-  I got lots of practice giving IM injections to horses.  Communicating with the owners was our biggest difficulty, as none of us spoke fluent spanish and the people who usually helped communicate where busy in the morning, but we did our best.


Many of the came in with bad tack wounds, and we tried to tell them how to keep the horses healthier - changing the padding more often, or using padding (some didn't). 
It was sad seeing the condition of some of the horses that we could do nothing about. We saw a few very bad cases of laminitis - the owners think it is from a spider bite.

.

We had a very good turnout, by the end of the day we'd vaccinated 95 horses! The vets performed two castrations. Many of the locals and owners gathered around to watch the castrations. They were all male, and it was amusing to me to watch them flinch and look uncomforatble throughout the operation:

We had one horse came in with a sarcoid tumor on its leg.  Apparently it had been cut off before but grows back, our vets think it may be virus related. We cut it off again and in January when the next vet trip comes they will bring some cancer drugs to try and treat it. The vets kept warning that cutting it off would be a "blood bath" but it wasn't too terrible, just a little bloody.

When world vets first started treating horses in the area, there was a lot of mistrust of the vets and they have been working hard over the years to overcome this.  Today there was a lineup of horses, some of which traveled in quite a distance to see a vet.  It was great to see how they have gained the trust from the community and are able to help out the local horses.