01/04/2021
A good read and thought provoking.
Good evening everyone! Buckle up because this is a long sweary rant... I apologise for the swearing...
Why I don’t like the “checked by vet and all clear” phrase, when addressing behavioural issues.
I come across this phrase all the time and mostly it is when someone is at their wits end with their horse’s behaviour... but occasionally it seems to crop up when someone wants to hear that their horse is “just being an arsehole”.
They’ll be there, emphatically stating “there is just NOTHING wrong with him/her” and this is followed by assurance from everyone else that because the “vet checked”, the behavioural issue is entirely the horse’s fault, and this gives the owner the justification to bring in *insert honcho cowboy/bigger gadget/stronger bit/give it a few good slaps/crack an egg on it’s head bu****it*.
I’ll be frank with this- it makes my blood boil.
Have a look at me. Look at any picture or video of me, going about my day, riding, teaching, parenting, mucking out, hanging upside down from a pole etc etc. I look like your average healthy, reasonably active person.
But I have a problem somewhere in my hip that causes me excruciating pain when I move my leg laterally. I have had painkillers, physio, doctor assessment, Xrays, consultant assessment, MRI with contrast, a different consultant assessment, an hour’s ultrasound investigation and several very painful, massive steroid and local anaesthetic injections. I currently survive on Naproxen.
No one has successfully diagnosed me yet. No one can tell me with any accuracy, what is wrong with me. And you would not know there was anything wrong with me from my weight, the fit of my clothes, how I exercise or what I eat. I’m sound in walk, trot and canter...
I also have a hernia, a shoulder that has limited movement, two fingers that don’t work, a thumb that has lost its UCL, a painful big toe and anxiety from previous history of living with domestic violence... but I digress...
So now imagine I’m generally pretty calm and happy, but I can’t talk. And you try to make me exercise in a way that causes the excruciating pain in my hip to flare up- I am going to do the only thing I can do and stop doing the exercise or try and get away from you. If you then continue to push me, the pain would likely make me defensive and at some point, let’s be honest- I am going to punch you directly in the face.
Now have a look at your horse and apply the same logic... at what point do you say he has been sufficiently “checked”?
Let’s say you had all the investigative procedures done that I’ve had done to myself and you haven’t found any problems. If your horse is me, we both know we are still in a lot of pain. But you’ve found nothing, so we’ve been “checked” right?
So now you go to some honcho cowboy who claims he can “fix” your horse in a few sessions, and nothing your horse says now will matter- honcho cowboy won’t stop bullying him and he cannot escape. He has no choice but to comply. He still hurts.
He stops fighting. He is “fixed”. Yay for you.
I now want you to imagine your horse has had to be PTS and you do an autopsy that perhaps reveals he had a brain tumor. Or arthritis in his SI. Or leukaemia. Or a thick tendon that was maybe causing him a lot of pain... are you still happy with what you did or are you now thinking “if only I’d known he was in so much pain”? At what point would you have listened? Because your horse was already communicating with you when he started “being naughty”.
I’m not saying 100% of behavioural issues are pain related; they aren’t. Many are down to bad training, bad husbandry or previous negative experiences. But the vast majority I have seen and worked with, began with a physical cause.
On such a large skeleton, with so many limbs and things that could go wrong do you really want to assume he is “just being naughty”?!
Rant over...
