A Horse & Hound Podcast advertisement feature with Zoetis
Welcome to this Horse & Hound Podcast advertisement feature with Zoetis, in which our podcast host Pippa Roome chats to equine vet Sam Cutts from Hook Norton Vets alongside horse trainers Matt Feerick and Hanna Walton from Confident & Connected in Oxfordshire.
Equine herpes virus (EHV-4) is a major concern for both horse and yard owners. Listen to Matt and Hanna’s first-hand experience of dealing with a case on their busy training yard.
You can listen online here or via your favourite podcast app.
An introduction to Hannah’s EHV-4 story…
“It was a really normal day. We were just working with the horses. They’d all come in, they were out at night time, and they’d come in to the stables. They’d gone through their normal routine of getting health checked in the morning and then eating. Then as and when we were ready, we picked them up to do sessions.
“So I had picked up this particular horse, and the goal that we were working through with him was to help him become more confident hacking. So we were hacking around the property. So I’d taken him out and he felt a little bit quieter than normal, but it was very, very subtle, nothing really to pick up on.
“About 10 minutes into his session, he started to develop a Little bit of a nasal discharge, and that was clear and white at the beginning. Then about 10 minutes further into our hack, I checked again, and some of that had gone into a yellowy discharge. And then by the time another 10 minutes had gone by, it got a bit worse.
“So at that point, I stopped and called Sam in the middle of the session, because yellow nasal discharge is going to ring alarm bells for anyone. And I just wondered what should I do? I’m out, I’m not in the barn, I’m not near any other horse, so actually, I’m in the perfect position that I could isolate him if I needed to.
“Sam said, yeah, let’s get him swabbed. We actually put him in a field, so he was isolated from the offset, and then he was swabbed later on that day. We checked his temperature, and he didn’t develop a temperature until quite a lot later in the day. So the only symptom was just a bit of a change in behavior, and this nasal discharge. We decided to keep a close eye on him and as we don’t know what we’re dealing with, so let’s just take every precaution.”
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