Veterinarians’ attitudes and approaches toward older horse care, as well as the relationship between horse owners and veterinarians, can impact the type of care a horse receives as it grows older. Veterinarians play an important role in supporting a horse’s health and wellbeing throughout its lifetime. However, research suggests that owners seek routine veterinary services less frequently as their horses age.

Disease rates are often higher in senior equine populations. Therefore, it is important to consider how the relationships between veterinarians, owners, and horses might be better supported.

Research on Senior Horse Veterinary Care

In a recent study1, researchers in Great Britain examined how veterinarians approach senior horse care by analyzing interviews and veterinary clinical record data. Veterinarians were recruited as part of a wider study that investigated owners’ and veterinarians’ experiences of caring for senior equines.

Key Findings

Veterinarians valued owners engaging them in their older horses’ care. During interviews, veterinarians talked about differences in the timing and types of issues owners called them about. It could be challenging for veterinarians if they felt they should have seen a horse earlier. Some veterinarians spoke about particularly emotive occasions, such as being called to treat an animal that seemed to have been in significant pain for a period of time.

Veterinarians can offer advice about a horse’s management, health care, or end-of-life decision making. Generally, veterinarians understood old age for a horse is associated with physical decline and an increased likelihood of disease processes. When giving veterinary advice regarding medical or surgical interventions, factors such as the owner’s concerns and choices as well as the context of old age shaped approaches. Advice could be influenced by any historical knowledge of the owner and their horse. Therefore, veterinarians’ views on what was considered ‘appropriate’ care for an older animal was individualized.

Developing long-term relationships with owners could create opportunities for veterinary involvement outside of formal visits. However, in the context of significant workloads, and caring for several animals, frequent advice-seeking by owners could be difficult for some veterinarians to navigate. While veterinarian–owner relationships could affect a horse’s care in varying ways, caring about the owner is an important part of being a veterinarian.

Take-Away Messages

Views on the aging process and what ‘should’ be treated via veterinary involvement can differ between veterinarians, as well as between owners and veterinarians. Management and health care decisions that align with the horse’s best interests will be individualized and require an understanding of the horse’s medical, emotional, and relational needs. Both owners and veterinarians can contribute knowledge to this end. Therefore, maintaining the veterinarian-owner relationship as a horse ages is essential to enable a collaborative approach to decision making.

Findings from the wider study suggest that owners base decisions around whether or when to involve a veterinarian based on past interactions and factors including the veterinarian’s communication style, technical skills, medical knowledge, and the ways in which the veterinarian interacts with the horse. This emphasizes the importance of these skills with respect to achieving good veterinarian-owner relationships over time.

Improved veterinary services might also be achieved by better understanding the diverse ways in which owners’ priorities for their animals, and how they accommodate their wellbeing needs, change over time. Furthermore, practice management structures that support continuity in veterinarian–owner interactions and better documentation of contextual knowledge in veterinary clinical records might support increased care provision for older horses.

References

Further Content

Sign up for My Senior Horse’s FREE newsletter to get the latest information about equids 15 years and older delivered straight to your inbox! 

  • Dr. Rebecca Smith is a veterinarian and interdisciplinary researcher in the field of human-animal interaction. She completed her PhD at the University of Liverpool. Rebecca’s research adopts social scientific approaches to study peoples’ decision making in relation to animal care. As a research associate, her current work uses ethnographic methods to study owners’ and vets’ understanding of, and approaches to, the management of chronic pain in horses. Alongside her research, she is undertaking specialist training in welfare, ethics, and law with the European College of Animal Welfare and Behavioural Medicine.

    View all posts