The price of proper vaccination for EHV-1 can prevent costly losses from virus abortionFarms fire veterinarians and hire them. It is the way of the world. I have been on both ends, as I suspect most equine practitioners have. Sometimes the firing is justified and sometimes not, but when a new guy is hired by an established farm it rarely crosses his mind that the last guy had to leave for some reason.

I was both hired and fired by one farm within a month. Before being hired there, I had met the owner once several months before and then forgot him until one day in late December, when he called and asked if I would stop by his office. I did and he said he was considering a change of veterinarians; did I want to handle his farm? It had two dozen mares and a stallion. Heck, yes, I wanted to. I did not ask why he was changing. He introduced me to his farm manager but, as nothing was going on, I did not meet, nor even see, any of his horses.



A new mare

The next I heard from him was two weeks later. Would I go to the sale and palpate a mare he just bought? I did; she was in foal, and he shipped her to his farm. I still had not seen any of his other horses, but that soon changed.

About ten days later, he called. A mare slipped. I went there right away.

The farm manager showed me to a stall that contained a mare and a roughly eight-month-old fetus, covered by and still attached to the placenta. Unfortunately, I knew what it was.

And looking at us through the bars from the next stall was a mare with a hip number still on, the new mare from the sale.

"Have these mares been vaccinated?" I asked the manager.

"For what?" he replied.

"Virus abortion. This is what this is." The post-mortem verified it.

"I dunno."

I asked the farm owner. He did not know, either. He showed me the previous vet's tickets for the past six or seven months and I found no record of vaccination.

I explained that the new mare should not have been put in the barn with the in-foal mares.

"Why didn't you tell me?" he asked.

Good question. Never assume anything.

"I guess our only hope is to get her out of here and vaccinate the rest, then cross our fingers," I said. We did.

The next day, another mare in the barn aborted. Three days later, two more lost their foals. Before it was over, 11 of the 12 mares that had been stabled in that barn when the new mare had moved in had slipped, as did the new mare. The vaccinations we gave had not helped, which was no surprise, and I was fired. (I later learned that, although they had moved the new mare to a different barn, she was still being turned out in the same field with the aborting mares.)



Vaccinate

Another client, one who spent as little as possible on health care for his animals, once bought a weanling at a sale. Not wishing to expose the three weanlings he already had on the farm to anything the new one might bring in, he put this baby in his broodmare barn. He was four-for-four: four pregnant mares, four abortions.

There is a very simple lesson here, of course: Vaccinate.

This is about virus abortion (EHV[equid herpesvirus]-1, Rhinopneumonitis), but other than saying that it can affect all ages and sexes in various manners (respiratory disease, abortion, paralysis, foal death), we are not going into a scientific discussion. Spread of the disease is by aerosol (inhalation) or direct contact with infected secretions or drinking water. A possible serious consequence of the respiratory form is secondary bacterial pneumonia.

Any gathering of horses-sales, shows, racetracks, trail rides, etc.-is a potential disaster. Horses come from everywhere to a central location to share whatever they may have. Stress and exposure-what more could a healthy virus want?

Sales are the worst. It is probably the most stressful thing any horse ever goes through. First, the horse is shipped; it may be only a mile or two or it may be across the country, but any time a horse steps on a van or a plane, stress begins. Then the horse is put in a strange stall next to other horses it does not know. It is hauled in and out of that stall maybe dozens of times in front of strange people gawking and poking at it. It is led through a maze of barns and people into a strange building where yet more people gawk and poke before it is led through a doorway into a small, roped-off area surrounded by even more gawkers. Then some person above it starts babbling wildly and banging a hammer. Finally, the poor horse is shipped again to another new place and stuck in with a bunch of animals it has never seen before. It is hard to understand why all sales horses do not get sick.

Other forms of horse-concentrating are also stressful, but at least horses at the racetrack will be there awhile and placed in a routine, which reduces the stress. Exposure to other animals continues, however.



Small price to pay

Fortunately, most horsemen vaccinate against virus abortion, or rhino, but there are some who never do and never will, preferring to "save" those few dollars. Most pay for it in time, however.

I am not going to go through a vaccination schedule here because your veterinarian may not exactly agree with the one I use, but it probably does not matter as long as a schedule is maintained. I am sure all equine veterinarians recommend to their clients that they vaccinate, but that is all we can do. We cannot sneak onto a farm at night and vaccinate all the horses on it if the owner refuses to let us vaccinate.

And we can recommend that a new horse or a horse returning from the track be isolated-quarantined, if you will-for three weeks, but we cannot do it for them.

Some clients will vaccinate their pregnant mares, but they tell me, "I'm not gonna vaccinate the yearlings and the teaser. They're not gonna slip." Or, "I'm selling this mare. Don't vaccinate her." But what if the guy selling the mare you intend to buy says the same thing? And your teaser is probably the most important animal on the farm to vaccinate-he has contact with every mare.

We will never eliminate virus abortion, but we can sure reduce the incidence of it. The few dollars it will cost to vaccinate is nothing compared to the potential loss from an abortion.