Melissa Kite Melissa Kite

Real life | 30 November 2017

How am I going to stop the last good vet in the world from retiring?

After a week of cold hosing, I decided I would have to get the vet to the small swelling on Gracie’s leg.

‘Dear Lord, be merciful,’ I prayed. But I knew that the quantity of mercy I would be shown would very much depend on the vet who came.

My usual vet is the last good vet in the world — the only vet in the western hemisphere who will make a realistic appraisal of a horse’s condition and give a quote for what can be realistically mended at a morally defensible price, by which I mean a price that will fix the horse without breaking the human owner. Consequently, he is very busy.

I rang the practice and was assigned a member of the team who was at a call-out down the road. When she arrived, my heart sank as I saw how young she was. She looked horribly sweet and idealistic, a bit like she might just have got out of veterinary college with the lectures of the visiting animal-rights activists still burning her ears.

I undid the field gate and beckoned her in. ‘It’s like Bute central down here,’ I said, referring to the phenylbutazone anti-inflammatories I had been giving to both Grace and Tara, Grace for her bad leg and Tara because she’s 32 or nearly 90 in human years, with all the aches and pains that entails. With a bit of Bute, she gallivants around kicking and biting as happily as she ever did.

But the young vet smiled weakly. She didn’t look like she did jokes. I explained as entertainingly as I could how Gracie had raced around the field to evade capture for an hour, charging and twisting away from me, and finally going over on her ankle.

As we approached the pony, I warned the vet to stand clear if she turned and charged.

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