Vet Soundness Exam

STEVE: The vet check can be paramount to the use of the horse and the longevity of the horse because a lot of things that they’re going to find in the process of examining it, and try to uncover potential problems down the road, things are going to happen (or potentially could happen) will be discovered in the exam process, depending on how in-depth you get.

Typically if you’re going to spend a lot of money for a horse — or a horse that’s going to stay around for awhile, — you’re basically going to do a good physical, potentially an airway exam by endoscopic route, and then you’re also going to take radiographs and potentially ultrasounds and other diagnostic tests in order to make sure the horse is good and solid.

There’s no such thing as a perfect horse. They all have a few things wrong with them. But the experience, the knowledge of the vet that you’re going to use, will basically bring out the fact that we’ve got a few things here that we think we can live with. We really have some troubles here, and so on.

So it depends on what you’re looking for and how in-depth you’re going to get as far as the use of the horse.

ALEX: The other thing, too, I think, is that you want to protect your investment. So if you’re going to buy a horse that’s five, six or seven years old, you might want to have that horse for the next 10 years. So you don’t want to inherit somebody else’s problem because that might shorten that horse’s career and then you’d only have him for a couple years. So it’s protecting your investment for the long road.