Ambulatory and Emergency Care
Providing clients with timely, quality ambulatory veterinary services has been a foundation of Hearn Veterinary Services and continues to be a vitally important segment of our practice. We provide many services on-farm, including primary and preventative health care, reproductive services, lameness examinations, radiography, pre-purchase examinations and 24-hour emergency service. Emergency services are assisted by one of five equine only practices that rotate on call to ensure that there is always an experienced equine veterinarian available for our clients.
Preventive Medicine and Health Management
Worms: There are two big problems developing here. a) Worms are developing considerable resistance to the current dewormers. b) Our current deworming programs are blanket treatments that waste huge quantities of drugs and are contributing to the resistance development.
HVS has worked together with a parasitologist to develop and recommend targeted deworming programs based on fecal egg counts. Research has recently shown that most adult horses have good resistance to worms and do not need nearly the frequency of deworming that we currently use. On most farms, a small group of horses are responsible for the majority of the pasture contamination. Approximately 80% of the worms are produced by 20% of the horses. Routine fecal examination for the identification of parasites is an important step to recognize the problem horses and reduce the over-use of dewormers.
Vaccines: HVS recommends using the guidelines laid out by the American Association of Equine Practitioners (AAEP). The AAEP gathered a group of 10 infectious disease experts and tasked them with providing state of the art recommendations and reviewing these guidelines every couple of years. This has led to an excellent set of guidelines.
https://aaep.org/guidelines/vaccination-guidelines
Reproductive Services
As former resident veterinarians for Canada’s largest Thoroughbred farm – Windfields Farm, we offer over 30 years of combined expertise in mare, stallion and pediatric care. We offer fresh, cooled, and frozen artificial insemination, ultrasound assisted mare evaluations, fetal sexing, stallion fertility evaluations, foaling and obstetrical expertise, neonatal and pediatric care. We can store Frozen Semen in the office for our clients.
Medicine Services
Hearn Veterinary Services offers excellent ambulatory medical care for patients with medical problems on your farm. We collect a detailed medical history, do a complete physical exam, and can conduct a wide range of diagnostic tests – including x-ray, ultrasound, joint tap, fine needle aspirate, culture, cytology, biopsy and bronchoalveolar lavage.
In-House Laboratory – We offer in house Complete Blood Counts, Serum Chemistry, Microbiology, and Semen Evaluation.
Prepurchase Examinations – HVS offers a comprehensive prepurchase examination that includes an extensive medical history, physical exam, flexion tests, lunging and ridden evaluation. The full exam including x-rays usually takes 2 hours.
Diagnostic Ultrasonography – is important in the evaluation and treatment of soft tissue injuries, lameness, reproductive evaluation, emergency colic cases, respiratory disease, and an ever expanding number of medical applications.
Endoscopy – Using these tools, we are able to evaluate areas such as the respiratory tract, esophagus, urethra and bladder, and uterus. Usually these procedures are performed on the standing, sedated horse.