Dr. Kerns' Stories

In Equine Handling lecture today Dr. Kerns was teaching us about first aid and had some amazing stories! I will share some of my favorites with you.

 

Horses are very inquisitive (curious) so this causes them to get into a lot of trouble and cause injuries to themselves.

 

 

Dr. Kerns was called to a farm where a mare had been standing between the discs of a discer machine and was spooked an her leg got caught. As a result, she fell down onto one of the discs and got a clean cut from and through her sternum all the way to her vulva. If the blades had cut just a millimeter deeper then she would have died, but Dr. Kerns was able to save her.

A week later Dr. Kerns got a call from the same client about the mare being cut again. He was thinking that his sutures had come out and that the wound was open again. But the owner said "no you did a great job fixing her up. Now she has another cut down her chest two inches to the left." Apparently the mare had cut herself on a corn harvester machine.

Dr. Kerns point to the story was "don't put weapons out in the pasture."

 

Tourniquets are rarely used or seldom needed when working with horses, but at times that's all you can do as you wait for the veterinarian to get to you. So Dr. Kerns got a call from a client saying that their horse was bleeding really bad and he needed to come out. So Dr. Kerns told them to apply a tourniquet above the wound so slow down the bleeding. They asked "what should we use?" Dr. Kerns replies "anything that stretches and can be tightened, maybe a rope." He got a call back from the owner saying that they couldn't put the tourniquet on the horse, because he was fighting back. The horse wasn't tolerating it. When he arrived at the farm the horse had a cut and was bleeding from his forehead. The owners had been trying to apply the tourniquet to the horses neck.

Dr. Kerns then made the comment to us "No wonder he was not tolerating it. He was fighting because he wanted to live!"