Drugs

This week in Equine Handling class we have been learning about restraint. We have learned both chemical and physical restraint. For physical restraint we were taught lifting the limbs, shoulder twitch, lip twitch, Chain Lead and various other. After learning all the physical ways of restraint we then learned the popular drugs that are used for chemical restraint.
Yesterday in class we went out to the barn and watched a demonstration. Guess who was the patient...Peanut!!!



Dr. Kerns injected some sedatives into Peanut, because he didn't want his muzzled handled and to show us the effects of the drugs.

 

Here the teacher assistants and Dr. Kerns are trying to put a tom cat catheter into Peanut's nasolacrimal duct. The nasolacrimal duct is a little hole in the horse's nose that discharges mucus and sewage tears. Once the tom cat catheter was in they injected saline into the catheter and the fluid should come out the eye if the tear ducts are not blocked. It was so cool!!

 



 

Everyone watching. I had just missed getting a photo with everyone crouched down peering into Peanut's nose and watching the whole process.

 

Here Dr. Kerns is performing a corneal stain to see if there are any ulcers on the cornea. I felt special that during class when we were learning about the process I could say that I had witnessed a corneal stain. My boss's horse had to get stitches to reattach her eyelid and a suture had been rubbing up against the cornea to cause an ulcer to form.