ANGLESEY Lodge Equine Hospital has been synonymous with cutting edge equine veterinary care since 1976, when renowned vet, the late Ned Gowing, founded the practice. “He would still be referred to as the boss,” says hospital partner Tom Austin who, along with Mark MacRedmond MVB CertVPM MRCVS and Juan Francisco Perez Olmos MVB, Dip ECVS, runs the hospital.

“We’ve just kind of followed in Ned’s footsteps. He was a great people person.

“Behind every horse, there’s an owner, so you’re dealing with owners every day, allaying their fears and concerns. Ned’s philosophy on how you treat people and horses is, don’t be leading people down the garden path with big, long, fancy, expensive procedures that aren’t going to work. If something has got to the end of the road, just be very honest with people, give people good solid advice.

“His philosophy was, do good work. And, if you do good work, your clients will stay with you and they’ll follow your advice. And, if you’re not doing good work, if your work is not high enough quality and the advice is poor, then they won’t come back to you. So even if you’re doing something and it’s not a very profitable job or the marginality is very skinny, you’re still going to do it well and have the customer happy.”

There are over 50 people working at Anglesey and there are two very different parts to the practice. There are over 25 vets, split between the hospital and the ambulatory practice, which services a lot of local clients, local trainers and local stud farms in and around the Co Kildare and Wicklow area. Anglesey have three surgeons, who spend most of their time in theatre or on the trot-up with lame horses. And there are three medics, who spend most of their day with critically ill foals or sick adult horses.

Scanning mares

“The work on the road is mostly first opinion work, scanning mares, scoping resources, vaccinating, x-raying yearlings, scoping yearlings, all that sort of stuff,” explains Tom. “And then, most of the cases that come into the hospital would be sent in by vets, either vets on the road or vets from Meath, the North of Ireland, Wexford, Galway, Cork. Vets find cases that they can’t fix or that need a surgery, or they have complex medical needs, and they need a lot of nursing, and they would then send those horses into the hospital. We also provide aftercare for the horses, after surgery, their bandages need changed or their sutures removed. We offer a wraparound service.”

Given their geographical location, right on the edge of the of the Curragh gallops, Anglesey are surrounded by yards of predominantly flat thoroughbred racehorses. “When I started in the practice 25 years ago, it was actually more a National Hunt practice,” says Tom. “But as time has evolved, we morphed into a kind of a flat practice, there would be plenty of hunters and ponies and sport horses through the practice too though.

“We are lucky to have our old, established clients, who have been with Ned from the very beginning, the likes of Arthur Moore, who would have been one of Ned’s first clients and now we’ve JD Moore, his son. And then you’ve kind of other family dynasties, like the Harrington family and the O’Callaghan family, Gaye and his sons. Then you’ve the younger, exciting up-and-coming trainers like, say, Ross O’ Sullivan and Mark Fahey, who are doing very well. And you know, when a yard is going well, it’s easier to work with people. When horses are winning, there’s prize money and horses are being sold - people are happy to pay bills. It’s a kind of a circular economy, a trickle-down effect.

“When the trainers win, we win. We celebrate their successes, and you can get as much of a kick out of fixing a scratchy horse to win for a small trainer, as you would for a horse to run and win in Royal Ascot. You can make a big difference in a small person’s life that way. And you know, there’s great job satisfaction in that.

Screwed his knee

“We would all be very big fans of racing here. And you know, when you come in on Monday morning at 10 o’clock to have a cup of tea with your colleagues or drop off samples into the lab, you’re like, oh, you see who won at the weekend? That’s the horse we did the hobday on, or that’s the horse screwed his knee last year. Or did you see the horse that ran badly? Geez, we better get him back in, because he’s no better. And maybe we should get the medics to do a gastroscope or lung wash because that run was too bad to be true or whatever. So, you are kind of looking at the ones that run badly, maybe more than the ones that win.”

According to Tom, and as most would suspect, lameness is by far the number one call Anglesey vets would get. “You look at a horse moving badly and it varies from a horse that might have sustained a fracture to a horse that has a bit of cartilage damage in a joint, or a horse that has a foot abscess or horse that has some bit of a wound that’s infected.

“Poor performance is a kind of a Pandora’s box, just multiple causes for a horse to run badly, low-grade or subtle. Lameness might be one of them or a horse might be suffering from his respiratory tract, he could be sick, or he could be having something like a bleed or an exercise-induced pulmonary haemorrhage.”

Technology is always improving and, in terms of equine veterinary, the racing industry is so often the front line for medical advances. “The big thing that we have now are the dynamic scopes, where you can assess a horse’s wind dynamically on the gallops with a real-time image,” Tom says. “That’s made a huge difference to the accuracy of the wind ops. I can remember maybe 25 years ago, a horse that has a wind problem, you may have done one procedure and that didn’t work, you try a second procedure. If that didn’t work, you might try a third. Now, with the dynamic scope, you can be very accurate in what the problem is, and do one operation and fix it, as opposed to guesstimating. It’s taken the art out of it, maybe, and put a bit of science into it.

“The resting scope is taken when you’re standing beside a horse that’s stationary, and you’re just watching him breathing, standing still; whereas the dynamic scope is a complicated piece of machinery that goes up his nose, and it’s kind of like a human being tested in a doctor’s office on a treadmill. The scope goes up his nose and stays there while the jockey is on his back exercising him around the gallop. And then you get this image of the horse’s throat, and it changes dynamically as the horse gets tired.

“If the horse has a problem, his larynx might appear a bit smaller or collapse, or his soft palate might flip or displace. And so, you can see all these things happening. And then you can decide, you know, how fast the horse is exercising, and how long you want the horse to exercise for, so you can mimic a race condition. Your horse with a wind problem doesn’t have a problem in the first part of the race. It’s the second half of the race, generally, when they’re under a bit of pressure, that the wind problems [occur]. The dynamic scope has been huge, and it’s been a massive advance in terms of our ability to accurately identify and then hopefully solve or improve wind problems.”

Emotionally attached

Supporting the partners, the Anglesey Lodge team are headed up by award-winning practice manager, Catherine McAvinney. Their head nurse Mary Wade BSc RVN has been at Anglesey for 20 years, “We’ve really, really good vets on the team, excellent nurses and yard staff, just really hard-working people who are very interested, very engaged. And, since we moved to the new facility, it’s been a lot easier to attract new people, because there’s kind of a wow factor when you walk into the new hospital. The new place is huge. We were kind of very emotionally attached to it [previous premises], because it was the boss’s original setup. And it was very sad when we had to leave - we just outgrew it. But now we’ve 40-odd boxes instead of 22, two fully equipped operation theatres, three knock down boxes and two trot ups. Our new philosophy is having two of everything. So, if one does break down, there’s always a backup so the service continues, uninterrupted.”