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I was recently involved in a neighbor's horse's euthanasia and can say
that even 3 miles from the vet's office you can't always get someone out.
 On the one hand, the vet should have bothered to answer his emergency
calls, which he seldom does. They had used him as their vet for years and
had paid for a visit from this vet approx. 2 weeks earlier so they were
clients. *However*, if a person insists on keeping a noticably declining
horse alive to the *very last minute* before suffering occurs, they'd
better understand that "the time" may come at 10 PM on a Friday night!

When they called me the mare was down in the stall and couldn't get up. I
had been out of town and the mare had been "struggling to rise all day".
This was an old mare with cushings. When I got there she was actually
cast, but in bad shape. We rolled her over and eventually managed with
several people helping to get her on her feet and with great effort got
her out of the stall in to the hall. Had she died in the stall it would
have been TOUGH to get her out! She was really near gone, but not close
enough to go on her own. What do you do on a Friday night?  I ended up
calling a personal friend who's a vet and got her to take her kid out of
the bathtub and drive across town to euthanize that poor little mare
while the 19 year old owner who'd ridden her as a child suffered every
time the thing almost toppled. By the time the vet got there the heart
was so weak that it had difficulty pumping the medicine through the body
and she went fairly slowly. 

If you can tell your horse is close, be considerate. For the most part, a
vet shouldn't have to leave his home after hours for something that was
25 years in the making. You can see it coming. It cost them a lot more
money, cost the mare more suffering and was worse all around just so she
could have a couple more days of life. Had she been mine I think I could
have shot her to save her the hour and a half of suffering waiting for
the vet. I think the bullet just hurts the person who pulls the trigger
and I could stand that for my horse.

P.S. The backhoe man loved me for thinking to bend her legs up and bind
them with hay string so she required a much smaller hole. I had been
afraid it would look cruel to do that to her body but as it turned out,
rather than having a rigid legged corpse that looks awful, she looked
just like she looked going over a jump in the old days and as weird as
that sounds it was less painful.

Angie

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