The Horse Doctor

If horses could talk

I don't delve into politics on my blog, but this really pisses me off. I hate it when clients want to dump pets. I've seen it throughout my career where owners get tired of the responsibility of a pet. I hear " he/she will require to much effort or expense or the child is now gone to school "and get this ....they ask me to put the horse down, or who can I "donate" them to. To me it's the "you broke it-you bought it" thing. You ARE responsible for that pet. So when I read this article from " The Times Online" it got my blood boiling. I remember Socks the cat from the Clinton White House which was new....usually it's the White House dog. It now looks like that was just a political move as Socks was dumped on Betty Currie when they left the White House. We have 3 cats in the Weldon household....one of them was a "dump offs" at my wife's clinic that we took in. One found it's way to our house after my si...

I'm sure you have heard alot on the news about the new "super bug"( here ) . It is a drug resistant strain of Staph Aureus or a Staph infection. The bad thing about this one is that it's resistant to antibiotics. This really isn't new, it's been coming for some time now. There has been numerous reports of MRSA for years and we probably created it by our over use of antibiotics, in animal feeds, treating kids ear infections and allowing the over the counter sale of antibiotics to farmers and horse owners. Now we have a problem, it is quite likely that we will see more of these with other bacteria. The resistance can be transmitted between organisms via plasmids fro bacteriophages. These are viruses that attack bacteria and can transport the genetic component that is responsible for resistance.