Most professionals who spend four years in college and three years in graduate school can look forward to decades of desk work and a closet full of white collars. But there are some–doctors, in fact–who spend much of their time out of doors and who literally get a kick out of their work.
“I had my left forearm broken by a kick,” said Dr. Gary C. Porter, a New Lenox-based veterinarian whose practice is limited to horses.
“I once got kicked in the face, and it broke my nose,” said Dr. Nicolette Polson-Meade, a vet with an office in Morris who treats small and large animals, half of which are horses. “It was an older mare that (the owners) forgot to tell me wasn’t broken. I still have sinus problems from that, but the horse had no shoes on, thank God.”
This is the side of life with horses that Hollywood never portrays in films like “The Black Stallion” and “National Velvet.” Did Black Beauty, feeling sick and wary of the humans buzzing around his stall, ever squeeze a vet into a wall? Author Mary Sewell never said.
“I can see why people might expect much more glamor than there really is (in treating horses),” said veterinarian Dr. Karen Bockelmann, an associate in Porter’s practice. “It’s really no more glamorous than any other job.”
Horses are beautiful creatures, say the equine practitioners, but their intelligence, their personalities and their affinity for humans are highly variable, so it’s hard to predict a horse’s reaction to treatment based on its age, breeding or other factors.
“If I had to generalize,” said Dr. Raymond J. Morandi, a veterinarian with a practice in Orland Park, “I’d say race horses and show horses, particularly if they are coming right out of training, are the most excitable.”
The one thing that all equine vets can count on, according to Porter, is injuries, large and small.
“I’ve been hurt many times,” he said. “In 1981 or ’82, I got kicked in the face by a horse when I was doing surgery on its tail. It caught me under the jaw and caved in the roof of my mouth. I lost my front teeth.”
Horses, he added, unfortunately don’t have the intellect to associate the short-term pain of treatment with healing. But Porter also said he can trace each of his injuries to personal lapses, times when he ignored certain signals and let down his guard.
“It has a lot to do with reading body language,” he said. “Horses, generally, are pretty kind creatures, and they usually give you a 5-second warning. When they bellow like a bull, that’s a serious warning; get out of the way. Their point is not to hurt you but to free themselves. When faced with danger, their instinct is to run.”
And what makes a horse fearful enough to run? Jim Mansell, co-owner of Jim and Becky’s Horse & Carriage Service, Peotone, said his 10 draft horses, each weighing between 1,500 and 2,000 pounds, often wear blinkers to weddings and hayrides because they can misinterpret what they see.
“Horses can easily see behind themselves, and this can scare them,” he said. “How would you like to be walking along and suddenly see a wheel that looks like it will run you down any minute now? The faster you go, the faster the wheel goes, but all you know to do is go faster.”
Mansell, a regular client of Porter and an occasional client of Morandi, said he most often calls on veterinarians to handle his horses’ leg pains and bouts of colic, which can tie a horse’s stomach in knots. Whenever a horse is sick, and even when it’s not, he said, slow, deliberate movements and constant watchfulness are warranted. Polson-Meade agreed.
“Watch the head, the eyes and the ears to see how they are set,” she said. “Kicking is the most dangerous thing, much more so than biting or squeezing someone against a wall.”
Knowing the individual horse is an important part of evaluating its body language, the vets agreed.
“If you’re not familiar with a particular horse, use caution, especially around the back end,” said Bockelmann. “Watch carefully and move slowly around a horse that’s a stranger.”
To spare the horse unnecessary fear and “as a safety measure more than anything,” Bockelmann said sick horses often are tranquilized, which helps to check their instinct to run at the first sign of discomfort.
That instinct, Porter said, accounts for their most common health emergency: deep, multiple lacerations. He recalled “some pretty wild instances” where fear prompted horses to race through several fences or to run for considerable distances while dragging a gate.
At the opposite end of veterinary experience is the kind of rare, catastrophic event witnessed in the late 1960s by Morandi, who since 1985 has operated an equine hospital on 12 acres along Wolf Road in Orland Park. Morandi, who began practicing veterinary medicine in 1965, spent 20 years caring for horses at Chicago area racetracks. He said 75 percent of his workday was spent treating race horses at the track, and at night he did hospital work.
“I was there the day Barn 20 at Washington Park burned down,” he recalled. “I’d say about 60 horses were involved. All around me there were so many dead or injured horses. I treated maybe 20 to 30 horses that day. And Barn 20 was right along Halsted Street, so there was lots of traffic slowing down to see what happened. It was a horrible day.”
Still, he fondly remembers Washington Park, which was destroyed by another fire in 1977, as the best of the racetracks, with accommodations for breeding stock and foaled mares.
Now Morandi treats horses exclusively at his five-building equine hospital, which has a surgical suite for horses that can stand and two surgeries for horses that need to be lowered onto their backs or sides.U
He also has an indoor arena where he can watch lame horses work out in bad weather. And he has separate facilities for X-ray, radiation therapy and nuclear-scan procedures.
Back at the racetracks, vets like Polson-Meade, a 1990 graduate of the veterinary school at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, follow in Morandi’s wake, taking their healing skills to places like Hawthorne Race Course and Sportsman’s Park racetrack, which she said are as far east as she travels with her mobile office. From her professional base in Morris, she also makes calls as far south as Coal City, as far west as LaSalle and as far north as Sandwich, where she lives with her husband, a horse trainer who supervises the careers of 10 to 15 sulky racers.
In addition to her private practice, Polson-Meade is administrator of animal control for Grundy County. She said an average work day starts at 8 a.m. and it can end anytime between 6 and 8 p.m. She agreed with Bockelmann that there is nothing like Hollywood glamor in her daily grind, which exacts a considerable physical toll.
“It’s exhausting,” she said. “We’re dealing with the gruesome part of horse care. Think of holding up the leg of a 1,200-pound horse for 10 minutes. It’s tiring. But this is the practice I want to have until I retire–that is, if my back holds out.”
To make sure she can go the distance, Polson-Meade said she tries to take off one afternoon each week. The rest of the week, she’s on the job, performing standing castrations in her mobile office, checking for lameness, treating tendons, vaccinating and worming horses. Mostly she sees race horses and “back yard” horses, which owners keep for their own riding pleasure.
Porter, a 1975 University of Illinois veterinary school graduate whose headquarters is a three-building, five-acre complex near Frankfort in Green Garden Township, began his career, like Bockelmann, with a one-year internship at Illinois Equine Hospital, Naperville, and followed up with a year of treating sulky racers and thoroughbreds, sometimes visiting as many as four racetracks in one day.
“I lasted one year at that. It was pretty brutal,” he said. “But the contacts I made during that one year are still helpful to me, and that’s when I picked up all the jargon.”
These days he starts making calls on horse owners about 9 a.m., with his longest days coming in the spring and fall, when his average day ends between 10 p.m. and midnight. In the winter, he added, everything slows down.
“Emergencies and paperwork can make a day long,” he said. “Now we have more first-time owners than 20 years ago, and they need more information and education than professional horsemen. And, of course, we have to visit some people after they get home from work.”
Because Morandi doesn’t make house calls, his schedule is more reasonable. His average day can begin at 8 a.m. and end at 6 p.m., with his morning devoted to lameness diagnoses and X-rays and his afternoon filled with hospital cases and surgeries. The price of his services, he added, is an important part of owning a horse.
“Veterinary costs definitely have to be fit into the expense of having a horse,” said Morandi. “It’s not an incidental.”
Porter added that every mobile veterinary unit, which is a necessity for ambulatory vets like Polson-Meade, Bockelmann and Porter, is “a huge financial commitment.”
“The financial rewards don’t exist,” he said. “The satisfaction is in doing good work, helping animals and meeting interesting people.”
For young people who are seeking these kinds of career benefits, the equine veterinarians have some advice on where to begin.
“Get some experience with horses,” said Morandi, whose family kept horses and who was interested in medicine from a very early age.
Polson-Meade suggested riding lessons as the place to start.
“There are many good stables that will get into the education end of it as well as rent you a horse,” she said. “4-H is another great way to find out about many kinds of animals. The point is to get it into perspective and strip away any false glamor.”
According to the Schaumburg-based American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA), the mean indebtedness of a 1995 vet school graduate was $45,251, compared to an average first-year salary of $39,535 for large-animal practitioners.
Based on information gathered from its members, AVMA records show that 8 to 12 years of practice raises the annual salary of an associate veterinarian (one who works in a practice owned by another vet) to $48,569, on average.
By contrast, a large-animal vet who owns his own practice–and therefore shoulders the expense of mobile units, office staff, taxes and medical equipment–can expect to earn $72,942 after 8 to 12 years of practice and $92,578 after 18 to 22 years of practice.
Although the big bucks may not be there, particularly for beginners, these veterinarians have no trouble remembering why they love their work.
“There really is a special relationship between men and horses,” Porter said. “Horses are social, herding animals that we have taken from the herd and so they really do bond with humans. But I think my human clients are even more interesting than their horses. They all have interesting tales to tell–usually about their horses.”
