In the current market, the good horses are going quite quickly, and there isn’t always time to work through in-person channels to identify good independent PPE vets out-of-area once a desirable horse has been traveled to, tried, and a price agreed subject to PPE. Sellers won’t hold horses more than a few days if at all (understandable); sellers who do agree to hold without a hard deadline want to know what’s happening when someone else calls about the horse and you’ve been waiting 3 days for your vet to hear back from his former partner who called her old vet school classmate who used to work in the area to ask for names (again, understandable); the Other Buyer is coming tomorrow morning with checkbook and trailer unless you have the horse vetted this very afternoon when the seller’s vet is coming to the farm anyway (shady)…
So, rather than starting new threads to preemptively ask for recommendations everywhere I might conceivably go to try a horse, I thought it might be helpful to have a general thread to collect COTHers’ recommendations for vets used for PPE (or sought after in one’s area), including whether they have access to mobile digital X-rays (including neck and back).
To start, I haven’t personally used (horse didn’t suit me), but received multiple recommendations for:
Jennifer Sparks, DVM, in Seattle/Mt Vernon WA
Pilchuk Veterinary Hospital, Snohomish WA
I’d love to get names in:
Moorpark/Thousand Oaks/Santa Clarita, CA
Albuquerque, New Mexico
