I feel like the university has written off a measurable amount of the expense so they could study the outcome of a 2 month premature foal. I sure could be wrong but that’s my hunch. Also, there was a donation link just for his care. I have no idea how much $$ that generated.
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Has she provided this number? I doubt he’s actually being billed out at $500/day. Assuming their billing is not substantially higher than the vet hospital near me in a MUCH higher cost of living area. $500+/day is getting into very critical, oxygen, constant fluids, constant monitoring, active life support type of interventions.
I wouldn’t be surprised if her bill for the vet school–I have no idea re: the private practices–is in the $75k range. Possibly lower if they’re cutting her deals.
No I absolutely pulled out it out of the sky.
No clue.
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I would guess so, too. There’s some sort of financial relationship going on between vet school and owner so that it’s mutually beneficial. They get to study the foal and experiment IRL with various treatment protocols and… well, KVS gets reduced charges plus the social media clicks.
It can work in a similar way with human medicine. Much of my medical care was covered by USC University Hospital because I had a rare condition a certain dept. chair was studying. My insurance paid a mere pittance and my co-pays were minimal. In that aspect I was very fortunate. But I was a human, able to give consent for experimental approaches and had every opportunity to say, “Enough.”
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I have no idea the costs at that hospital and I’m in a different area, but that cost does not sound out of the realm of possibility. The first few days of my preemie’s life were about $3,000/day. Luckily that decreased over time but based on his total bill for a month stay, it averages out to about $700/day, not counting my mare’s expenses. By the time he left and they weren’t doing as much, it was around $300/day for the stall and feedings basically.
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Were you at a private practice, or a teaching hospital? That’s the key IMO–of course it’s very possible that this teaching hospital bills much higher than UCD, which is the one I’m very familiar with.
That price wouldn’t surprise me at all for NICU care at a private practice.
I would think that the base day rate at a hospital is probably $100 plus standard add ons around hand walking, wrapping, whatever. Considering that he probably had many $1,000+ days it seemed like $500/day wouldn’t be too far off. Even $300/day over a year is staggering when you think about how those funds could have been redirected to help with medical needs across a community.
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No matter the finer details, it’s an obscene sum of money for what amounts to well-intentioned torture of this poor animal, to be sure. A lot of animals with much better prognoses could have been helped with that.
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It is insane what rich people spend their money on but probably better then owning an empty mansion that no one lives in except for 2 weeks a year. I do think the money will be of some benefit to the university and the students there.
I agree that it would make more sense to euthanize and focus on the animals that can be saved, rather than going to extreme lengths for one animal.
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I was at a private hospital, but so was Seven for the first several months.
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I guess I wasn’t very clear in my initial response–I was just speaking about the costs to the vet school, and it seems mistakenly assumed GraceLikeRain was as well.
I have no idea and no doubt that she was paying much more than $500/day for the initial care. I was just speaking about the costs since he’s gone to the teaching hospital.
Being close to some folks who work at a teaching hospital and knowing what goes on behind the scenes at least at one, I’m perhaps a bit overly defensive! It’s not a perfect system by any means, but I do think the staff mean well, and often have much less say than folks would think.
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I think the staff at both types of hospitals definitely mean well. They wouldn’t deal with all the stuff they deal with daily if they didn’t care about the animals.
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What would other countries think about her little parade of animals and spending obscene amounts of money on a doomed horse for “clicks”? Think of the good that could be done for Ukrainian or Palestinian families right now. But no, feeding her ego by narrating her little fantasy videos is her selfish choice. The only thing she is accomplishing is that she’s ensuring a deformed horse has a grotesque “life” for her enjoyment, rather than his.
In college I took a class taught by Dr. Bernard Rollins called Animal Ethics. He was a brilliant professor that wrote many books on the issue. One important point, among many, was quality of life. I’m butchering the concept, but please bear with me. If you cannot mimic the basic needs of that animal’s lifestyle, whether it’s a bird with a broken wing or a horse, you must consider the ethical issues.
A horse’s basic genetic makeup gives it the desire to flee from danger. This in of itself, comprises this colt. A horse on a very basic level needs time to stretch their legs, enjoy equine companionship, and eat roughage. When any of those are compromised, we must think about their quality of life.
When my first horse was 33 years old, she had an arthritic knee that allowed her to walk and do a sort of hobbling trot. That’s all. She had the wisdom of years to not spook and leap around, but it was still when she told me it was time to let go.
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Devil’s Advocate checking in (lol)
Your horse would have been picked off in the wild long before she ‘told’ you it was time to let go. She no longer had the ability to flee from danger. According to what you wrote in the paragraph above, “This in of itself, comprises this colt.”
That’s not a ‘smack’ at you, but rather me playing with the endless push/pull in my own head. We can’t move ahead in medicine without some trial and error and teetering about on the line of what is good for the patient and what is good for the entire species. I’m not sure any of us here are qualified to draw that ethical line, but I’m also not 100% sure who it is (except Seven’s owner falls within the “us here” category).
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No, you’re right. She was my first horse and it was hard to call it because I didn’t want to let her go. There’s more to the story, but suffice to say I’ve been a bit more comfortable calling it since then. In contrast, this is a horse at the beginning, not the end of their life.
The first issue is quality of life. The second is whether the horse will get better. I would suggest some basic questions to start after a traumatic event (in this case, premature birth):
- Is the horse in pain right now? Is pain relief long term a viable option?
- Will the horse get better in a reasonable amount of time and will the pain level be reduced or eliminated?
- Will the horse return to normal function or near normal function?
- Is the horse in danger of future serious injury due to disability or a change in function?
If you have to ask these questions and the answers are “no/maybe, no, no, and yes”, what the heck are you doing?
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I agree. I have actually printed off the Canuck Code of Practice for friends that were having difficulty knowing if it was time. I just went looking and it seems the language has softened. My memory says it was much more clear on when to euthanize than it is now. That said, my memory may be clouded somewhat by my work with dairy cattle where the language is very clear.
I could have sworn the old equine code for euthanasia read almost verbatim to the code for dairy cattle, but either my memory is faulty (I don’t think so) or the equine version has changed. Anyway, here they are for interest’s sake:
Dairy Cattle:
REQUIREMENTS
Cattle must be promptly euthanized if they have a condition that compromises their welfare AND at least 1 of the following applies:
- they do not have a reasonable prospect of improvement,
- they are not responding to treatment(s) within an appropriate timeframe for the condition, or
- treatment is not a humane option.
Equines:
REQUIREMENTS
Equines that are sick, injured, or in pain must receive appropriate treatment without delay or be euthanized without delay.
For sick, injured or compromised horses that are not showing improvement, horse owners or caregivers must, without delay, obtain veterinary advice on appropriate care and treatment or make arrangements for euthanasia.
FWIW, (virtual hug) I bet that most of us have delayed a bit more than we should have with at least one of our animals. I am very, very good with other people’s animals. I try to be as good with my own, but man, oh man, it’s so much harder. All we can do is strive to get better and try to befriend some bitch like me who will verbally knock us upside the head when we don’t see the extent of the suffering we may be allowing to continue.
All of that said, I still don’t know where I’m at with the question of Seven and medical improvements which may come from prolonging his weird little life.
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I think this is always a great challenge. It calls to mind Barbaro and the money spent on him. While he was a winning racehorse, he was also a gelding so just like this scenario - no financial gain to keeping the horse alive.
Some people questioned the level the owner’s went to in order to save Barbaro but the flip side is that New Bolton (and hence the entire equine vet community) learned a LOT about broken legs in horses that they would not have otherwise had the opportunity to learn.
I am not going to make a judgement call on Seven’s owner’s motives for what she is doing as I have known enough people with money that do things I would never dream of and they do it because they think it is right. This is to include colic surgery on a 26 year old, average, overweight gelding to the tune of about $26K. Keeping a horse that is only pasture sound from 2 years old until some time when natural death occurs/is imminent - that is pasture sound horse they are boarding for probably $1,000/month (this horse is still alive and probably about 10 years old now). Buying back horses at the “going rate” (twice more than they sold them for) because they just didn’t want them going out of the country.
I have worked near enough old money type people to gain an understanding that their thought process and understanding of how much is “to much” is very different than mine.
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Yes, to all of that.
It would be easy to write that money clouds judgment. From my perspective, I have absolutely clear boundaries that are made up of a combination of having seen suffering prolonged, fear of difficult recoveries, and finances. It’s very easy for me to say I will not do a surgery requiring general anaesthesia, but would consider standing surgeries if within my budget. Would those boundaries be different if I had a ton of money? Possibly, but it would be case by case - a bone chip likely for a young otherwise healthy horse, colic surgery probably still wouldn’t happen though. Would I put another horse through founder recovery if I could bankroll it? Maybe.
There really is no black and white.
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He wasn’t a gelding and if they could have saved him I’m sure they were thinking about breeding.
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Are you sure? I am pretty sure he was…but I could be misremembering. I tried to look it up before I posted but no reputable sites listed if he was cut or not. I don’t know the owners personally, nor the trainer but from what I recall breeding wasn’t at the front of anyone’s mind.
I know people who know Michael Matz and knew the owners (I met Michael Matz once or twice but know people that do/did work with him and for him). That’s where I am drawing my information from.
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