That’s exactly what I said. 
Your response is purely speculation as well:
We have no idea if that is true, nor does the OP until she speaks with the BO.
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Agreed.
It doesn’t make any difference why the trainer withheld information, only that trainer did so. I wouldn’t be trying to come up with rationalizations for it. It was never the trainer’s role to try to manage the owner’s reaction to the information.
Just me personally, I would not leave a horse/pony in the care of another unless I were located close enough to check in personally several times a year.
If you do leave your pony, set out in writing, as part of whatever contract you have with BO, that you will communicate directly with any vet, farrier, or other service provider about anything outside of routine maintenance care. Recommendations, extra procedures/treatment, etc. The BO should be an active participant as the BO is there on site and should know the pony as if it were her own. But you will always be 100% in the loop and part of every decision process.
Also set out in writing what to do in case of emergency if you can’t be reached immediately, especially a need for emergency euthanasia. Treatments you automatically agree to and what the spending limit is, beyond which euthanasia must be considered. Any insurance you have in place. There are several examples floating around COTH somewhere.
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I don’t see this as abnormal.
I have plenty of customers who rely on me to coordinate visits from vet, work with vet on diagnostics and then report back to them. They also will sometimes call the vet if they have questions I can’t explain as well as my vet……but generally speaking, I handle the vet and relay the info to horses owner.
With that in mind, I owe it to my owners to be as clear as possible about an injury, condition etc their horse has. I always give them a best and worst case scenario for the given situation and always tell them what the vet said he would do if it was his horse.
To answer OP question. No, I would not leave one of my horses under a trainers care that has been dishonest and shady about another horses current health.
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If the BO was responsible for dealing with the vet and relaying the information to the owner, then she was wrong to downplay the vet’s suggestions for more investigative work. If she said, here’s what the vet recommended and here’s what I would do, that’s different. But the owner should be making the decisions about her horse’s care.
Personally, I would not leave my horse in another state. Maybe with an iron-clad contract, but there’s a lot that can go wrong and if the BO has downplayed a problem in your friend’s horse, what’s to say she won’t even call the vet if your horse has an issue. The decision to call the vet in the first place is a very important part of the equation.
A friend of mine left her horse at our co-op barn while she was living out of the country during COVID. It’s a huge responsibility to be in charge of someone else’s horse. And yes, the horse did get injured, yes, I have the authority to call the vet and I did. You need to be convinced that the BO would always take the most conservative route with your horse and treat every issue aggressively and proactively.
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It just as easily could have been a miscommunication between the BO and the vet. Not all vets are straightforward about suggesting a specific course of action. I’ve definitely had vets tell me about diagnostics or treatments in a sort of “Well, you could do this” way that doesn’t really make it clear whether they think it would be a useful step or not.
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Regarding your specific issue, I’d be more concerned about my horse being overused in a lesson program, depending on the financial status of the barn as well as the ethics of the trainer. Would your horse be used by beginners? Are the workloads of the horses managed appropriately? I’ve seen what I do think are “not bad” horse people overuse lesson horses and ponies when finances are tight, or have lessons in extreme hot/cold, beyond which is really effective as well as healthy for humans and horses. So I’d evaluate things more in that context.
I do agree downplaying a vet’s recommendation for further diagnostics with no personal motivation sounds very odd. In retrospect, your friend should have given the vet a quick call for clarification at some point. But the logical response for the barn owner would have been to say something like, “call the vet, I think his recommendations may have been over the top, but you should hear his reasoning.”
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Meh, not nearly as crazy as you might think.
The Show barn I was at (many years ago) BO/Trainer chose vet & shoer.
Clients could be there when these Pros provided service or not. Most chose Not.
Some due to work - I tried to be there for both, but sometimes could not get time off - and then barn staff would hold horses.
BO communicated with vet or shoer & relayed the info to client. Again: IF client asked.
I would follow up with the vet myself, but the shoer, for some reason, was sacrosanct & spoke only to the BO*
Yes, I wrote the checks for both, but shoeing was done to my satisfaction, so not worth the argument.
*like the Lowells speak only to the Cabots, the Cabots speak only to God
So in the case OP describes, if blame is placed, I blame the HO for not being in contact with the vet.
As a Trainer friend once told me “You enable the trainer”.
RE: leasing your pony.
Make it clear to BO you expect to be kept in the loop regarding any care - vet, shoer or whatever.
Is there any reason you cannot contact any provider of care yourself?
Or let BO know you will be doing this?
And have Plan B in mind in case you are not happy with care pony receives.
There are plenty of reasons a barn owner would want to downplay issues. Every horse represents income. If the horses in training and the barn owner takes a percentage of the trainers income, which is common practice, quite a lot of income might be dependent on whether or not that horse is being worked. If the horse is a school horse, the same is true.
People Routinely Drug horses to continue making money off them.
Gross but true.
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The horse had recurrent lamenesses according to the OP, which means that the horse likely wasn’t being worked. It was the degree to which the vet was recommending imaging studies that was downplayed, not the degree to which the horse was lame.
But yes, I’m aware of drugging and all of the lovely ways in which evil barn owners and trainers use poor unsuspecting horse owners. I’m also well aware of all of the lovely ways in which paranoid horse owners use and abuse equine professionals of all stripes when they are just trying to do what’s best for the horse owner and the horse.
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I recall an article in which a BNT said flat out that they did not want the owner anywhere near the DVM.
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{sound of my jaw hitting the floor}
Whoever this BNT was, the ego that allowed this opinion to appear in print speaks volumes.
So, in this BNT’s mind the clients are just idiots and Walking Checkbooks?
As Bugs Bunny would say:
“What a maroon!”
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I believe that. I boarded once for a total of 2.5 months because of this issue; I called the vet (I had horses at home, same vet clinic serviced the boarding barn), and the trainer was very unhappy that I had a discussion with the vet about a horse in her care.
If I had left her there, I would have definitely done so knowing that I would not necessarily be involved in vet discussions. And, in this case, I did not agree with the trainer about how to handle the situation (which was why the vet was called in the first place.)
The difference is - that arrangement was not acceptable to me, so I brought my mare home.
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I personally think the trainer overstepped the bounds in not allowing the owner to choose going down a rabbit hole if she chose. It also looks like the trainer possibly was responsible for the horse’s continuing unsoundness since it wasn’t getting the treatment it should have?
It isn’t 100% on the trainer as the owner should have gotten all information first hand from the vet.
I would never leave any horse of mine behind so I can’t help you there but I would worry that if your pony suddenly has a health issue it may not be taken care of properly if the trainer is in charge fully.
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If you’re worried, move your horse. That worry will just multiply when you’re out of state. It sounds like you trust your friend more than the trainer. Go with that feeling. Gut instincts are usually right. Even if everything was just a mistake, you will second guess every decision made in your absence. That won’t be good for either you or the trainer.
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I would never leave a pony or horse to be used in a lesson program unless I could check on them regularly. There is so much that could go wrong.
I say don’t do it OP. Take your pony with you and find a good situation where you can check on him with your own eyes.
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I would suggest bringing this up in the con text of what might happen if you leave the pony with trainer either as lesson or lease horse. In that case you want the trainer making care decisions.
If trainer is ethical they won’t discuss the details of the other client to you, unfortunately.
Lameness evaluation is notoriously fraught. Many folks on COTH report months or years before they get a firm diagnosis. And with everyone having good intentions. Vet is fixated on hocks, it turns out to be stifle, etc.
Trainer could legitimately think the problem was X and vet is overdoing diagnostics by wanting to ultrasound every inch of Y and Z instead. In this case trainer was wrong.
Question is what will you do with your surplus pony if you dont leave him in this program when you move?
Dont feel you need to remove him out of loyalty to your friend.
And I had the experience of a highly recommended sports medicine vet completely ignore me while trying to get a history on my mare from the not-BNT I was working with, who’d only known her a few months at that point. Said vet proceeded to inject my mare’s hocks, which was needed, using light sedative and a twitch (not enough to get mare to hold still), and completely missed one of the joint spaces.
I went back to my old sports medicine vet, and when he discovered that dry joint space, he was furious. And then it was forever awkward when the first vet was around, because I was the only person in the barn (for a while) who didn’t think she was the best.
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I did, and she said what I thought. The owner is young (college-aged) and still a little inexperienced, but takes her horse’s care seriously. She can overthink things, even I agree with this, and used to go in a million directions at once based on the advice of other people at the barn—everything from tack, to training, to supplements. I do remember one time she was near tears over some contradictory BS she’d been hearing from the other riders at the barn, and I had to tell her to tune them out, do her own thing, and not let anyone start her thinking she wasn’t doing right by her horse. The trainer thought she was legitimately doing her a favor by filtering the information from the vet. Idk. I trust the trainer, but I don’t always agree with her on everything either. I would feel better if I could find a full care lease for him vs a lesson program. She agreed to lease month-to-month so I can keep looking for a better arrangement and let this work for now.
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Well that sounds like a reasonable trainer.
I hope things work out for you and your pony.
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