A few days before we headed out on the road to our new home, we had to go to the Vet to get a health certificate, and we figured that while we were there, we’d get a few other things done as well, including floating the horses’ teeth and some other things I’ll have to write about later (because they truly deserve their own post).
With us moving all over the world, my wife got to work in a few vet clinics, including large animal care. She talked from time-to-time about filing horse’s teeth (“floating”). “Back in the day,” that’s how it was done – with a file. I often wondered how exactly you file the teeth of a half-ton animal.
This day, I was finally going to see how it was done.
I’d been out of town for a month and a half, getting a start on my new assignment and setting up the house and getting it ready for the family – human and otherwise. Martha, in the meantime, had gotten the old house ready to move (while keeping it in tip-top shape for viewings by potential buyers), gotten the kids ready to move, and gotten the horses ready to move.
In her “spare” time, she’d worked pretty much every day on teaching Jasper to get into the trailer, and though it took longer than the week Rachel had figured, she’d made it work. Jasper was now getting in with very little complaining or balking. This all taught me the first rule of horse trailer training: get someone else to do it.
So on the day of the vet visit, Zip walked into the trailer first (as always with no balking), and with a little encouragement, Jasper jumped right in with him. We buttoned up the trailer, started up the truck (and at this point, felt the trailer shake a bit as Jasper realized this wasn’t the normal trailering lesson, where he got to eat for a while before being let back out into the pasture), and headed down the road the short drive to the vet. When we opened up the door, Jasper definitely was ready to get out.
The vet visit itself went extremely smoothly, but this brings us to the whole point of this post. Remember what I said about hand-filing teeth? Well, it seems like 20 years of technological advancement have changed things a bit. Below isn’t my video – I guess I need to get a Youtube channel – the characters are different, but the procedure is the same. Don’t watch it if you’re susceptible to queasiness.
I told my kids that I expect no complaining during next year’s dental exams.
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