Eye On You

You know, and another thing I was thinking about is, you know, a lot of people...

Diseases of the eye and conditions of the eye, I think, are scary, you know, to think about for humans, for horses.

And it it breeds a little fear in us for our horses.

And you think, oh, my gosh, you know, if my horse is dealing with blindness, you know, as something that's coming at them or that has happened.

It sounds so dismal, but it really is not necessarily the case.

Right.

I mean, there are horses that can live a really full, safe, happy and comfortable life without Even if they have had a tremendous loss of sight or complete loss of sight, right? I mean, pasture buddies, and they tend to do a lot better than we give them credit for, right?

They do.

They do.

They do a lot better than we could ever dream of doing ourselves, I think.

But yeah, absolutely.

I know there are Olympic level one-eyed horses.

You have to be a little bit careful about things that they may not be able to protect themselves as well if they don't see something coming.

You have to worry about fencing and things like that and not... leaving holes open for them to fall in, you know, things that seem kind of practical, but you wouldn't necessarily think about with a fully visual patient.

But yes, they can definitely do very well with limited or even no vision.

I've seen some patients that have fooled their owners into them thinking that they could see perfectly fine when they had very very poor vision in reality and they just did so well they adjusted so well that it it was i mean it's remarkable sometimes how well they can do yeah so don't give up on them

Very adaptable, those horses of ours.

No, so interesting.

So I want to give you the opportunity for kind of some final thoughts.

What would you wish that, you know, referring veterinarians and also us as horse owners kind of knew and took into consideration more so with our horse size?

Yeah, well, one thing I think is what you already mentioned is don't wait.

If you're worried about an eye, maybe has an eye problem, it may be overreacting in some cases, but it's better that than the alternative.

I know that it's scary sometimes to think about eyes and a lot of people are not really comfortable with managing eye cases.

And that's fine.

And that's why we're here.