The vet bill has been sitting on my desk for three weeks. All vet bills are cruel and unusual but this one is even more so than most. It only came about because the owner of the yard where I had the horses until recently kept telling me they were lame. They didn’t look lame to me.
‘Maybe she’s just tweaked herself in the field?’ I said, as we trotted Grace the skewbald pony up and down.
‘She’s lame as ****!’ he declared, in his charming horseman’s patois. The thoroughbred filly, meanwhile, he declared utterly beyond help.
‘She’s club-footed,’ he growled.
‘Well, maybe one front hoof’s a bit taller than the other,’ I said, bristling like a mother who has been told her daughter needs an orthopaedic shoe.
He shook his head. ‘Her feet are completely odd. She’s gonna blow a tendon.’
Horsey people are like this.
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