Description
Sick foals can represent a big challenge in the field as not only can disease progression be very rapid, but also clinical signs are not always obvious. Foals are the weakest members of the herd, of a prey species. This means that they must avoid showing clinical signs of illness for as long as possible. This often makes the vets, nurses and owners jobs much harder, as serious disease can have fairly subtle clinical signs. This is especially true of remaining standing, and it takes very marked disease to take a foal off its feet.
This lecture covers treatment of the newborn foal, including clinical signs of common diseases, assessment, fluid therapy and initial treatment choices.