What a vetting actually covers

Ask around a yard and you will hear that a horse passed the vet, or failed it, or passed with something on it. The phrase is so embedded that it survives every attempt to dislodge it. Vets have been trying for the better part of twenty years, because a pre-purchase examination does not produce a pass or a fail. It produces an opinion, on one day, about one horse, for one stated purpose — and the gap between that and what buyers believe they have bought is where most of the disappointment in this market lives.

This is a description of what the examination actually consists of, and more usefully, what it does not.

The five stages

The standard UK pre-purchase examination has five stages, in a fixed order, and each is doing a specific job.

Stage one — the preliminary examination. The horse is looked at at rest, in the stable and in hand. The eyes are examined in a darkened space with an ophthalmoscope. The heart and lungs are listened to at rest. The vet works over the whole body by hand, feeling limbs, joints and back, checks the teeth and mouth, looks at the feet, and takes a view on conformation. This stage alone often takes the longest, and it is where a great many findings originate.

Stage two — walk and trot in hand. On a hard, level surface, in straight lines, with turns in both directions and a rein-back. Flexion tests of the limbs and, where it is safe to do so, trotting in small circles on a firm surface. This is the stage most people picture when they think of a vetting, and it is looking for lameness and for asymmetry that is not yet lameness.

Stage three — exercise. The horse is ridden, lunged or otherwise worked hard enough to raise the heart and breathing rates properly. The point is not to school the horse. It is to see the gaits at speed, to hear the respiratory system under load, and to put the cardiovascular system under enough demand that the next stage means something.

Stage four — rest and re-examination. The horse stands quietly while heart and respiratory rates are monitored coming back down. Anything that recovers slowly, or does not recover, is significant. The vet listens to the heart again now that it has been stressed, because some murmurs and arrhythmias only declare themselves either side of exercise.

Stage five — the second trot up. The horse is trotted in hand again, and often flexed again. This is the stage that catches what exercise brought out: stiffness that was not there in stage two, a shortened stride, a horse that has tightened over its back. A surprising proportion of findings that matter appear here and nowhere else.

A two-stage vetting is stages one and two only. No exercise, no re-examination, no second trot. It is cheaper, it is quicker, it is sometimes all that is possible with a young or unbroken animal — and it is a substantially weaker document. Many insurers will not offer full cover on the strength of one, which tells you what the industry thinks of it.

The blood sample

At the end of a full vetting the vet will usually draw blood and store it, typically for six months.

It is not routinely analysed. It sits in a freezer so that if something emerges in the weeks after purchase — a lameness that was not there, a temperament that has changed markedly — the sample can be tested for substances that might have masked a problem on the day. Sedatives and anti-inflammatories are the usual concern.

Buyers sometimes decline the blood sample to save money. It is a false economy. The sample is the only part of the process that can look backwards.

What is not in it

This is the part that costs people money.

Radiographs are not part of a standard vetting. No X-rays are taken unless you specifically request and pay for them, as a separate procedure. If you want to know what the navicular bones or the hocks or the back look like, you must ask, and it will add materially to the bill. Buyers routinely assume this is included. It is not.

Nor is any other imaging. No ultrasound of tendons, no endoscopy of the airway, no MRI. All available, all extra, all requiring you to decide in advance what you are worried about.

Pregnancy status is not checked unless requested. Nor is a full dental examination beyond a look in the mouth.

And it is not a soundness guarantee. A vetting is an examination on one morning. A horse can vet perfectly and be lame in a fortnight, and no part of the process claims otherwise.

Who the vet is working for

The vet acts for the purchaser. That is worth saying plainly, because the arrangements around vettings often blur it.

Where possible the examining vet should not be the seller's regular vet. Where that is unavoidable — and in a small area with one practice it sometimes is — the conflict must be declared, and the vet is then obliged to disclose relevant history they already hold. Some buyers are content with that arrangement because the practice knows the horse. Others are not. Either position is reasonable; not being told is the problem.

You are also entitled to be there. Attending your own vetting is one of the more useful hours you can spend, because the vet will say things aloud during the examination that will be compressed into a single sentence in the written report.

The question it is actually answering

Here is the reframe.

A vetting does not ask is this horse healthy. It asks: on the evidence available today, do I see anything that makes this horse unsuitable for the purpose the purchaser has described to me?

Everything follows from that. The purpose you state changes the answer. A finding that is irrelevant for a horse that will hack out four times a week may be disqualifying for a horse expected to event at a level. If you tell the vet you want a happy hack and then take the horse affiliated, you have not been misled — you asked a different question from the one you needed answered.

So state the intended use precisely, and state it honestly, including the ambition you have not admitted to yourself yet.

Modern reports are written as findings and their implications rather than as a verdict, which is why "passed" has fallen away. You will get a list of what was found and a professional opinion on what each thing means for your stated purpose. Reading that list and deciding is your job, not the vet's.

What a vetting cannot reach

The examination sees one morning. It cannot see the two years before it.

It cannot tell you how often this horse has been lame, what it was treated for at six, whether the wind operation was disclosed, how many homes it has had, or what the previous owner's vet wrote in 2023. That history exists — it is simply held in a filing cabinet at a practice the buyer has never heard of, and there is no obligation on anyone to hand it over.

That gap is why we built the free lifelong health record and made it free for every animal, whether or not it was ever sold through us. A vetting is a snapshot taken under pressure at the worst possible moment for calm judgement. A record is the other thing entirely, and the two are not substitutes.

The same principle runs through everything here. As with what a pedigree cannot tell you about a foal, the document in front of you is usually sound. The error is in believing it answers a broader question than it was ever asked.

— Rene