warvet

    The Real Cowboy In the military stud farm where I worked, major work force used to be the non-combatant syce who spent all their life taking care of horses. Over the years, the more intelligent amongst them used to gain a lot of veterinary knowledge by observing and assisting us officers in our work. Karan Singh, my Head syce or Daroga was one such wise old man. He would take a hard look at a mare in severe colic and pronounce – “Yoo, raat nahi kaategi”. During post mortem exam of a dead horse he would prophesize – “ Iska pate fata milega”. Sometimes he would surprise me by using scientific jargon like “ Isme Diaphragmatic Hernia ya Congestive Heart Failure ho sakta hai”! The other day I was observing that there was a high incidence of illness amongst our syces and their families. Almost all households were having a serious case who needed to see a doctor regularly and this was hampering our work. The Daroga nodded thoughtfully and added “ meri gharwali ko bhi ba...

  Animals in Uniform The Key to Longeivity In Army, Horses and Mules are generally retained in service till 18-20 yrs after which they are disposed off. Some, who have exceptionally good health, survive more. But the longest survivors have other qualities which make them indispensible. There was this pure black horse “Jorawar” whom we retained way past his productive life so that we had a steady supply of black horse shoes which were in great demand for their occult powers. And our clientele used to be overwhelmingly very senior officers! Then we had “Thumri” a very agreeable chestnut mare who was very quiet and docile on whom we used to demonstrate myriad high   tech equipment like ECG, Ultrasound, Ultrasonic Nebulizers etc to the visiting officers. One mare, who was a work animal (pulls carts), was a surrogate mother for whole lot of orphan foals in her lifetime. Her milk never dried and at any given time you could see her breast feeding 2-3 of these poor little th...