LTS Strangles Outbreak - vet costs for schoolies

Who this will help

Hi there! My name is Tessa Laughton and I own a Laughton Training & Sales Inc. The funds raised will go to help pay off our vet bills occurred over the past 3 months during our strangles Outbreak & my coaching staff who lost income during this hard time

. I'd also like to start helping other farms going through this once we surpass our goal, I'd like to help farms who also handle this responsibly & go public.

Why I'm fundraising

We arrived home after show number five on the silver circuit with such excitement, ready to go to playoffs with our large team. It was Labour Day weekend, and our spirits were high early the following week our worst nightmare happened the dreaded. S word. Our first horse popped an abscess, and the dreaded strangles word came up. But we needed to be responsible so we started testing and we put an immediate lockdown in place. No horse movement until we knew what was going on.

I knew immediately I wanted to go public with this information. I think it is so important that as barn owners, we share such information with our Horse community and industry. As any movement between facilities that have this bacteria could cause another infection, and could cause this nightmare for another fellow barn owner. So it was time to go public and help stop the stigma. We need to talk about this. It's very active in Ontario and we need to figure out why and how to make it Stop.

Under the guidance of Dr Kim from Ferguson Equine, we came up with a plan of how we were going to handle the different zones where they were going to go, and I also decided that I wanted to test every horse, miniature pony, miniature donkey on the farm. I needed to know who had it and what zone they belong in.

. .We ended up having 13 positive that were asymptomatic and two positives that were symptomatic.

So far alone in vet bills, I have surpassed $20,000 that is not including cleaning supplies, lost hay/shavings we had to dispose of, paying our barn staff during our closures, lost income from lessons and competitions, but I also want to help support my coaching staff that could not work throughout the month of September and October while we were shut down, and we all know how much the cost of living has increased.

Here is an article:

HORSE SPORT MAGAZINE

The impact of your support

Any donation is amazing. Whether it's just a few dollars nothing is too small. I am not doing thus go fund me to make money, I am actually very bad at asking for money and help. What I want to do with this money is help pay off my extreme vet bill that will surpass $20-$25,000 but I also want to help other farm owners

going through this nightmare.