Fresh from a teaching stint at Cornell Universitys veterinary school, moving to Southern Pines in 1971 made Fred McCashin feel a bit like a pioneer on the frontier of equine medicine.
Considering the manicured pastures of todays Southern Pines horse country and the miles of weathered post-and-rail fence lines in Moore Countys equestrian enclaves, that feeling is difficult to imagine.
But back then, much of the equestrian community here was seasonal fox hunters and harness racers and N.C. States College of Veterinary Medicine wouldnt be up and running for more than a decade.
McCashin, 76, recently attended the 50th reunion of his vet school class at the University of Pennsylvania. His Youngs Road practice, Carolina Equine Clinic, is celebrating its 40th year in business this month.
He came to North Carolina not to be a solo practitioner, but to direct the N.C. Veterinary Research Foundation. Established as a nonprofit by a group of veterinarians hoping to lay the foundation for a veterinary school, the facility is now the N.C. State Equine Research center on U.S. 1 north of Southern Pines.
Dr. Fred B. McCashin, shown here with Attaboy Roy, establshed the Carolina Equine Clinic in 1977. (Photo by Ted Fitzgerald/The Pilot)
Other opportunities were available: continuing to teach at Michigan State, or working as the staff veterinarian for the racing stable of a prominent French art dealer. At that point, though, hed had enough of difficult characters and the politics embroiled in academia. And the chance to fill a void for the states thriving horse business by performing surgery on a referral basis held its own fascination.
That was really sorely needed because there were very few veterinarians that would even attempt to do surgery in the state of North Carolina, said McCashin, who recalled his six years at the research foundation as nonstop work.
I could stay up all night operating on a case and you didnt have any time off the next day. It was like working on the prairies. It was a nice building and all, we had the facilities, but I was trying to get veterinarians in the field to come in with their cases and give me a hand, because sometimes you just cant do it all by yourself.
He opened Carolina Equine Clinic in 1977, working out of the barn on the property, then adding a clinic and lab building.
This is just a little modest thing, and I never made it any bigger, he said. I thought about having branches in Wilmington and other places where no one was doing surgeries, but I was busy enough here that I couldnt get away.
The clinic is strewn with relics from McCashins career in the form of calcified masses extracted from patients. One, the size of two fists, he found in 1982 while performing emergency colic surgery on a Morgan horse from a Raleigh farm before N.C. State started surgery.
In that particular case, McCashin rushed to the clinic on Halloween his children missed trick-or-treating that year not a moment too soon as he opened the patients abdomen to find it full of manure. Though that could have been a death sentence, the horse made a full recovery.
The owner was here and I said this is bad but I just took it and heaved it over the side and everything else looked reasonably clean, he recalled. The stone was there and it had ruptured his small colon. So we cleaned it up, took out the busted section and stuck it back together again and I said well just see how its going to go.
I dont ask the kids if they remember that, he said ruefully.
Its that kind of episode that remains so vivid to the longtime veterinarian that it might as well have happened yesterday. So too with the tough cases, solved through months of rehabilitation and sheer force of will like Jet Murmur, a Thoroughbred colt who broke his leg at around six months of age.
(Photo by Ted Fitzgerald/The Pilot)
In six months I think I had him on the table maybe seven times because the plates kept getting a little bit loose and Id go back in and tighten up the screws and put new screws in and kept altering the thing, McCashin said.
I remember taking him on a longe THIS IS CQ line up there on the hill and taking him through the woods and trotting him over logs and stuff. He was a long yearling by the time I sent him home and he ended up being a productive stallion.
McCashin developed a specific interest in orthopedic surgery as a student protg of Jacques Jenny, who invented the technique of bone plating inspired by Swiss compression equipment used to treat skiing-related fractures in humans. He remembers plating the first broken leg at Ohio State University while studying as a postdoctoral student there.
It was a fancy Quarter Horse filly by a stallion called Gunsmoke, he recalled. Its always fun if you happen to save the life of a horse thats in a line of really well-bred animals.
Appreciation of a good horse was in McCashins blood long before he became a veterinarian. His father, Arthur, was captain of the U.S. national show jumping team that won bronze at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics.
Growing up on a derelict polo field in New Jersey, McCashin and his older brother jockeyed their fathers steeplechase horses and jumpers. But it was on his fathers advice that he decided to forego a chance to ride in the Olympics himself.
Dad told me, If you had a horse and went to the Tokyo games in 64 and you win a gold medal, you put the gold medal and a dime on the counter and youll get a cup of coffee, McCashin said.
I did ride with the team for quite a while, just never competed, but I exercised some fancy, fancy jumpers. I was lucky to be on Ksar dEsprit and Fire One and San Lucas and horses that are in the history books.
Though he never got to ride in the Olympics, McCashin had a backstage pass to the 1976 games in Montreal as the official vet for the United States Equestrian Team and to the 1996 Atlanta Olympics as an officiating vet for the international governing body for equestrian sports known as the FEI matching the competition horses to their international passports and drug testing a random sample.
While he stepped back from work as a competition vet last year, retiring completely isnt in McCashins plans. Not that he hasnt considered it. But after 50 years, he isnt sure he knows how not to be a horse doctor.
For the last few years, the clinic has hired younger veterinarians to do the bulk of the everyday work driving around Moore and nearby counties vaccinating horses, performing dental work, and other preventive maintenance. McCashins current associate, Beth Susen, has a knack for tricky reproductive cases.
Several of the areas equine veterinarians initially built their reputations in Southern Pines while working as McCashins associate vets. Perhaps as notably, Dean Richardson at UPenns New Bolton Center, who rose to stardom in the horse world when he operated on 2006 Kentucky Derby winner Barbaro after he broke several bones in his right hind leg at the start of the Preakness Stakes, worked at Carolina Equine Clinic before he was even admitted to vet school.
I saw him when I went up for the 50th reunion and reminded him he used to plant trees for us down here, McCashin joked.
McCashin still performs some surgeries in the clinics padded operating room, but like most vets refers severe colic cases and broken limbs to N.C. State. In 40 years of veterinary practice, there has been plenty of development to keep abreast of things that dont involve picking up a scalpel.
IRAP, stem cell therapy and other regenerative therapies have replaced counter-irritating methods in treating common tendon and soft tissue injuries in horses. The telltale scars of pinfiring applying extreme heat or cold to a horses leg were once frequent markings in horses retiring from the racetrack but are now out of vogue among most trainers.
(Photo by Ted Fitzgerald/The Pilot)
You would do counterirritation just to give the horse time off, McCashin recalled.
The advent of digital imaging has made diagnosing lameness easier than ever but McCashin failed to join N.C. States faculty in their enthusiasm when the school first acquired an equine MRI system.
Its a great research tool and you can definitely learn a whole lot more by getting that kind of detail, but they get really reliant on some of that technology when they get out of school, so theyre stuck, he said. I always tell them you can use your ears and your eyes and your fingers, if you learn to use them, to discover a lot on a horse.
McCashins patients range from carbon copies of the horses he rode in his showjumping heyday to horses of a different color entirely: Standardbreds training in Pinehurst, barrel racing Quarter Horses in Carthage, and mammoth jack donkeys in Wagram.
Riding a Paso Fino in the Andes on a recent vacation to Peru, it was all he could do not to conduct an impromptu study of the hardy horses respiration rates at varying elevation levels.
When you really love doing the kind of work you do, its hard to retire, he said. Its hard to give that up. You like to be selective in what you do and what you dont do. Ive had surgeries to repair this and repair that, my back, and then I had my heart ablated for a-fib, so I just try not to get sedentary.
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After 50 Years, Equine Vet Not Ready for the Pasture - Southern Pines Pilot