We had a really good farrier at our barn, but there were a couple of different vets over the years and I didn't think much of some of them. I'm pretty sure the one guy killed one of our lesson horses... she was a little bright red chestnut pony, very delicate build, and the kids loved her, but she had something wrong with her feet from her previous owner, and she got horse aspirin in her oats, but every once in a while she'd have to get an injection of steroids to control the swelling, and that injection was supposed to go into the muscle... and we had her in cross-ties, and it was about the tenth shot he'd given in the past hour and he wasn't paying attention... talking over his shoulder to my boss about something... and he stuck it straight into the big vein in her neck. I knew that wasn't supposed to happen and I started shouting at him, and he pretended that was where it was supposed to go... but it wasn't, because you don't inject steroids directly into the bloodstream like that, at least not the ones he was using... my boss sent me to go off and get one of the other horses, and when I came back my boss was freaking out and the vet was insisting he didn't do anything wrong and this poor pony had dropped dead. It stopped her heart.

Sorry... horror story, I know, but I guess it just means that a good large animal vet is really hard to find, and a lot of them seem not really care about the animals very much.