Massey Magazine November 2001 |

The Horse Man

Professor
Name: Wayne McIlwraith
Qualification: BVetSci

Don’t be scared to change horses in mid-stream, Wayne McIlwraith tells his students. And he gives his own life story as an example.

Sheep and cattle and the dream of a rural lifestyle in New Zealand brought him to Massey for a Bachelor of Veterinary Science in 1967. But horses have taken him to the top of his profession, to a very different way of life in the United States and to constant travel to Europe.

Recently appointed president of the American Association of Equine Practitioners, McIlwraith is Professor of Surgery and Director of Orthopaedic Research at Colorado State University. He has conducted pioneering research in athroscopic surgery for horses. (Fibreoptic cables allow the surgeon to operate through a tiny incision, viewing the procedure using a television monitor.) But he spends about a third of his time performing surgery on some of the world’s most valuable racehorses.

He didn’t have a horse when growing up in Oamaru, but learnt to ride on his aunt and uncle’s high country sheep station. His experiences there in the holidays made him see a future for himself as a farm vet. And when he graduated from Massey University, with Distinction, in 1970, he went to work in a veterinary practice in Darfield for three years. Then he was off on his OE, aiming at new heights – but not in the vet field. He led a climbing expedition to the Andes. He had intended to come home and get back to work, but the mountains of South America whetted his appetite for more and he went to England to work for the money to fund a three-month climbing trip in the European Alps.

While in England he decided to specialise in equine surgery. He did an internship in Canada and then Master’s and Doctorate degrees in Indiana. Again he intended to bring his skills back home, and was making job inquiries. But the sudden early death of his predecessor in the job he’s still in brought him an offer he couldn’t refuse.

“Colorado had the mountains,” he points out in explaining why he immediately decided to take the job, and move to Fort Collins – “just five minutes from some of the best rock climbing in the world”.

He doesn’t manage to spend much time on the rocks though. Last year his air miles totalled 300,000 and he spent a third of his time away from home.

This included a trip to Australia with the New Zealand team for the Sydney Olympics. In the previous Olympics he’d been asked by team vet Wally Niederer to go to Atlanta and have a look at the New Zealand horses. He ended up having to tell Mark Todd his horse Kayem could not compete because of injury. Later, he operated on Todd’s Broadcast News before the pair went on to come second in the 1997 World Games in which New Zealand was overall winner.

“I really liked working with the New Zealand team,” says McIlwraith. “I’m still a New Zealander. I’ve still got a great passion for the country.” He comes back to New Zealand at least once a year. Recently he was here for a reunion of those who graduated from his Massey class in 1970. All but one of those still alive turned up. McIlwraith’s Massey links are alive and well. He’s working with Elwyn Firth, Director of Massey Equine, an ex-classmate, on a large collaborative research project, along with institutions in England and the Netherlands, on reducing injury in racing horses.

Most of his travel is to England and France – for a combination of speaking and surgery. And every second weekend he does surgery in Southern California. The home of many of America’s best racehorses is second home to McIlwraith and his wife, Nancy Goodman, who for the first 15 years of their marriage continued her racecourse vet practice there.

He operates on hundreds of horses in Southern California and dozens in Europe each year. That the gruelling schedule behind numbers like these might put off those who are now students is one of McIlwraith’s concerns as AAEP president. “Graduates often want to go into small animal practice because they want to work a 40-hour week. I don’t want to get hauled out of bed in the middle of the night either, and it’s physically very hard work – but I feel privileged to work on great horses.”