When a horse has digestive tract or respiratory problems, doctors need a long tube to get all the way inside to see what’s going on. That’s why veterinarians at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine are so pleased to have a new three-meter endoscope, donated by Morrie Waud, one of the hospital’s clients.

“Now we can examine a horse all the way back to the duodenum in the small intestine,” says Dr Simon Peek, a large animal internal medicine specialist at the school’s Large Animal Hospital. “Before, our endoscope would only reach to the stomach. But in horses, ulcers often occur further back than that.”

An endoscope is a long, flexible tube with a cold light source at one end and a viewing scope at the other, allowing doctors to see the insides of the esophagus, stomach, intestines, or nasal passageways. But standard-sized endoscopes are incapable of reaching far enough into a large horse, such as the draft horses Morrie Waud owns, to fully see what is occurring in the stomach and beyond.

The new three-meter endoscope remedies that