First: stop, look, and control the bleeding
The first decision is made before you touch the wound: is this a cut you should be treating in the field at all? Get the horse caught, calm and standing somewhere safe, away from the herd mates who found the fence with him. If there is active bleeding, press a clean pad or folded cloth firmly over the wound and hold the pressure steadily — most bleeding from a minor cut slows within minutes of uninterrupted pressure, and repeatedly lifting the pad to peek restarts it. A wound pumping blood, soaking pad after pad, or sitting somewhere you cannot compress is not a field case: keep pressure on and ring the vet, because that call is the treatment.
Clean it thoroughly before you judge it
Field cuts arrive full of mud, hair and grit, and a dirty wound cannot be assessed — and should not be closed or covered — until it is clean. Flush it with plenty of clean water, ideally from a hose on gentle pressure or containers poured steadily, working from the centre outward and taking your time: the goal is to float out every particle of contamination, not to give the surface a rinse. Only once it is clean can you see what you are actually dealing with — how deep it goes, whether the edges gape, what the tissue at the base looks like, and whether anything is embedded in it.
The honest assessment: where the field stops
Run through the questions that separate a minor cut from a vet case. Does it gape open or show tissue deeper than skin? Does it sit over, or close to, a joint, a tendon or the eye — areas where even a small wound can reach structures that turn a cut into an emergency? Was it a puncture — a nail, a thorn, a narrow deep wound from wire — rather than a slice? Punctures look trivial on the surface and are the most deceptive wounds horses get. And how is the horse using the leg: a horse significantly lame on the affected limb, or unwilling to bear weight, needs the vet regardless of how the skin looks. Any yes in that list means the field routine ends and the vet takes over, today.
Looking after a genuinely minor cut
For the shallow, clean cut away from trouble spots, the job becomes protection and monitoring. Keep it clean and shield it from flies and the mud of the field as best the season allows. Then commit to looking at it properly twice a day rather than glancing at it across the field: you are checking for heat around the wound, swelling that is spreading rather than settling, any discharge, an increase rather than a decrease in soreness, and edges that are not knitting. Healing wounds improve steadily; a wound that stalls or goes backwards is communicating.
The changes that mean call the vet now
Escalate without waiting for the next scheduled check if the leg swells significantly, the horse becomes lamer rather than sounder, discharge appears or increases, the wound opens up after starting to close, or the horse himself seems dull or off his feed. Wounds near joints that start producing fluid, and any wound whose surrounding skin becomes hot and tight, belong at the front of that list. When you ring, the history matters — when it happened, how it has changed, what it looked like on the first day — and an honest sequence is far more use to the vet than a worried summary.
That sequence is easiest to give if you recorded it at the time: a photograph on the day of the injury and at each check turns 'it seems worse' into something a vet can judge over the phone. Keeping those dated photos with his wound notes in his KinsLe Pet Passport means his injury history, vaccinations and records sit in one packet, ready whether the call ends in advice or a visit.