Page 40 - August 2021

Tommy Hays, DVM
Equine Medicine’s Mild-Mannered Man of Steel
by Diane Rice
Veterinarian Tommy Hays doesn’t change clothes in a phone booth before he tends to his equine clients, but nonethe- less, he’s known by at least one longtime client as Superman.
“He’s been our vet for a number of years,” says Bob Gaston, who along with his wife Jerry, has bred and raced many successful runners over the years.
“He really pulled off a miracle on a mare of ours that was running in the Sam Houston Futurity in 2006,” Bob says. “She [First Tea Rose] blew her knee pretty bad. The jockey had pulled her up and the track vet ran down there and said he’d have to put her down. About that time, our trainer Heath Taylor ran up and said, ‘No, no, put a bubble cast on it; I’m talking to Dr. Hays. We’re going
to haul her to Elgin [Texas, location of
Elgin Veterinary Hospital] and see if he
can fix her up.’”
“Heath rode in the back with her to hold her and when Tommy looked at her and x-rayed her, he said, ‘I’ll need my team; we’ll do it at 6:00 tomorrow morning.’
“I believe there were 27 pieces in that knee,” Bob continues. “He put them all together and put some bands and screws in
“Anytime anybody needed help, I helped them out . . .”
there and put a cast on it. He said that if she didn’t founder on the other leg, we’d be halfway out of the woods.”
“Well, she didn’t,” Bob says. “We took the cast off and he said that would be another critical time, because if she hurts on that, she could founder. But she didn’t. We took her out and she bucked and played, and she’s still having babies! She’s had a few stakes winners. So, Tommy has been a big part of our horse operation all these years.”
HIS BEGINNINGS
Dr. Hays was born to J. T. and Bonnie Hays in Thibodaux, Louisiana, and raised in the Oklahoma panhandle in Laverne, near Amarillo, Texas, with his sisters, Kathy and Denise.
“There wasn’t much racing out there in
the panhandle,” says Dr. Hays. “When I was growing up, Raton was the big racetrack in the area. Racetracks were few and far between there. It was quite a while later, after I left there, that Remington opened up. Of course, everybody raced at the bush tracks around there on the weekends; it was kind of a fun deal.”
In his youth, Dr. Hays worked for ranchers in the area. “Anytime anybody needed help,
I helped them out — mostly gathering cattle and taking care of horses,” he says.
“My first recollection of wanting to be a veterinarian was when one of the ranchers had a really good mare. She colicked one night and the few vets in the area were mostly cattle vets. All we could do
was watch her suffer and die because nobody knew what to do. So, after that, my goal was to become a veterinarian, to be somebody
who could fix horses.” A self-described animal person, Dr.
Hays says, “I had
cattle, sheep and
hogs. I showed a
sheep when I was
a senior in high
school, and he won
all kinds of things.
But I’d picked him up
when we went out looking
for animals to buy for the FFA chapter one weekend. This guy had a sick sheep so when he learned I wanted to be a veterinarian, he gave it to me and said, ‘Here, take this one, doctor him up, and if
“I admire him as a person: his integrity as well as his skill as a vet.” – Bob Gaston (shown with his wife Jerry)