If you give enough magnesium to restore the horse to normal levels, and that fixes his behavior, that’s great. It means his battiness was due to an actual deficiency, and now everything is fine. But you can’t give too much magnesium to a horse and get even more calm. You either get no change, or you get diarrhea, or you get muscle cramps or weakness, etc. In other words, a prolonged overdose is going to upset the overall metabolism of the body.
For me, this would put magnesium in the category of nutrition, rather than medicine. You want it optimized, but it doesn’t have any positive effect on horses that are not suffering from a deficit. This puts it in the same category as protein, vitamins, etc.
This to me is different from oral or injectable mood-altering treatments that are not part of the overall nutritional requirements of the horse, such as tranquilizers or stimulants. In this I would include both pharmaceuticals and herbal formulas that have no place in a horse’s diet except to alter mood. Also painkillers. As far as I know, these rules were first instituted at racetracks, and focused on painkillers and stimulants. Like cocaine. The welfare focus there would be on not running injured horse through their pain.
http://horsefund.org/the-chemical-horse-part-2.php
The problem of calming agents and tranquilizing is more recent, with the rise of horse shows that reward extreme calmness.
Obviously there is going to be a grey area. There always is, in every kind of regulation. The grey areas are the ones that are going to produce court cases and 36 page reports.
The existence of a grey area in any regulatory environment does not invalidate the regulations as a whole. It’s normal, and it can be an interesting area to generate test cases and precedents that push the regulations either towards more laxity or more severity.
For instance, think speeding tickets. You might want to argue that freeway drivers going 5 kpm above posted limits in safe conditions don’t deserve a $200 ticket. But no one is going to say that squealing through a residential neighbourhood at 120 kpm is OK (except the drunk teenage driver).
Or think of the grey areas in between libel and protected speech, between interpersonal conflict and bullying, or even determining if a given event was or was not “date rape.” Or even if something is murder, manslaughter, or an accident. We can all imagine really complicated scenarios where it might be difficult to definitively decide. But that doesn’t mean that the laws against dangerous driving, libel, criminal harassment, sexual assault, and murder are in general vague and unenforceable. It just means that you will always have a very few cases on the borderline, and those are the ones that are in fact interesting in how they put pressure on the regulators to clarify further.
The reason for only banning testable substances is obvious. If you can’t test for a substance, then you can’t prove it was used. It does tie the regulators’ hands to some extent, but I don’t see how else you could proceed.
Interesting to read that tryptophan is banned. I wonder if that means the milk protein Zylkene will also be banned. They are both amino acids, and I assume if you can test for tryptophan, you can test for “the globally patented bioactive decapeptide a-casozepine, derived from milk protein casein” which is a chain of ten amino acids.
Of course, tryptophan is also a required amino acid. So I’m curious as to how it shows up in testing. I assume there is a baseline of normal tryptophan in the body, and an excess would be spotted?
I’ve never given any thought to how you test for performance enhancing substances. I guess pee and blood, same as human athletes.
