Again, just keeping the parts of your long, thoughtful post that are relevant to my general, continued, hard-a$$ rant.
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And I personally I agree with you, MVP, that better training could probably resolve a lot of the reasons why people are giving it. But I am looking from the outside in as I learn about this. I am sure that there are scenarios where this might actually be a necessity for some.
On another insight to this, I don’t see much about weaning a horse off of it. It would seem to me that hormones, like steroids, shouldn’t be stopped cold turkey but gradually weaned off of it but then since the shots seem to last for awhile I guess the body does that naturally?
It is true that I haven’t found much “labeled” info for geldings through out my search and I am anxious to speak with my boss about it. I will say that there are many times that we use medications “off label” in small and large animals and of course, there are risks just as there are with using the medication as labeled.
Do you also object to the use of regumate or depo in mares? For that matter, gelding them is surgery to remove an organ, which is done to make the horse easier to handle, rather than training the horse to behave despite what their hormones tell them to do. [/QUOTE]
I’m a purist…kind of. So I don’t know about weaning times or long term effects for hormones. Actually, I’ll bet that the show horses who are on an expensive, "helps just this much drug are kept on it. I also think their career or even equines’ relatively short working life may mean that we don’t know about the long term effects.
My half-a$$ed righteousness also means I’ll happily use a drug off-label with caveats. I was right up at the front of the line pestering my vet for Previcoxx which is still off-label for horses but an effective and cheap alternative to Equioxx or bute. My thinking was informed by the fact that I was looking for a therapeutic drug that would help an arthritic horse a tad. That’s all. An appropriate dose of one anti-inflammatory or another won’t allow us to make the unsound horse so sound that we hurt him further.
As to Depo in mares and gelding stallions at all. Damn straight a PITA mare shouldn’t get to the top by pharmaceutical means. And some very, very famous ones have made that trip with chemical help. To me, this is “false advertising” for a good mind that we think it’s possible to breed or train.
I think this is most serious when we choose breeding stock. It’s also important in keeping our competitive expectations of horses reasonable-- tethered to these animals’ limits. The actual western pleasure horse is a rare combination of great mind, good training and athleticism. The utterly-rideable, quiet hunter with an expressive jump is the same thing-- a rare horse. When we make it possible for everyone to fake the good mind rideability, we raise the stakes for the next guy… and of course that guy uses whatever tools he can on his more average horse!
I do think stallions, like mares, should have spectacular minds in order to gain entry to the gene pool. Gelding 'em ain’t bad. It creates a very useful horse out of that vast, vast majority that are not of that caliber. It also effectively keeps the riff raff (like my own gelding!) out of the next generation.
Mare owners aren’t doing anything worse-- they’re trying to create an asexual, non-hormonal machine we get in the gelding. No problem, these horses aren’t suffering for their machine-like status. But we ought to note which mares, stallions and their get need extreme measures in order to be rideable when we think about breeding.
