Genius…
Pretty sure I heard about this happening at at least one show, and the sad corollary to that is that barns will have their own hidden sharps containers. Be careful when you reach for that Kleenex!
The deceit is just that deep, way deeper than anyone wants to acknowledge I’m afraid.
I couldn’t agree more.
Interesting because I really don’t see any recent articles in the literature for US competitions, but plenty for the UK and Europe, as well in conjunction with specific FEI sports - looking at you endurance. Of course, this was a very quick search in an area outside my own specialty of business/finance/economics.
I’d say, if a researcher from a major vet school with a pharmacology program was interested, this would be an incredibly useful study. Not sure if an IRB would require making show participants know the study was being performed or not considering it’s doubtful there’s any identifying information on the sharps in the container. But again, my lord, think of this study being performed annually or bi-annually.
And sure, you may not get a complete view of everything being injuected, but you would have a good overview.
Okay, nerding out over academic studies over.
this exactly
It grosses me out how quickly some owners are to stick their horses. How would they like to get that many shots? Just getting stuck with a needle daily is awful and then you add all the substances
Until my hand problems started, it was me giving IM pentosan, and allergy shots to my mare. But she’s pretty easy about it. When my ring and pinkie fingers on my dominant hand curled up, I realized that it wouldn’t be that impossible for the syringe to get caught on them and leave a broken needle in the horse. So BO or BM took over. But IM shots were seriously easy - much easier than giving her paste!
Agree, my vet gives me IM injections to do on my own. I had a exam, I got the medicine through the vet, why not? I don’t need to have the vet out for Adequan. It would be a MASSIVE cost increase to back yard horse owners to try to force the “nobody’s allowed to have needles” route.
No one is saying that. We are saying AT A SHOW, there is absolutely no need for it. Nearly every therapeutic drug is available orally, and the ones that aren’t it’s up to the owner to either schedule the administration around the show or have a vet do it there for the cost.
There’s less margin of error with dosing/ contamination when things are given IM or IV. Oral meds are more likely to cause an accidental drug overage or mistake, so people prefer injectable.
Source?
Going to the overshowing piece, there was a Facebook post recently that highlighted how a horse did 25 (!) over fences classes at a Midwest indoor show over a 4-day period. Comments on that post highlighted that show management apparently addressed it… but after the fact. Is there no system for show management to deal with this during the week? I’m assuming maybe but then looking at the stats I collected below you can see where the incentive is to not…
I (obsessively) checked entries from that show and found that 36 of the 107 entries did more than 10 jumping classes in 4 days, and it wasn’t confined to a single division (e.g., the 2’6) but it was all hunters/equitation horses.
The 18 highest showing horses (doing 15+ OF classes) showed in 315 classes which is 32% of the ENTIRE SHOW. Only 2 of those horses showed under 3’ and 2 were ponies.
Trainer A had 4 horses at 25, 20, 19, and 16 rounds
Trainer B had 6 horses at 22, 18, 16, 15, 15, 15
Trainer C had 3 horses at 19, 16, 15
Trainer D had 4 horses at 19, 18, 17, 15
Trainer E had 1 horse at 15
Jumpers? Highest class number was 9 showing in the 0.75 & 0.95
Full breakdown:
18 horses who did 15+ OF classes (17% of the show) did 315 classes (32% of the entries)
18 horses who did 11-14 OF classes (17% of the show) did 211 classes (21% of the entries)
33 horses who did 7-10 OF classes (31% of the show) did 277 classes (28% of the entries)
38 horses who did 6&under classes (36% of the show) did 182 classes (18% of the entries)
Stepping into this conversation as someone who had given IV shots since I was a junior. I watched a vet put a sedative in my broodmare’s artery. She flipped over and had a seizure on the floor in front of us. She was blind when she finally stood up. I will never, ever give an IV shot myself ever again. This incident has even given me lasting mental effects when giving IM shots.
IV shots should not be treated as flippantly as they currently are. Juniors should not be giving them. I would support a rule that disallowed needles at the horse show. If your horse really needs injectable meds, you should possibly look at how much and how hard you are asking them to work.
Source? You asked why people give injectable meds vs oral? That’s why. If it goes in the horse, it’s in that horse not in the bucket, in a different bucket, on the ground, spit on the wall, rolled into the next stall, or in another horse. It’s precisely the number of ccs, not someone bumped the dial and gave two and a half clicks instead of two.
I need a source that says that giving a medication orally somehow holds more risk than administering it IV.
The person can still draw an incorrect amount of ccs, or hit an artery, or do a whole host of other things that can go sideways. I don’t know that I can recall a horse dying from an incorrect dose of something in their grain. An overage administered IV, I can list several right off the top of my head.
If the wrong horse gets a legal med that’s in the wrong bucket, that’s a management issue and isn’t likely to kill the animal. If the horse spits some of the legal med out, who cares.
“We need needles to be able to show”, “we need to be able to give our horses daily injections to be able to show”. Normalized != normal. Seriously, we need to take a humongous step back here - this is not ordinary.
Things like Adequan are an injectable medication. I do not see how using something like Adequan means you are asking your horse to work too hard.
You missed the best place - in my freaking hair. I seem to always get oral paste in my hair.
How did we get from injections = all IV?
Lots of injections discussed in this thread are IM.
As your source, I’m telling you that it holds more risk of a rule violation or of the actual medicine not doing its actual job. Those are the risks people weigh against the relatively minor risk of an injection causing an issue when it’s giving a legal and safe product.
Your illegal products are mostly already violating the 12 hour injection rule if they are timed to work properly. So making all needles illegal would not do much for them, since the people giving them are already breaking a rule.