Apologies and remorse don’t remotely cover the crime and the damage.
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Total tangent, but it’s particularly disappointing given who his grandfather was and the positions his grandfather took.
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Im wondering if they knew it was sick while riding it??
Another person who had a horse go through EHV-1. Mine was in 2001, well before the most recent research. The terrifying thing about her case is that many vets portray this as not very contagious…but that is not my experience.
My pony showed off the trailer, and I rode 2 horses in her division (C/A Jumpers division of maybe 15) and she was my second…so I literally tacked her up, trotted back to the ring after horse 1, jumped a couple of fences and did her first round (last in the division), walked on her during the course walk which I had done earlier, jumped a fence and was first to go in the second class. I didn’t even hose her off as it was March and she wasn’t sweaty, she was an old pro and didn’t warm up long.
The vets at VA Tech thought she must have got it from a shared hose when I filled water buckets in the barn.
She spent a week in a sling with HIV meds given through a spinal tap. She lived a few more years and came back to light work, but the neuro symptoms caused reduced gut motility and she eventually died of a ruptured stomach/colic.
I am disgusted by the cavalier response from some trainers.
No one else in our barn showed any symptoms, but I think it kind of is like COVID in that it is mild for some horses and life-threatening for others, often with no rhyme or reason. Of course the viruses are different scientifically, but it was very weird. Different that the respiratory illness that we picked up from a show this year, which made no one very sick but worked its way through most of the barn.
On the flip side, I cancelled shows this year because I am a decent person. I think we should be allowed to get a refund with a vet note of communicable disease. The shows I canceled didn’t refund anything. I could have taken the horses, as the showing ones weren’t sick, but I couldn’t live with the idea of making other horses sick like someone did to us. That hurt financially a lot!
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I absolutely agree that USEF should require horse show organizers to refund entry fees when there is an outbreak to make individual incentives align better with the public interest.
Horse show organizers have insurance for that sort of thing, or if they don’t, they should.
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And have they been fired by their clients ?
Oops…I realized after I posted that it was the clients who allowed the horses to move.
Is AC3 Archie Cox?
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The onus is on both the trainer and the client. Selfishness regarding one’s own horse caused people to disregard the effect on other horses.
However, as the professional, the trainer has even more responsibility to act in the interests of the wider community, not just the selfish interest of the client.
Can the other people affected, other than trainer’s client, punish the trainer? (Rhetorical.)
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Yes, but who is HG?
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The problem is that they let horses leave the first week when it was non-neurological. So I would imagine there are horses at other shows since Katy, TX isn’t really that far and if you got out of Dodge early, that would be an easy hop-over. There are horses in Wellington too. They made it out the first week and are being quarantined, but they’re there. It’s a freaking debacle and the better question is… what do they do if the show ends and they can’t move everybody off the grounds? There is only a few more weeks of Thermal left (3 maybe?) That’s a lot of money and time to spend idling and who is going to want them back at their home barns til they’re cleared?
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Hope Glynn I imagine.
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I think the names of the trainers and clients involved should have their names published. Since these people can’t do the right thing on their own, maybe some public shaming and loss of revenue would make them re-think their future behavior.
If I were shopping for a trainer, I would definitely want to know the utter disregard for horse welfare of these individuals so I could steer clear of them.
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There was also a dressage show at DIHP Feb. 17-20.
Was that the second week of the outbreak ?
Isn’t this behaviour illegal? Are there no laws against knowingly ignoring quarantine and putting other horses at risk?
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IIRC, if your horse is in a California Dept. Food & Ag. mandated quarantine - at a show or home barn - it’s illegal to disregard the protocols. If the horse isn’t technically in a state mandated quarantine, and is “free to leave” the showgrounds (as written in Thermal’s press release) then it’s ok.
It’ll be interesting to see which rule violation USEF comes up with.
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Why are people so desperate to show? Seems to bizarre to me!
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If you take a look at showgroundslive and the entries for Week 4 of DIHS and the west palms show last week, you can see which horses attended both. Takes some detective work, but I could find overlap with an AC having horses at both DIHS 4 and the February West Palms LA show. It is important to note, it doesn’t account for horses at DIHS during the off-week. Not sure about anyone else (didn’t take time to dig further).
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Oooof… where to begin with that question?
Because getting into Devon and Indoors are considered a big deal, as well as qualifying for Big Eq regionals/finals, and then there are the FEI grand prix events where people are targetting for World Cup Qualifiers. Then there’s also those trying to win circuit champions at the bigger shows or Horse of the Year awards for USEF. The list goes on… Pony Finals, Jr Hunter Finals, etc.
So points are tough to accumulate in certain regions and certain areas need to chase more than others, and that requires having access to shows for a lot of the winter season to satisfy cutoffs or accumulate enough throughout the year to get in.
Missing a few weeks can make the difference, especially if you didn’t have the ride/horse for the full year and you’re already making up for lost time.
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And all of that, for some people, is worth the risk of infecting and possibly killing other people’s much loved horses. Stunningly self centered behavior to say the least.
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The horse put down on Tuesday at Hansen Dam was just confirmed EHV positive. That horse was not at Thermal, it was presumably infected at the LAEC show by a horse who had been at Thermal.
So, hundreds and hundreds of horses have now been exposed to this virus because a tiny handful of professionals thought their show schedule was more important than our horses’ lives.
If you’d like to ask USEF to suspend or fine the trainers who violated quarantine, the contact is epratt@usef.org or 859 983 6833.
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