Not really sure that I’d want to give USEF the ability to thoroughly check everything in my stall aisle, truck, trailer, home barn, etc. whenever they want to. HISA has this authority at the racetrack, but they are a government agency and racing is heavily regulated because of the gambling. Horse shows are a whole other animal.
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Word to the wise, I would not take a drawn up dose. Some chemicals bind to the plastic of the syringe and it can change the potency of the drug. I (Registered Veterinary Technician) worked for a surgeon who would never let us pre-draw diazepam (Valium) for this reason - not saying that is necessarily the case for flunixin, but these drugs are FDA approved for safety and effectiveness based on storage in amber glass at specific temperature ranges.
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USEF is not going to search tack trunks randomly. They don’t have the manpower or the will to do anything organized like that. This rule is for when a steward sees someone injecting something suspicious and asks to know what the substance is.
Which we know is almost never going to happen and so the rule is toothless. But that’s the only goal here. To empower show officials to ask “what’s in that syringe” when they have a reason to.
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Wouldn’t it also give more teeth to a “set down” if a horse does collapse or die after being medicated?
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Wouldn’t it be nice if horses came first?
For all the flapping done by USEF and FEI, there’s an awful lot of bad stuff going on.
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And here I am preparing myself to tell my trainer my horse doesn’t need to be lunged (I usually never do full grooming but have to at a show coming up, so have to tell him how my horse needs to be “prepped”…which is, not).
Sometimes I really hate my sport and want to quit all the time because of $h!t like this thread topic.
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When I see stuff like this, I always think back to Amber Aslin’s perfect take when Brigit Colvin was set down for giving a derby finals horse GABA and 9 tubes of PerfectPrep and Lactalase. She said something like, “The best horse in the country with excellent trainers and a freak of a Junior rider AND it still needs all this crap to achieve “hunter quiet.” Us little people may as well run up our stirrups. Natural Hunter quiet does not exist.”
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Holy smoke!!! I knew she was set down but didn’t know all that!!!
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It was eye opening and depressing. They could not draw blood in one area because his veins were collapsed. We discussed it all on here.
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I’ll look for it. Thx!
Absolutely disgusting. Granted, my horse is a jumper; but still she takes 0 prep. Can walk into any show ring, no ear plugs/bonnet, and will jump around perfectly. I refuse to buy perfect prep as I think it’s a placebo, but I guess if you give it NINE tubes, that’ll do something. Geeeezus.
But that’s the other thing…does anyone think that if that horse wasn’t given anything or prepped that he would’ve performed the same? Honestly, probably. But “we” are conditioned to think “we” have to go to these extremes or else if something goes wrong it’s because “we” didn’t prep it right.
And here I am right back to where I started. I hate it here.
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TDs are now coming to barns and trailers to do bit checks at dressage shows. If they are going to pass this rule, why wouldn’t stewards be authorized to do some random med checks?
I’m all for not allowing anyone other than a vet to be carrying anesthesia or euthanasia meds on show grounds, but there are plenty of legal meds and good to have just in case meds that don’t require a vet to administer them where this would be a pain for the owners, trainers, and vets, and are probably not what this is all about anyway. But perhaps they should up their testing budget to catch the cheaters rather than put this on the stewards to police tubes of Banamine.
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The industry has been very lucky some million dollar horse hasn’t been killed by a “barn manager.”
Maybe they have?
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I’m not saying they COULDN’T, I’m saying they WON’T. Since when has USEF done anything but the bare minimum lazy effort when it comes to cracking down on actual horse welfare issues.
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Just the USEF vet…
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Humble?
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My point is…TDs are USEF officials and they are doing all the extra bit checks.
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I don’t know if he was valued at a million dollars.
But I believe he did make the front page of the New York Times. Above the fold, as I recall. Which was a little unfortunate.
On the bright side, I think the woman who did that to him finally retired from the horse business.
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Think showjumper, that died this summer. I can’t remember his name, but his breeder and owner was right peeved over “medications” given by the team vet that resulted in his death. I’m sorry I can’t remember his name. Humble was a hunter pony.
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Yes, I know Humble was the hunter pony. I just meant he died (probably of magnesium, was it ever proven?) during the Carolina Gold heyday, from an injection given by the trainer not a vet.
Chromatic BF was the show jumper that died this summer “allegedly” from the vet-administered cocktail.
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