If “medical supply salesmen” do not sell pharmaceuticals, what medical supplies are they selling? Syringes, tubes, gauze and vet wrap? The latest and greatest in non-pharmaceutical pain relief? They are salesmen flogging product after all.
I knew you were talking about sharing information but most salesmen that I have ever heard of only puff their own products. That is necessarily self-interested and not always reliable information.
6?
IIRC it was 4 from late December at SA.
Yes, 2 at GGF.
For me, what would “do it” is to please explain why they broke down. Where are the necropsy reports? Where is the CHRB suspension? Can you (or a few others here) explain why other than horse broke down?
I don’t ‘convict’ based on a single “fact” without evidence and information to substantiate and explain the “fact”.
Sorry… I’ll still go back to what I said. We now have a trainer who’s career is in shambles, potentially with other trainers wondering who will be next to get axed without a substantiated reason.
If you think 6 dead horses is the right reason to axe someone, then go for it; I won’t do it.
There’re only so many times I can repeat myself. I’m sure everyone else is as bored with this question as I am. :lol:
I’m sorry if you don’t like, or believe, that people share info at the track. There’s really nothing more I can say to that.
So help me by clarifying your logic. Horses bled long before Lasix was proven to lessen the frequency and severity of bleeding episodes, yet you are okay to ban it and have horses suffer the negative consequences of a bleeding episode, which may include DEATH, to provide a certain level of genetic virtue? You make the guy who sent out the horse with the sesamoid fracture look like a saint (and he wasn’t right to do that either.)
Not saying it hasn’t ever happened but I have never seen nor heard of a horse being put on the vet’s list following a pre-race vet exam or jog. They get put on the vet’s list if they pull up bad or get scratched in the post parade etc but not during the pre-race.
My problem with the “Lasix weakens the gene pool” argument is that plenty of horses with successful parents who did not race on Lasix still bleed.
If there was a place in the world where EIPH did not exist, I’d be all ears. That’s not the case. Places like Europe still report incidents of EIPH in nearly all racehorses.
I do worry about the prevalence of administration for lower-level horses-- those running on 2-4 week intervals. Those are the horses who need it most, but I don’t feel like the effects of frequent administration are as benign as many make them to be. This is purely anecdotal opinion that I’m sure will be disputed. My Lasix stance is always fluid because I recognize both the benefits and impacts.
Again, you don’t have an appreciation for the knowledge base that’s already there. The great objection from NY trainers when continuing education was first mentioned as a requirement regarded 1-who was going to provide the training, and 2-what would the subject matter consist of? What are you going to teach John Kimmel? He’s already a board certified veterinarian. What are you going to teach trainers such as Rick Schosberg (Ivy League grad,) Gary Contessa, Linda Rice, or others like them? They’ve spent their entire adult lives in this business and have probably forgotten more about horses in general, and racehorses in particular, than you’ll ever know in your life. People like Charlie Baker and Jeremiah Englehart didn’t arrive at their prominence by accident. They work hard at their craft and business every day. They’re not in the minority in the training profession. Another analogy, you’re not going to send a engine builder who specializes in high performance race car engines to a seminar on how to change the oil in the family sedan.
That’s been my experience also.
How many trainers have the same credentials as the people you reference? I would venture to say that the same is true of lawyers and doctors, some of whom are true stars, who either have to present at continuing education or sit for it. Accountants also have to get CE to keep up with the changes in their field.
Horse trainers aren’t unique. If a person is so damn good that s/he can’t learn anything from CE, let them get their credits as presenters. Presenters have to prepare using the newest information.
Maybe it would be a good thing if people had to have continuing education before they could present themselves as experts when posting on COTH.
If there was a national governing ‘body’ for racing and they changed their rules as often as the IRS does, then yeah, bring on the education. :lol:
While you’re at it, how about requiring continuing education for NASCAR drivers and teams so someone teaches them the new rules and changes in the aero package and how to drive the changed car… ??
On The Farm and Laurierace… out of curiosity, when the horse is a vet scratch because they lost their marbles in the gate and got cast, does the horse also go on the vet list or is the horse given a more thorough exam after they get back to the barn or what happens? (On the non-vet side, I’ve gotten the impression that the starter keeps track of these horses and may require more gate work training before their next race start).
Yes, in general when I see the horse loose it in the gate and get case such that the assistant starters have to get the horse out, I really, anymore, dislike seeing the horse re-loaded and run. Even if the horse does finish the race (which they usually do), they don’t run as well as they might have without the song and dance before the race started.
My experience at Finger Lakes was that one of the examining vets would come by the barn and give a slip with the notice and their general reasoning–didn’t like the way the horse walked back to the barn after unsaddling, looked choppy pulling up, etc. The state vet is not there for diagnostics, nor should they be.
Blood Buffer is NOT sodium bicarbonate on race day. Tubing sodium bicarbonate into the stomach of a horse is nothing like squirting a few ounces of not sodium bicarbonate into the horse’s mouth.
The horse may be placed on the vets list, and in some places that may have been changed to must, and the horse is also placed on the starters list to get more gate schooling before it is allowed to start again. Yes you are correct that the starter keeps a list of horses and their peculiarities, and the gate crew has a quick meeting prior to the first race each race day to review which horses they anticipate having problems with. Sometimes a horse will have a specific asst starter assigned to it as that person may have worked successfully with the horse in the morning. And starters from different jurisdictions willingly share information with each other when horses race out of town.
Trainers have a very wide range of credentials. Some are college grads and have advanced degrees, some stopped at high school. Some are foreign born and educated and may not have the equivalency of a US high school education. Mandatory CE for all trainers would be a challenge. I think MJC has some online courses that trainers can take, and maybe I’ll google it later.
@Texarkana - to have more facilities like Fair Hill, we need more du Ponts to donate land. It is very hard to be a successful trainer in Europe because trainers have to pay for stabling, and it’s a difficult barrier to entry for many aspiring trainers.
Fair Hill is every trainer’s dream come true but unfortunately not an option for the majority of us. It is prohibitively expensive for most of us and not an option space wise in many places.
I trained at a very small training center for a couple of years and absolutely ruined my baby. He got fit but wasn’t exposed to the sights and sounds of the track except when he shipped in once per week for a work and go. He got to the point where he started washing out whenever he saw the trailer. I eventually moved him to the track but the damage on his pea brain was done. He would literally, no exaggeration work faster than they would run the races but got so nervous on race day that he trailed the field even at bottom claimers. A big training center like Fair Hill would have prevented that most likely, but anything much quieter than that would have had the same effect.
Do track vets, private and public, have to speak fluent Spanish–that is, well enough to be able to explain to track workers what is going on with a horse and how to cope with it? If not, do they do their work with translators at hand?
Reason I ask is that in a hearing transcript, one trainer understood very little English and, even with a translator, didn’t understand what he was being asked.
I’m not trying to discredit anyone experience or turn this into a training center debate.
But I do feel like clarifying that I’m not trying to be pollyanna about this. I’m not saying, “oh, we should move all the ponies to training centers tomorrow.” It would fail horribly, especially with what is currently available. You guys highlight some of the exact problems. Those certainly aren’t the only problems. Exclusively private training centers would be a disaster in my opinion; there would be no way to regulate safety for all parties involved.
Yet I still believe if the entire industry committed to shifting operations from backside to state/governing-body sponsored training centers, we could make it work successfully and in the benefit of the horse.
The cost of achieving such a shift would be astronomical, so it will likely never happen. The United States also has geographic challenges that smaller countries do not have. Yet we’ve been shipping horses despite our geographic challenges for years, so I don’t think geography alone makes it prohibitive.
I’m not an expert on international racing, so forgive me if I botch a detail or two. But–
Nearly all (all?) Japanese racehorses are housed in one of two training centers sponsored by JRA.
Hong Kong has recently invested in massive training facilities instead of backside housing.
Europe’s system has already been mentioned.
Places like Australia and Dubai have developed their racetracks with a more modern approach than our encroached-upon urban backsides. Not to mention both places are more likely to have yards similar to what you find in Europe.
In my time in Tennessee, I became affiliated with Kentucky Downs and was surprised that the ship-in meetings ran so smoothly. I anticipated a lot more challenges.
I acknowledge it would add to cost. I don’t necessarily think that is a bad thing. While I hate the idea of reducing accessibility of racing by making it cost prohibitive, I believe the bulk of racing’s welfare problems originate on the “poorer” side of the sport. That is not a criticism of the people involved with that side of racing, so please don’t take it that way (I’d be criticizing myself). I think economic forces are inevitably going to phase out “cheap” racing in most states, unless something drastically changes in terms of public interest/support or methodology.
This is just my silly belief from my own personal experience. And clearly not a popular belief. :lol:
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