Typically people supplement with ESe to help with muscle soreness and a muscle sore horse won’t present at his best. If someone believed that the injectable version was better than the oral version, I can see the connection.
Standard coth disclaimer - doesn’t make it ethical or actually effective, just an observation on human nature.
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I didn’t think this was a decision made solely by the vet. I was thinking more about the management members of the team.
I also think if these things were part of his normal treatment plan, the horse’s people would not be so vociferous about it, because if there is a lawsuit, there is no doubt his previous vet records would be part of that.
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Based on the owners posts she was unaware of the other meds. It is still unclear if those meds were all given at once in multiple or one giant syringe or over a period of time. The FB poster implies that the owner is lying about the horse being sound and not knowing about medications. Or implying that the home vet was at least aware and in communication w the team vet.
Is it possible someone besides the owner was calling the shots about previous injections? I am well aware that in some barns the vet only deals w the trainer and not the owner. All speculation of course.
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But wasn’t this was the first time the horse competed in the multi day format that is WC? I can see that the program could have been modified for that due to the multiple jogs that aren’t typical in a week to week style FEI competition… I wonder if there were consultations between vets, again entirely typical, and they decided to do another pre jog treatment program to ensure a good outcome at the second jog and the ONE person there who should have been notified wasn’t?
I don’t know what happened, but the whole idea of a treating vet arbitrarily changing a program just does not quite sound right. I mean it sounds good when you want to make a villain, but somehow I suspect the truth is somewhere in between and far sadder than just having a good old fashioned villain.
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Maybe in the COTH article?
Here’s a few key paragraphs:
“About an hour and a half after the last of the awards ceremony, about two hours after the class, I get a call from [Chromatic’s longtime groom Pepe Rodriguez],” Branscomb, Half Moon Bay, California, said. “He was worried and upset that they were asking him to bring the horse to the vet station. We had been very clear earlier in the week nothing be done to him without [permission from] me personally or my veterinarian, who was not in Riyadh but available by phone. He was concerned because I hadn’t told him the horse was getting a shot.”
Owners must sign a horse participation agreement with USEF when their horse participates in an international competition representing the U.S. That agreement effectively requires owners to loan their horse to the USEF and that, “[f]or purposes of horse welfare, by signing this Agreement the horse owner(s) give their full permission to the USEF and its agents to administer medication to their horse(s) in the interest of the horse(s) welfare and well-being during the loan period.”
Branscomb said she was not consulted before her horse received the injection, which she was told was 20 cc of Selevit. She was upset to learn in the horse’s post-mortem report that he also had Legend, Adequan, Traumeel and arnica in his system, which were drugs she was not aware he had been administered. All are typically used to address joint pain, and none are prohibited substances under Fédération Equestre Internationale rules.
As soon as Branscomb received Rodriguez’s phone call, she headed to the barn, she said. She arrived just after Chromatic had received the injection and been walked from the veterinary station to the crossties, where Rodriguez started wrapping him. As she fed him carrots there, Chromatic suddenly screamed and collapsed, then began seizing, she said. FEI and USEF veterinarians attended to him immediately, but efforts to revive the gelding were unsuccessful.
…
Branscomb, who received the final necropsy report Monday, June 10, was upset to see the list of medications present in Chromatic’s blood, and said she is angry that Ulibarri did not disclose the full slate of medications Chromatic was administered on the evening of April 18, even after repeated questioning. While she initially believed him to be contrite, she now feels she was deliberately misled.
She also noted that the post-mortem report, completed by the pathology department at King Faisal University in Saudi Arabia, contained factual errors (for example, it states that the horse competed on April 18 and 19, while the actual dates were April 17 and 18), inconsistencies in the timeline, and typos.
USEF is wrong to be emphasizing the possibility that Chromatic’s death was caused by exercise-associated fatal pulmonary hemorrhage, she said, when it was at least an hour and a half between the end of competition and the horse’s death and the horse wasn’t showing signs of distress in the interim. She thinks it’s much more likely that the injection administered minutes before the horse’s collapse led to his death.
In the aftermath of Chromatic’s death, and before receiving the final reports on it, Branscomb worked with senior officials at the USEF to revamp the Horse Participation Agreement. In the new draft, called the United States Equestrian Federation Inc. Horse Participation Consent Agreement, owners don’t loan their horses to the USEF.
The new document also addresses another of Branscomb’s concerns: Who is in charge of medicating a horse in non-emergency situations? As it stands today, she said, the decision to administer the Selevit and the other medications lay completely with the USEF veterinarian. She compared the situation to flying an airplane, saying that there’s always a co-pilot in case of a mistake, and pointed out in this situation there was no co-pilot to weigh in on whether the horse should have received non-emergency medication.
According to the new draft, the athlete—who is considered the “person responsible” by the FEI—must sign off on all non-emergency medications.
Branscomb is now considering legal action against the USEF.
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As I said, I thought more the team management personnel, rather than the vet alone. But two people weren’t informed. The owner and the groom. The owner also made these statements after consultation, I am assuming, with her home vet.
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Highly unlikely, I’d venture to say impossible. This owner is incredibly involved as she bred the horse and makes decisions daily on care and meds.
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Maybe it’s not a matter of wanting a villain … but more a matter of wanting to shift liability?
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But then what’s the point of USEF going the whole exercise-associated fatal pulmonary hemorrhage route? If the scandal is that the owner totally knew and approved this cocktail (as is being suggested by KMHSF and elsewhere), then why not agree that said cocktail was the most likely cause of death? And then demonstrate how the owner did indeed know what was going on?
USEF’s desire to pin the death on something other than the shot suggests (to me) that the owner did not know the full extent of what was in the injection(s), or never agreed to the injection(s).
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This, also - what’s the whole point of them making the owner sign an agreement effectively giving them carte blanche to treat the horse as they see fit? Wouldn’t it make sense that the agreement exists just so they can give the horse whatever they want without consulting owner/regular DVM?
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Legally speaking they should limit any statements regarding the cause of death to what the necropsy report states. I don’t know why it didn’t also list anaphylactic reaction, I do believe the other condition, which was labeled as “severe” did exist and whoever was doing that necropsy for the FEI believed that to be the the most likely attributable cause of death based on the evidence at hand. Otherwise you’re talking a major conspiracy here and you know people just don’t do conspiracies because humans don’t do secrets particularly well.
As for the care custody and control agreement, that is not unique to this situation. That’s pretty much standard across the board for world championship events. Instead of assuming the worst case scenario, let’s assume they don’t have a care custody and control agreement and your horse is colicking. The vet will not treat it because you cannot be reached (you are not even in the same country) and there is no legal authority for them to treat the horse, especially given it would eliminate them from competition. Other less noble reasons to have such an agreement would be to control substances administered to the horse by people who might be less concerned with a positive result or at the very least to have a concerted defense if a substance did trigger a positive.
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Yeah, I’m sure it was more than one person (I’m assuming the regular team vet was there as well but this vet may have been administering meds due to country licensing restrictions), but again, I don’t think they up and changed an entire program without the regular vet, especially if he was in regular contact with them.
I’ll be really honest, I’m not going to rule out that the horse may have had a program as they ramped up for WC (and those nerve destroying jogs) that the owner did not know about…
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Without my permission is the part that makes me outraged.
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It’s incredibly disturbing to me the way many equine athletes are treated like science experiments, given all kinds of supplements, herbal concoctions, and injections–much of which has NO evidence based support for it’s use. Not only do most of those supplements, herbs and injections not any proven benefit, we also do not have enough evidence to know what their potential is for causing harm. It’s completely unethical.
I generally am very reluctant to place blame on vets, they have a very difficult job. It’s really hard when they are treating sick or lame horses and veterinary medicine does not have the same amount of research as human medicine does for vets to draw on when making clinical decisions. But this was a perfectly healthy animal that did not need “treatment” to begin with. And the substances administered neither offered a clear benefit nor had adequate safety data. Witchcraft would have been a safer alternative for this animal. I also think that it is one thing to try new therapies with discussion and consent from the owner–it’s another thing entirely to be practicing non-evidence based veterinary medicine without consent. I don’t care what the loan situation is–when you are responsible for another person’s animal, decisions need to be made carefully and with a basis in evidence.
Despite being a h/j rider, I work primarily with racehorses, and the explanation regarding EIPH appears to be BS to me. I think when they crafted that explanation they were counting on the unfamiliarity of the h/j world with EIPH (because it’s extremely unusual to see in h/j horses) and were hoping people wouldn’t ask questions. It would make everyone feel better if the horse’s death were related to some weird physical issue, and it certainly would protect many important parties from blame. But unfortunately this sounds exactly like a reaction to the injected substances. I’ve been in the horse business for…well…many decades. I’ve seen many cases of EIPH, none like this. I’ve also seen horses retired from racing due to severe episodes of EIPH and go on to have careers in eventing, showing and foxhunting and NEVER have another episode. I’ve also seen horses have severe reactions to and die from injections, and that’s exactly what this sounds like.
I am not a veterinarian, so I am open to reconsidering my opinions should a trustworthy veterinarian come forward and be able to explain the details of this highly unusual case.
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Am I correct that per the agreement the owner signed the “team” can basically do whatever it wants to the horses in its care without notifying or consulting owners or anyone else for that matter? Because that’s how it appears to read to me…
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I wouldn’t get too carried away with the idea they were medicating for the jog. FEI jumper jogs are not very strict and horses that are questionable are usually permitted to rejog back at the barn. Jumping 1.6 without touching the milled rail on a flat cup is what they are medicating for.
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I do think a major component of the outrage here is that the owner did not approve the medication and was not even consulted. And there was not an emergency-life-or-death situation. There is no reason she couldn’t have been called before the horse was given any medication.
There’s a separate question about whether it’s appropriate for a performance horse to be getting this medication under these circumstances… but setting that aside I am disgusted that when your horse is ridden for the team, you essentially lose all control over the horse and don’t even have the right to be consulted before the horse is treated.
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The owner signed a release that they could do that without notifying or consulting anyone . I don’t like that not one bit
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FEI rules permit you to represent once. If you choose to do it right then and there, and get spun, you are done. You might be able to represent later (i.e., back at the barn), but that is entirely at the ground jury’s discretion. It might not be too out of the norm at regular events, but iffy for them to grant that at selection events (based on an experience this winter where a bunch of us got a reeducation in this area). I would say it is far less likely to happen at the actual event. And yeah, I know that ground juries are aware that the horses that are jog have a big boy job, that’s fairly common across all FEI jogs, not just those that jump the big sticks. But if you do have a horse that has a history in the jog, I promise you that ground jury will know it. (Also, side perk of a sound horse in the jog is a sound horse in competition, or so one hopes)
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Because that’s never happened before!
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