Ok, I’ve been following this discussion with great interest and have two things that stick out in my mind about the issue.
First, I’m an eventer, but I’ve got friends that do hunters and a couple at a fairly high level, so I’ve paid attention to how they do things, i.e. the differences in barn management and training issues are things that I find very interesting.
The first thing that makes me really sad about the drugging issue – I’ve watched one person who has a horse that really doesn’t need to be tranqued or calmed, work out the dosages that would be needed to give her horse, mostly because she seemed concerned that since most horses showed on it, it would be an advantage that she wouldn’t have if she didn’t do it too.
I think that is a real danger here, even more so than the horses that would be too “high” if they didn’t get a cocktail – is this why you guys are seeing the horses in the ring becoming more and more “deadheaded?” If you take the edge off of an already pretty calm horse, eventually it seems as if they’ll be sleepwalking.
The second thing that jumps out of this discussion at me has been alluded to by a couple of posters. The ponykid’s parents that don’t know enough to know if the trainer is doping the pony, or lungeing it to death, will learn fast, if the pony goes down, or trips with the child and the kid ends up with a broken neck.
No equine liability law will protect someone from being sued if they knowingly put a client on a horse that has either been drugged, or worked to exhaustion. If I were a trainer that engaged in these practices, it would scare me to death. Especially in a state that doesn’t have the protections for your homestead that Florida does. At least here, you wouldn’t lose your house, though you might lose most everything else.
If I were an owner and the trainer was putting other people on my horse that had had a “calming draft” before going in the ring, I’d be quaking in my boots too. The damages awarded to maintain someone who has suffered irrepable damage are astonishing.
It is a risk I darn sure wouldn’t take.
That said, I personally am not in favor of “zero tolerance.” I never travel without bute, banamine, and dex in my medicine box, and I have a good chart that makes it easy to determine what I can and can’t give if my horse is showing. We are careful to fill out med forms if we need to, and I’m even someone who’s used Ace to be able to handwalk a crazy TB and have used Prolixin on both of my horses while they were recovering from injury, though only at home – I’ve never used any tranq away from home.
Would I ride or show them on psychotropic meds? Nope. I value my own neck too much for that. And, I agree with GotSpots, I’m too darn proud to do it. If my formerly nutbar horse has a nice, calm dressage test, its going to be becuase I’ve worked hard to get him there, not because I gave him a shot. I tell you, that high score we got on “submission” two weeks ago is one of my proudest moments since I bought the darn horse. 
And, I’ve used bute only within the legal limits and only when necessary, (i.e. once when he had a terrible case of hives at a show and something had to be done to bring down the swelling in his neck.)
However, it still makes me sad to see someone wanting to quiet a perfectly lovely quiet horse when he would be ok without it, and the liability situation scares me to death and it makes me wonder how that risk could possibly be worth it. Must be a case of “that won’t happen to me” syndrome.
Libby
Proud member of the Hoof Fetish Clique
[This message was edited by Bensmom on Nov. 06, 2003 at 10:47 AM.]
