This 12 months, horse racing made countrywide news for the horrific and mysterious deaths of a minimum of 23 horses in 3 months at Santa Anita Park in California. What nearly nobody noticed turned into that final year. Kentucky had a similar hassle: Horse fatalities at kingdom tracks almost doubled in 2018.
At the February Kentucky Horse Racing Commission meeting, equine clinical director Dr Mary Scollay mentioned the hassle: Fatalities went from 20 in 2017 to 36 in 2018, an eighty percent increase. The fee for fatalities rose as well, from 1.33, with 1,000 starts off-evolved, to 2.39, she stated. According to Racing Commission records, Kentucky hasn’t stated fatality fees like that in the thirteen years that the country has tracked them.
“It’s unparalleled,” she stated.
In truth, the problem in Kentucky may be a ways worse: Unlike Santa Anita’s numbers, Kentucky’s do now not consist of horse fatalities all through or due to training because the Kentucky racing fee simplest counts racing fatalities. Even so, the exchange turned dramatic: The deaths were throughout all Kentucky tracks, as have been the will increase, according to Scollay.
She has no clear solution for why there had been extra horse deaths; however, she noted one shift: The horses that died were younger. Data on horse fatalities in Kentucky and across the U.S.A. for years has shown that the riskiest age for a racehorse is 3 to 4 years old. But closing year’s Kentucky deaths have been much more likely to be 2—and three-year-vintage horses, Scollay said in an interview.
“It made me wonder if something had modified within the horse populace,” Scollay said. “Because I knew we hadn’t changed our pre-race vet tests or protocols,” designed to seize horses that shouldn’t be racing before they go to the starting gate.
Somehow, those horses had been getting via.
A ticking time bomb
Scollay, like many others in horse racing, wonders if an enormously new class of medicine will be masking vulnerability in bones (and the deaths in Kentucky and California are nearly all musculoskeletal) that is contributing to the wave of deaths. Bisphosphonates are osteoporosis medicines authorized approximately five years ago for horses four or older to deal with a navicular bone disease. The paintings are now not through constructing new bone but by killing off the cells, called osteoclasts, that clear away bone with microdamage. In humans with critical problems, including osteoporosis, this helps as it prevents the hollowing of bones. But vets can legally prescribe it for bone troubles in more youthful horses, including soreness.
Concerns about the usage of drugs in racing have been constructed for years.
Ed Martin, president and CEO of the Association of Racing Commissioners International, stated that his business enterprise, which lobbies for regulatory change, known for the law of breeding and income more significant than 12 months in the past, expressly with worries about bisphosphonates.” “And it was simplest until pretty currently that people started to move on that,” Martin stated. “We’re very concerned approximately whether or not they’re safe to deliver to young horses … We’re worried that the technology that shows while it is given to young mammals can cause stress fractures. We don’t have equine-particular research … however, other studies show its connection to pressure fractures and the hyperlink to catastrophic harm.”
Last April, vets presented concerns to the ARCI annual assembly about the good-sized label use of these tablets in racehorses and younger horses. Dr Sue Stover of the University of California-Davis Veterinary University stated that bisphosphonatesVeterinary University bullet” for myriad bone troubleseentead, that might have created what has been referred to as a ticking time bomb in a few racehorses. The capsules are suspected of building bones that appear sound on X-rays but aren’t capable of normal healing.
Renowned equine orthopedic doctor Dr. Larry Bramlage of Rood & Riddle stated that when the medication, bought under the name Children and Osphos, first became available, he was concerned they might create the capacity for catastrophic breakdowns. Instead, what he commenced to peer changed into horses taking months longer to heal from routine accidents. “I have no doubt this is the case,” Bramlage said a remaining week.
