Welfare and Safety of the Racehorse Summit focuses on unity between horsemen and vets
LEXINGTON, Ky. – It’s no secret that tensions between regulatory veterinarians and trainers in U.S. Thoroughbred racing have been mounting for several years now.
These days, raceday scratches of high-profile horses routinely lead trainers to openly question the competencies of some regulatory vets – in some cases, by name. In the most overt example of the bad blood, the connections of top older horse White Abarrio earlier this year filed a lawsuit over the scratch of the horse just prior to last year’s Breeders’ Cup Dirt Mile.
So it’s not surprising that the organizers of this year’s Welfare and Safety of the Racehorse Summit, which opened on Monday at Keeneland, staged a presentation allowing regulatory veterinarians and their supervisors to explain the data and policies that generally lead to raceday scratches.
“I hope you appreciate that these people want to work with you to help you keep these horses safe,” said the moderator of the panel, Dr. Mary Scollay, a former regulatory veterinarian who held several top-level leadership positions before retiring last year.
“None of these people wake up and say, ‘I’m going to scratch a horse today.’ ”
According to the panelists, the exponential increase in the availability of data generated by the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority, the advancement of technologies like wearable devices and video analysis, and the long-delayed acceptance of the scientific evidence for the primary cause of catastrophic injuries – it’s not the “bad step,” it’s repetitive stress – have combined to allow regulatory veterinarians to take a far more analytical and intense approach to examinations.
That analytical approach often runs head-long into a backstretch culture that rightfully takes pride in its intimate, hands-on approach to horsemanship and the hard hours that trainers and their staffs put in to prepare horses for races. In some cases, the two sides can talk past each other, even when the top priority for both is the health of the horse.
“It can be challenging, and sometimes it can be confrontational, given the emotion involved in trying to get a horse ready for raceday,” said Dr. Nick Smith, who has taken his share of criticism as the chief racing veterinarian in Kentucky.
The relationship between both sides has become so tense in Kentucky – where raceday scratches of horses have nearly doubled since 2022, when measured as a percentage of entrants – that Kentucky regulators and horsemen have both participated in discussions to improve the process while protecting the outcomes.
In Kentucky, as in other racing jurisdictions, fatalities have declined markedly over the past decade. That has coincided with a massive investment by racing in identifying the risk factors for horses, and those risk factors are now being used by regulatoryvets to hone in on horses with particular histories or suspect physical behaviors.
Dr. Will Farmer, the equine medical director at Churchill Downs, said during the Monday presentation that his team has been trying to alert trainers and attending veterinarians to any potential problems with their horses well before raceday by relying on results of veterinary records submitted to HISA’s database, video analyses of banks of cameras recording training and racing performances at the track, and data from wearable devices that measure gait and stride characteristics.
Farmer said that since the track began requiring attending veterinarians to perform soundness exams prior to workouts, the track’s relationship with the vets has benefited immensely, because both the vets and the regulators are gaining a much better understanding of a horse’s baseline physical characteristics, making abnormalities much easier to identify and manage.
“It’s all about pulling them into that conversation,” Farmer said. “Attending vets have expressed to me over and over again how valuable that has become.”
Dr. Stuart Brown, the vice president of equine safety at Keeneland, said that communication among equine health professionals has expanded significantly over the past five years. That’s a key component of the track’s ability to assess the soundness of many horses running at Keeneland, Brown said, because many of the runners at the track’s two three-week meets are from out-of-state. That means the state’s regulatory veterinarians don’t have a detailed history of interactions with them.
Keeneland has also attempted to develop a “comprehensive approach” to identifying any problems with horses by pulling in staff from around the entire racing and training operation for assistance in identifying problematic incidents, Brown said.
“We’ve gone about trying to build a team of people to be around those moments, so that when you see something, you say something,” Brown said. That includes clockers, exercise riders, and gate attendants, among others, Brown said: “Anyone in a position to make an observation.”
Barbara Borden, a steward in the state, said that the growing robustness of the state’s system for evaluating soundness has probably had a negative effect on field sizes, but she was in no way critical of that dynamic.
“There’s probably some entries that haven’t been made because everyone knows this process is in place,” Borden said.
Smith, the Kentucky regulatory veterinarian, said that he has tried to focus on communicating to horsemen that the state has a standard for diagnosing soundness, and if the horse is displaying any behaviors that violate the standard, his job is to scratch the horse.
“We’re trying to let our horsemen understand that if it doesn’t meet the standard, then don’t enter on race day,” Smith said.
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