Letter That Bill Casner, a Very Prominent Owner and Breeder and a Very Good Horseman Sent to His Fellow TOBA Board Members. It is Powerful, Sad and True! To my fellow TOBA board members, The link below is to the overview of HBOs Real Sports broadcast on horseracing. After watching the program, I felt the the Paulick Report gave and accurate overview of the program. paulickreport/news/ray-s-paddock/real-sports-segment-a-disturbing-look-at-racings-drug-culture/ The reality of the broadcast is that all of it is true. We, as industry, have created this with our plethora of legal medications with little regulation and oversight. How can a trainer be allowed to medicate everything in his barn with Thyro-L, a more powerful endocrine hormone than anabolics and one that is the master regulator of metabolism. Thyro-L is not an illegal medication, yet when supplemented on a daily basis over months will cause the thyroid gland to atrophy with the eventual crash of the horse. It is not administered with any type of diagnostics and its sole purpose is to make young horses more precocious and elevate metabolism. Multiple joint injections are rampant and a standard procedure( changing the oil) and they are legal with no limits with how often a horse can receive them or for what condition. Bute, a drug not even used in human medicine anymore because of its association with leukemia, is documented to cause stomach ulceration with as little as 2 treatments and interferes with clotting --and we wonder why we have such a problem with bleeders. Omeprazole aka Gastro Guard contributes to osteoporosis. And, of course, the holy grail of them all--Lasix--which has a list of side effects longer than your arm including calcium flushing, bone loss, increase chance of fracture, etc.etc. There are volumes of science in the human field documenting the detrimental effects of these meds but proponents (especially vets) will always say hasnt been documented in the equine model--reason being few valid studies have been done with the horse. Drug after drug are stacked on top of each other with magnified side effects, including the derogatory effect on bone and sometimes death---And we wonder why our horses have soundness issues. We can continue to be in our perpetual state of denial and hope that it goes away but the writing is blatantly on the wall. The HBO segment will air over and over and each time more viewers will see it and become repulsed by horse racing. PETA will be emboldened by HBOs usage of the video and will continue its attack on us. An industry friend told me he watched the program with his 11 year old daughter and she was horrified. We loose our relevance one person at a time. We either recognize that the world has changed and create meaningful oversight and punishment or we will continue the slide into oblivion. We are delusional if we think that we can fix this broken model with 38 autonomous dysfunctional state jurisdictions. The only way that we can hope for meaningful reform is for Federal legislation that gives central governance for drug oversight and enforcement. Worried about the Feds getting into our business?---How can they screw it up any worse? Very Sad.... Bill Casner •© 2014 Microsoft
Posted on: Wed, 28 May 2014 17:49:42 +0000
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