On-Track Pharmacies Restore Racing Integrity

On-Track Pharmacies; the potential to improve racing integrity

On-track pharmacies have the potential to restore racing integrity in America. 

The on-track pharmacy would be the only place drugs are allowed on the racetrack. The attending veterinarian examines a horse and prescribes a treatment. If medication is determined to be part of the therapy, the veterinarian submits the horse's name, the diagnosis, and requested medication to the racing regulatory body. The pharmacist and regulatory veterinarian evaluate the request and dispense the medication to be administered to the specific horse. Everything is recorded; drug, dosage, frequency of administration, expiration date, lot number, brand name, etc. 

Veterinarians would not be allowed to drive around the backside with truckloads of drugs, as this current practice has led to indiscriminate inappropriate treatments, that have led to breakdowns and doping problems. Rather than trainers dictating medication protocols, on-track pharmacies would restore the medication protocols to be decided by veterinarians rather than trainers. Currently, trainers in large part decide what drugs their horses receive.  With an on-track pharmacy policy in place, if a trainer has a notion that his or her horse needs a certain medication, a veterinarian would be required to examine and assess the horse, arrive at a specific diagnosis, and then request the medication from the pharmacy, where further vetting of the plan would occur from the regulatory veterinarians and pharmacists. Rather than being utilized as medication technicians as attending veterinarians currently are utilized, attending veterinarians would again become doctors practicing the science and art of veterinary medicine. Instead of being paid for drugs they administer, horse doctors would again be compensated for their medical evaluation of the racehorse patient.

The pharmacy is the only place medication could be stored or dispensed on the racetrack, other than with the emergency trauma and colic responders. Veterinarians will have to practice veterinary medicine as veterinary medicine should be practiced with racehorses. Pharmaceutical manipulation to enhance performance would be eliminated, while therapeutic treatments could be sustained. No drugs would be allowed to come into the track through any other venue. Every horse medicated is medicated via this process and no other, with the exception of emergency treatments. This is the model in Hong Kong where the breakdown rate is one of the lowest in the world. This policy effectively prevents doping, while providing all of the horses with the necessary therapeutic medications to train and race. Every treatment is transparent. The bettors, trainers, owners, and all others are made aware of every treatment for each and every horse. The result is racing with increased integrity, increased safety, increased public support, and increased handle.

The effectiveness of an on track pharmacy on a wide scale basis depends on the construct that all of the horses are stabled at the track, or stabled at the track for a period of time before they race. Horses that are stabled off the track would be able to avoid the pharmacy protocol, unless some sort of stabling island surrounding the track could be established. In Hong Kong, horses are required to be stabled at the track to race. Modifications to manage American racing could include that the pharmacy protocol, while best serving horses on a continuous basis, would be enforced after horses are entered into a race. This would also allow a gradual implementation of the on-track pharmacy. Protocols to include ship-ins could include pre-race testing for horses stabled off track, but as we have seen, testing as a reliable method to manage doping has vast limitations.

Horsemen and veterinarians will oppose this, of course, as it is inconvenient, restrictive, and allows total transparency. On track pharmacies have the potential, nonetheless, to manage doping and restrict the pharmaceutical manipulation of performance. It is pharmaceutical manipulation that has caused much the trouble the industry is experiencing. Injuries to both horses and jockeys are often due to doping and other unwholesome improper medication practices, which also devalue the horse while shortening their careers.  A problematic part of American racing has become the ability of veterinarians and trainers to pharmaceutically manipulate performance, a practice so entrenched that it has become part of the game. The sport was designed to test the natural ability of the horse, and the trainer’s ability to bring out that natural ability. Doping and pharmaceutical manipulation were never intended to be part of horseracing, but pharmaceutical manipulation has become an integral part of horseracing in America. The breakdown rate in America is manyfold higher than in Hong Kong, and the ease of pharmaceutical manipulation is a primary reason for this safety differential.

Development of an on-track pharmacy policy is the doping prevention policy that is in the best interest of the racehorses, the riders, the players, and the owners. It is this system that has the greatest potential to restore integrity to horseracing in America. The model is in place in Hong Kong, where it has been tremendously effective in supporting racing with integrity while sustaining ethical horseracing values, while experiencing excellent handle as a result.  

On track pharmacies represent the health and welfare of the horse. On-track pharmacies can make racing considerably safer and more ethical, restoring public trust in the sport.

Dr Gustafson is an equine veterinarian, veterinary behaviorist, and novelist. He helps refine horse and dog training methods to accommodate the inherent nature and behavior of horses and dogs. Applied veterinary behavior enhances optimum health, performance, soundness, contentment, and longevity in animal athletes. Natural approaches to development, training, nutrition, and conditioning sustain equine health and enhance performance. Behavioral and nutritional enrichment strategies enhance the lives of stabled horses. Training and husbandry from the horse's perspective result in content, cooperative horses. DrSid provides equine behavior consultations to help recreate the needs and preferences of horses in training and competition.

How Horses Heal

Restorative healing in Equus caballus.

Restoration strategies that recreate the horse's social grazing preferences facilitate and potentiate horse healing. Appropriate healing of many equine maladies is encouraged when the veterinarian provides appropriate initial treatment and subsequently carefully facilitates a scenario to provide the horse with abundant forage, friendship, and locomotion. 

Grazing pasture in an open setting with other horses, when appropriately orchestrated, has the potential to provide the most profound and often the most cost-effective healing of musculoskeletal infirmities and injuries. For conditions allowed to progress to lameness, time is required, often months. When musculoskeletal conditions are detected early, before lameness ensues, short term rest and restorative strategies encourage solid healing (days to weeks). Both long and short term healing are enhanced when the horse is content with the forage, friendship, and locomotion resources. Avoid unnecessary restrictions to locomotion whenever feasible.

The earlier inflammation is detected, the shorter the time period is required to heal. Healing in a social-grazing setting is a long-evolved trait of the horse. Horses acclimated to herd and pasture settings during their development respond best to restorative healing. 

Horsefolk need to take special care not to exceed the horse's adaptability regarding stabling and healing. 

Horses require a sense of comfort and security for physical and mental restoration (and maintenance). An adequate social grazing environment, or appropriate facsimile thereof, often provides the most comfort to the most horses. Horses provided with adequate socialization throughout their upbringing are most responsive to these strategies. For horses, comfort and security come from friendship, forage, and, most-critically, a near-constant casual locomotion. Young horses and newborns learn to be horses from the dam and herd, and foals are best served to develop with horses in an appropriate grazing environment, as well. Horses learn to socialize, communicate, graze, locomote, run at speed in close company, play, smell, balance, move, and compete from their mother along with the herd members.

Corral or stall rest is counterproductive to healing, as it deprives horses of all three healing essentials. Horses heal efficiently in a social grazing setting, not one of isolation and deprivation. To a horse, restoration, from the word rest, ideally implies grazing open country in a herd setting with abundant environmental resources; appropriate grasslands to graze and walk, salt, and appropriately placed clean water. The properly managed social grazing setting with the open view is the environment in which horses evolved to thrive and heal.

Healthy physical and mental development are best actualized in a social grazing environment. Neonates rely on their dam for critical early learning processes, including sensual development, locomotion, and early mobility.  The development of agility, coordination and athleticism in early life is critical to subsequent mental health and soundness. Abundant social contact, grooming, sleep, play, athletic development, and social bonding occurs during early herd life. Horses rely on constant contact and frequent interactions with other horses for healthy mental and physical development. 

Opportunities for the abundant expression of normal equine behavior and motion promotes healing. 

Unfortunately, healing opportunities of this sort are not available everywhere, especially in the more urban equestrian settings. Space and grazing limitations restrict healing opportunities. In these scenarios, the horse's preferences have to recreated with carefully designed and implemented ENRICHMENT strategies that provide some fashion of near constant forage ingestion that allow oral and physical and movement and motion. Stabling scenarios often restrict social expression and sensual contact. Horses are sensitive to these deprivations which results in stress, which complicates and delays healing. 

LOCOMOTION is essential for both horse health and healing. 

Husbandry, healing, and rehabilitation nearly always benefit from appropriately managed and free choice locomotion strategies that are constantly tailored to the horse's healing process. Locomotion is required not only for normal healing, but for normal digestion, respiration, hoof health, circulation, and all other physiologic functions of the horse. Stall rest is at the expense of many systems, especially the hoof and metabolic systems. Digestion and respiration are compromised by confinement and restriction of movement. Metabolic, digestive, circulatory, hoof health, musculoskeletal, and nervous, systems, as well as the all other systems and functions of the horse, are dependent upon adequate and appropriate locomotion for normal functioning and/or healing. 

For horses that are hospitalized, paddocked, stabled, and corralled; active implementation and re-creation of the social pasture setting is necessary to maintain health and promote healing. The absence of abundant forage, friends, and locomotion are detrimental to a stabled or hospitalized horse's health, if not welfare. Medical conditions are apt to deteriorate in the face of the deprivations created by stabling and hospitalization. 

Stalled horses heal poorly. Locomotion, social, and forage deprivations create problems for horses. In addition to appropriate medical treatment, veterinarians and stable managers must creatively provide horses with abundant socialization, forage, and locomotion to maintain health and facilitate healing. 

Horses also heal horsefolk, and those horsefolk that implement these healing strategies often experience a sense of healing themselves, it seems. The human/horse bond runs deep. Domestication of the horse is a co-evolving evolutionary process. The human perspective is being shaped by the horse's perspective these days. Appreciation of the science of equine behavior and equitation is a welcome change for the horse after centuries of considerable subjugation.

To healing horses,

DrSid

Dr Gustafson is an equine veterinarian, veterinary behaviorist, and novelist. Applied veterinary behavior enhances optimum health, performance, soundness, contentment, and longevity in animal athletes. Natural approaches to development, training, nutrition, and conditioning sustain equine health and enhance performance. Behavioral and nutritional enrichment strategies enhance the lives of stabled horses. Training and husbandry from the horse's perspective result in content, cooperative horses. 

Dr Gustafson's writing interview

Sid's interview with Brine Publishing.
Dr Gustafson is the only know novelist in America who also practices veterinary medicine.
http://brinebooks.com/3367/blog/writing/interview-sid-gustafson/

Today we have our interview with Sid Gustafson from the United States. He had contributed Whistle to Stanzas and Clauses for the Causes. Let us tell you a bit about this talented writer before proceeding to the interview questions.

Sid Gustafson is a novelist and veterinarian living in Big Sky, MT. Sid writes novels in Bozeman, practices veterinary medicine in Big Sky, and teaches equine behavior for the University of Guelph. He had the good fortune to be raised by horses under the Rocky Mountain Front with the Blackfeet Indians, to whom he returns time and again to find another story.

His second novel Horses They Rode was the 2007 High Plains Novel of the Year.

Horses They Rode is a contemporary novel about a Montana native son who hops a freight and returns to the mountain foothill ranch where he was raised. His journey connects the Blackfeet Indian Reservation near Glacier National Park with Playfair Racecourse in Spokane, Washington. The book tells the story of Wendel Ingraham’s younglife passage through the last vestiges of the American frontier. The novel is colored and contrasted by present day Blackfeet Indian life. White folk and Indians mix and merge along the last wilderness reaches of the Rocky Mountain Front amidst cattle ranches and grizzly bear habitat. The protagonist recapitulates his Montana past when he returns for asylum on the reservation hoping to discover resolution in his life after his wife of four years boots him out of their Spokane home where he is a thoroughbred racehorse trainer. Wendel is forced to leave the little daughter he truly loves behind. The novel poetically weaves his journey through women, children, horse races, and Indian spirituality on the wild rim of a distant American culture.

In Prisoners of Flight, Sid Gustafson’s veterinarian protagonist refers often to angels: “We haven’t heard from our angels in a long time. But they’re out there . . . waiting somewhere in the sky.”
Two ex-military pilots, Gustafson’s protagonist and his comrade, Henson, crash their plane into wilderness alongside Montana’s Flathead River. Former Vietnam POWs, they have wrestled with life’s trials ever since, holding to a single constant: a fierce longing for an idealized sky. Says Gustafson’s protagonist: “The flying rule is: When in doubt, do nothing. But I’m not flying anymore.” For indeed, Gustafson’s characters are themselves fallen forms of the angels they seek.
Gustafson manages both an economy of words and a compelling lyricism. There’s a rhythm here that makes for a read difficult to interrupt. And he’s not afraid to toss the rules. Single-word sentences. Pop phraseology. Recurring metaphors. The result is a harrowing adventure part magical realism (with a hint of psychedelia), part paean to the deep forest, part redemption chronicle, and part cryptogram.
Gustafson strands his characters with only a river shack for shelter. Soon, twin sisters—”two breathless earth cookies”—searching for their dog (named Hope—”lost Hope”) emerge from the forest cold and bewildered.
The protagonist recalls how he and Henson communicated cell-to-cell as POWs—through tapping out a simple alphabetic code. They repeatedly refer to this “old dance,” often lapsing into it. Acutely aware of their frailties and failures, they call often on God. And while longing to be back in the sky, they fool themselves like lost boys whistling in the dark that happiness can be found on the ground: “Our earthbound angels can’t stop smiling. And we thought they only lived in the constellations of our skyblown minds.”
The narrative dealing with Henson’s fate is both mythic and sad. (I’m not giving away much here, since the first two words of Gustafson’s novel are, “Henson’s dead.”) Finally, the protagonist’s escape and redemption are pulse-pounding.
There is much that is satisfying about Prisoners of Flight. Best is that it ends, as all good prayers do, with a single word, tapped out in code:
“Amen.”

Interview

First of all, can you tell us about your background as a writer?
My mother had me reading books of all sorts at a young age. She adored novelists, so I became one.

Has being a writer been your dream job?
Writing is my dream job, but I can only dream about money as income from my writing, so I practice veterinary medicine to pay the bills. As far as can be determined, I am the only veterinarian who is novelist in America.

What human rights or social activism issue(s) are you most passionate about and why?
I represent the health and welfare of animals all across America. In particular, I represent the health and welfare of racehorses in America and the wolves of Yellowstone Park, who are both unnecessarily subjected to untoward medication practices. I write for the New York Times regarding horse-racing.

Why do you write? What is your inspiration?
I write to relax, I write to know myself and my world.

Do you have any advice for any other writers or poets wanting to get into the industry?
Keep writing, and write some more. Read. Successful writers were first successful readers. To learn to write, read.

Which short story that you have written is it that you are most passionate about? Can you explain why?
Whistle, the story you are publishing. I found a unique voice, and a special language for the story, a state of mind that worked to tell the story.

Who would be your favorite writer?
Faulkner is my favorite for portraying the human condition in literary fashion.

Do human rights or social activism issues influence your writing? If so, how so?
Oh yes, I write to change the world, to make the world a better place for humans and animals.

Do you have a career outside of your writing?
Yes, I am veterinarian and equine behavior educator, and I work every day, and then write after all the work is done.

Do you have any other hobbies or interests that help to influence your stories?
Horsemanship, backcountry travel with horses and dogs.

What kind of genre do you primarily work in?
Literary fiction.

What is your most memorable moment as a writer?
When I received the phone call from the editor that she would like to publish my debut novel, Prisoners of Flight.

Are there any particular challenges that you face in your writing?
It is sometimes difficult to get the worlds in the right order.

Do you have any future projects that you wish to talk about?
I write poetry and prose, fiction and non-fiction. Much of my writing is activist poetry and prose. It is best to change the world with creativity rather than criticism or force, you know.

Thank you for sitting down with us today, Sid! It was a pleasure learning more about you. If anyone reader wishes to connect with this writer or learn more about him, then you can do so through here:

Website: http://www.sidgustafson.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sidgustafson

Twitter: https://twitter.com/sidgustafson

Google+: https://plus.google.com/+SidGustafson/posts

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/sidgustafson

Pinterest: http://www.pinterest.com/sidgustafson/great/

Amazon Author Page: http://www.amazon.com/Sid-Gustafson/e/B001K8I2DI

Dr Gustafson is an equine veterinarian, veterinary behaviorist, and novelist. He helps refine horse and dog training methods to accommodate the inherent nature and behavior of horses and dogs. Applied veterinary behavior enhances optimum health, performance, soundness, contentment, and longevity in animal athletes. Natural approaches to development, training, nutrition, and conditioning sustain equine health and enhance performance. Behavioral and nutritional enrichment strategies enhance the lives of stabled horses. Training and husbandry from the horse's perspective result in content, cooperative horses. DrSid provides equine behavior consultations to help recreate the needs and preferences of horses in training and competition.

Equine Behaviour Online education

Equine Behaviour

http://www.opened.uoguelph.ca/offerings/offering.aspx?hold=y&id=4523

Description

Enhance the welfare of horses in your care by learning the language of horses. Equine Behaviour encourages you to understand a horses behaviour through the eyes of the horse, adapting the horses environment and handling through investigating horse perception and learning. Examining equine behaviour research and practice are part of this course designed to improve the health and welfare of horses in your care.

There are optional activities and readings built into the course content which allow you to explore additional topics in equine behaviour. The additional topics are popular among the behaviour students and we would like you to know participating in optional activities increases the amount of time per week you would need to commit to the course.

This course is entirely online, so travel to the University of Guelph is NOT required.

NOTE: This course is an elective course in the Equine Science Certificate program and a core course in theDiploma in Equine Studies program. For details about these programs, please see our program website www.EquineStudiesOnline.ca

Designed For

racehorse trainers, veterinarians, horse owners, trainers, grooms, breeders, stable employees, veterinary technicians, industry representatives, coaches and individuals with an interest in horses.

Course Topics

• Introduction to Behaviour
• Perception
• Behaviour and the Brain
• Learning
• Social & Play, Communication
• Body Care
• Ingestive and Eliminative Behaviours
• Reproductive Behaviour
• Stereotypies
• Locomotion
• Training
• Handling and Transporting
• Welfare

Textbooks

Equine Behaviour, A Guide for Veterinarians and Equine Scientists (Confirmed)
Edition: 2ndAuthor(s): Paul McGreevyPublished by: Elsevier Ltd in 2013 ISBN: 978-0-7020-4337-6

Dr Gustafson is an equine veterinarian, veterinary behaviorist, and novelist. He helps refine horse and dog training methods to accommodate the inherent nature and behavior of horses and dogs. Applied veterinary behavior enhances optimum health, performance, soundness, contentment, and longevity in animal athletes. Natural approaches to development, training, nutrition, and conditioning sustain equine health and enhance performance. Behavioral and nutritional enrichment strategies enhance the lives of stabled horses. Training and husbandry from the horse's perspective result in content, cooperative horses. DrSid provides equine behavior consultations to help recreate the needs and preferences of horses in training and competition.