The Racehorse: A Veterinary Manual PDF

PREFACE

The Thoroughbred racing industry is now more than ever a globalized affair. Transport and communication links that have made the world a smaller place for travel and business have had an equally profound effect on racing and breeding activities, as well as the veterinary advances that support them. While regional variations in disease and injury will always exist, clinicians in Europe, the Americas, Asia, Africa and Australasia largely face the same challenges in respect of maintaining the health and well-being of racehorses under their care.

The primary aim of this book is to provide a practical and objective source of veterinary information, pertinent to the Thoroughbred racehorse, that is accessible to both the racehorse and non-racehorse clinician. It is also hoped that others within the industry interested in veterinary matters will find it a useful reference work. While there are several excellent texts available on equine orthopaedics and sports medicine, information relating to racehorses is fragmented and sometimes contradictory. Many conditions are poorly serviced by the literature, and descriptions of even those common to other equine disciplines frequently fail to take account of practicalities of management peculiar to the racing industry. Racing practice is a very particular blend of population medicine and highly focused individual care and is a specialism in its own right.

I was very conscious throughout this project of the need to create a text based more on evidence than anecdote. The great challenge, of course, is that much of what we do as equine clinicians is derived empirically; indeed, there is no scientifically validated ‘best' way to manage respiratory disease or for that matter most orthopaedic injuries. On the other hand, one would be unwise in the pursuit of objectivity to discount the value of shared experience and by doing so exclude knowledge that has accumulated over generations in one of the hotbeds of equine veterinary endeavour. But rather than simply transcribe the received wisdoms of Newmarket racing practice, every effort has been made to build the text from a scientific base by reviewing not just the published equine literature but much relevant work from human sports medicine. The reader should also be reassured that as far as possible the text has been made relevant to all the major racing jurisdictions, not just the United Kingdom and Europe.

This work seeks to draw together those conditions that might reasonably be encountered in the day-to-day management of a racing yard and arms the practitioner with information necessary for clinical problem solving. Orthopaedic injury necessarily accounts for the major part of the book. Advice on rehabilitation periods and prognosis is undoubtedly of particular interest to the user and these have been defined as tightly as possible in order to be of practical benefit. As very little published information exists on likely return to racing following most injuries (in relation to uninjured cohorts), categories from excellent to poor have been used for prognosis. Where more specific figures exist these have been included in the relevant chapters. Also of enduring interest to clinicians and trainers are recommendations for withdrawal times of medications prior to racing. In this, however, it is not possible to provide guidelines, due to the shifting goalposts of testing procedures, regulatory advice and individual variability in pharmacokinetics. Here the reader is referred to drug detection times published by regulatory boards and current advice from local veterinary clinicians.

The chapters on non-orthopaedic conditions are also intended to be racehorse specific. This has influenced not just the choice of conditions included, but in many cases extends to describing key diseases as they might be presented to a front-line clinician. A practical approach to diagnosis and management as viewed from the stable door is the objective, rather than comprehensive coverage of medical and surgical procedures. Likewise, the scope of the chapter on infectious diseases is restricted to conditions of primary importance to the movement of horses (intra- and internationally) for which testing may be undertaken.

Inevitably in a book of this type there will be omissions both intentional and unintentional; however, an honest attempt has been made to compile a clinically relevant text for the racehorse and I hope that in these efforts I have done justice to the subject.