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In answer to separate points:
Yes, I am exercised about welfare. I am worried about horses AFTER they leave the industry and a horse should not be doped irrespective of whether he’s running on a silken carpet or a load of cobblestones. I don’t think this having these views is incompatible with feeling there’s too much racing on the all weather and especially on the all weather during the summer. It is absolutely true that all weather can guarantee a consistent surface when weather extremes happens, as they seem to more with global warming etc etc etc, but if you were to follow that argumental to its extreme conclusion, in the interests of horse soundess all flat racing should hypothetically migrate to all weather – and I am sure no-one would want to see that happen.
Regarding bookmakers, I meant the sums the bookies pay direct to each racecourse for the rights to show their races in the betting shops. Racecourses get up to £4,000 per race but it drops right down to £2,000 or even less if too many races on a particular card have eight or less runners. This is a fact, not guesswork.Yes, I understand why all weathers have to be on stand-by during the summer, but that’s what they should be; on standby. Its not as if, say, if Worcester is abandoned, everyone can box up and charge over to Southwell to see if they can get in the 5.35.
"Replacement" fixtures in any code are always arranged at short notice, so there is no need to have so many all weathers racing routinely between May and August. Sometimes even during the winter they have struggled to "fill" some all weather races, and as I understand it, bookmakers’ contributions to single races reduce by more than 50% in fact if there are less than 8 runners in a race. So it has to be in some sectors’ interests to are down the number of fixtures and try to keep runner per race up, pro rata. That of course would reduce some peoples’ chance of winning a race, which is of course highly undesirable from the owners and trainers’ perspective, but there would be some very small satisfaction in seeing the bookies pay their fair whack per race!Why didn’t the BHA take advantage of the closure of Great Leighs to reduce the fixture list? You don’t need all this all weather racing in the summer?
You are absolutely right, high jumper, I didn’t know that, but my point about Sheikh Mohammed banning himself yet still riding in this event still stands, I think! Hypocrisy all round!
You can not blame courses for charging expensive rates to get in; if punters are willing to pay. Fact is the Gordon Enclosure (tatts) will be choka block next week. I would not pay that sought of money; thankfully don’t need to as am a member there. But if people did not pay, they’d be forced to reduce prices. Market forces.
Gingertipster is right, Goodwood membership is amazing value. If you take advantage of some of their reciprocal days at other racecourses as well, you only need go racing 15 times a year – not even to all of goodwood’s own meetings – and you are "in profit" relative to the cost of day tickets for premier enclosures. You also gets discounts and free entry to other great days out there like the motor sport.
I would have thought that public admission fees at big meetings are directly paying towards the prize money in a way they didn’t 5 years ago when some sponsorship could still be come by. As the bottom has now dropped right out of sponsorship, it can’t be the case that owners contributions and the Levy are covering the cost of all the black type prize funds we expect to find at race meetings we pay top dollar to attend. Check out the ROA website for a fascinating table which shows which racecourses are putting their hands into their own pockets (aka spectators) to enhance price money. Newmarket generated £3.5m of its own prize fund in 2008. Only someone very naive would think that came mostly from sponsorship in this day and age. The table can vary month to month but contains surprises. You often see people taking a pop at Northern Racing’s prize money, but some some of their courses have perfomedpro rata
better in the past year than courses in the Jockey Club portfolio though the reverse is also true (No, I don’t work for Northern!)
When Towcester re-opened a few years back after a small spell of closure, didn’t they have free entry and discover that spending on food and drink increased so much from gratfied spectators that they more or less got their "money back"?Hello all
I have caught up with this thread, having been absent for a few weeks, not because I have lost heart, but because I accompanied my sister to the USA for a MS treatment not available here. I would quite like to have been on holiday but I’ve spent most of the time sitting in clinics, trying to keep her sprirts up. Apologies for so shamefully abandoning your forum during this time.
In answer to the one or two slights made against me, I make no apology at all for mostly posting comments on welfare or doping related issues (see my Endurance posting today, at least I got home in time for that). One person’s allegation that someone must have a moitive for asking quite rational questions about animal welfare does not dignify a reply.
I am baffled at the post that suggests my reproduction of a Weatherbys investigation into horses’ whereabouts is insufficient "evidence." This was Weatherbys, not made-up hysterics from "Animal Aid" or some other such off-beat lobby, for goodness sake!
Mosts posts on this forum (and indeed any other kind of chat room) on any topic are opinion, not fact.
I don’t dispute at all that horses in training have a very good standard of care – someone else that took that line off at a tangent, not me. What happens to them AFTER they leave the industry interests me.
Having been dismayed at the initial level of debate arising from my post its cheered me up a bit to come back and see that most forum members DO care.Where’s the welfare benefit of breeding from a known bleeder? There is enough indiscriminate breeding going on with horses that are fundamentally unsound and likely to pass these weaknesses on to the next generation, thereby exacerbating the re-homing issue.
Thanks are due to the members who have troubled to read this posting and make a reply. Though I hope that just nine replies is not a true barometer of industry concern on this important subject.You can lift things as high as you like but he’ll always look like an Australian cane toad and his pious personality and mean spirited journalism complement the physical package very well. I never really knew why he was so prominently used by C4. Now he is even more frightening to small children than before.
By the way, isn’t it interesting that its only the personable BBC racing presenters who go on to greater things…. No doubt Clare Balding is having to pace herself as she recovers, thankfully, from her illness but you’d have to agree Rishi Persad has also done a great job at Wimbledon the past two weeks.I quite agree with Cheekster – that those that can least afford it are often the ones that do their best for the horses’ future – but if everyone was as diligent as Happy about re-homing their horses, those Weatherbys figures would be grossly exaggerated, wouldn’t they?
Hydration and cooling off are two quite separate but equally critical issues and you need copious water for both and ideally ice for the latter as well. In simple terms, the horse continues to "cook" inside after major exertion and it takes much longer to cool it down down, pro-rata, than a human athlete. That’s why you chuck water over it for as much as it takes and for the reason even yukky river water would have been better than nothing. I haven’t been been behind the scenes at something like the Grand National but I have groomed at Badminton etc and ice is in regular use after the cross-country, even in fairly mild weather conditions. Surely all the work done at the Animal Health Trust in this area (for the horses that went to the Olympics in Atlanta and Hong Kong) has been passed to the racecourses?
Such a shame its being left to the horsey publications to keep the story going, as the racing papers don’t seem to want to report it even though there several well known "cross-over" persons involved.
It was later revealed that although Sheikh Mohammed was said to have "put up his hands" about the dope tests on Tahhan which it was claimed had ben done privately, his horse HAD been positively tested in January and was already in the FEI system anyway (eg on the case status stable) and was freely available for anyone to see including his own agents even though his spokesman has blamed the FEI for not telling him direct, sooner. So did Sheikh Mo only "come clean" when he knew this was going to come out anyway? This different take on the sequence of events was well reported in Hose and Hound magazine but I have not seen it in the Racing Post.Horse and Hound story read:
Sheikh Mohammed demands answers from FEI over dope caseH&H news desk
14 May, 2009
Sheikh Mohammed has demanded to know why the International Equestrian Federation (FEI) — an organisation headed by his wife, Princess Haya — delayed notifying him of a positive dope test on his horse, Tahhan.
On 6 April, Sheikh Mohammed suspended himself from competition and began an internal investigation after his own team discovered traces of two potentially performance-enhancing drugs in Tahhan. He competed the horse in CEI2* 120km endurance races in Bahrain and Dubai in January and February this year.
But has emerged that Tahhan was also tested by the FEI during the rides. The horse’s positive results were passed to the FEI legal team on 19 March — nearly three weeks before Sheikh Mohammed’s well-publicised statement that it was he who had volunteered the results.
A spokesman for the Sheikh said: "HH Sheikh Mohammed notified the FEI on 3 April 2009.
"The FEI notification to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) federation was on 6 April, 2009. HH Sheikh Mohammed received no communication from the FEI or from any other party, prior to 6 April.
"As a result of this chronological issue being raised by the media, Sheikh Mohammed’s legal team has written to the FEI requesting clarification of why earlier notification was not made to the UAE federation, and the procedure surrounding the use of the FEI website for cases of this nature."
The progress of doping investigations are published in a "case-status stable" on its website, http://www.fei.org
An FEI spokesman said: "We introduced the table so the facts of all cases under investigation could be seen."
Tahhan is one of nine UAE endurance horses under investigation for positive dope tests — to read more, see today’s issue of Horse & Hound (14 May).
Ten horses tested positive to banned substances in endurance rides in the UAE since December. Although only one of them Tahhan was rdden by Sheikh Mohammed, Mubarak Bin Shafya trained two of them and five can be linked with the Maktoum family in terms of who owns them or trains them.
In FEI sports the Person Responsible is the rider, which works sensibly in eventing, dressage, show jumping etc. Because endurance riding is set up similar to horse racing, the trainer manages the horse day to day and the rider/jockey only arrives for the race and could claim he doesn’t really know what’s been given to the horse. For this reason there are often arguments by the defendants lawyers at the FEI hearings about who should be the Person Responsible though the FEI has stood firm that it must remain the rider though has brought in new regulations that would allow trainers and vets etc to be joined in the action.
The recent case of Castlebar Kadeen, trained by Bin Shafya, has just been decided upon (June). The horse tested positive to flunixin ( a fast-acting analgesic and anti inflammatory), ketoprofen ( an anti inflammatory) and naltrexone (usedin humans to manage alcohol and opiod dependence). The rider Dhahi Abdullah Khamis Al Dhahi got banned for 10 months as he is legally the person responsible, so Bin Shafya was not penalised! The FEI decision notice (which is worth reading see below) stated that Bin Shafya was asked for an explanation as to why these substances were in the horse but he could not give one.
In 2005 Sheikh Mohammed’s son Sheikh Majid was the rider of a horse Okara that tested positive to guanabenz (same substance as Sheikh Mohammed’s horse Tahhan) and they managed to move the blame to the horse’s trainer Ismail Mohammed, as Sheikh Majid was a minor. Ismail Mohammed was banned for 12 months but the Court of Arbitration for Sport reduced this to eight months.The FEI case status table can be found on this link:
http://www.fei.org/Athletes_AND_Horses/ … 202009.pdfThe link to recent decisions which include Castebar Kadeen can be found on this link:
http://www.fei.org/Athletes_AND_Horses/ … sions.aspxGuanabenz slow heart rate. This will be amotivation in endurance racing because you have to get the heart rate down before you can move on from the vet checks that happen about every 25km in an endurance race. in the early days of the sport this was achieved by good horse management and massage etc. In the desert its very easy to pop behind a sand dune about 2 km before a vet check and jab a horse. Bebabaloula, the ride of Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, tested positive to butorphanol, an opiod-related painkiller, and hydroxyl-xylazine, a sedative which can reduce heart-rate by 50 per cent.
Tahhan tested positive to guanabenz. Both Tahhan and Eo Fawati, the ride of the younger Sheikh Hamdan, tested positive to the anabolic steroid hydroxy-stanozolol. Three other horses, Lienka, Omani Iman and Skyros de Peyrols, who had other riders and are not owned or linked to the Maktoum family, tested positive to etorphine, an analgesic 1,000 times more potent than morphine. Etorphine was in Immobilon, that is not licensed for horses any more. A micro-dose can have a stimulant effect and vets used to have the antidote waiting as even a drop on your skin could kill you.
