Quote:
Originally Posted by Cannon Shell
Horses get hurt because they are big, strong animals who are fed high test diets and honed to stay on edge. They have skinny legs and big bodies and most of the time those legs arent exactly perfectly conformed. They may have club or flat feet, be back or over at the knee, may be cow or sickle hocked. When thier foot strikes the ground the concussion isnt sent exactly up the leg through the foot in a straight line but correspondnt to the physical makeup of the feet and legs. This leads to certain area's getting more stress. A horse who is back at the knee is much more likely to sustain a knee chip than one who isnt. A horse who has flat feet is much more likely to get sore feet than one who doesn't. Horses with long pasterns are much more likely to run down/have suspensory issues than one who isn't. The surfaces that we train on in the best of times are hardly uniform from day to day, and from hour to hour, depending on the weather or even the amount of traffic on the track.
That doesnt even take into consideration internal issues like stomach issues, colic, tying up, etc.
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No doubt that conformation is an important component of racehorse injury. But isn't even the most ideally conformed racehorse susceptible to injury if overworked/overraced?
Does treating minor issues with legal therapeutics, specifically for racing purposes(versus for training or recovery), enable potential overload, and potentially cause some minor injuries to become "major" ones? If that scenario is commonplace, would a ban of therapeutics (to threshold levels) from, say, 7-days out (after most horses have had their final breeze for an upcoming start) be a logical approach to controlling medication use?