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Originally Posted by Riot
Because you need some way to track what injuries go to what animal on what track (horses change tracks), and repeated injuries to same horse.
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I must be confused as to the purpose of this national database. So basically, its just one big giant "vet's list"? I guess when its all said and done they can fire every racing association vet because this Scollay lady's got it whipped...
I still don't see why they need names. So when they see Crippled McFracture's name on the list more than once they'll know to ban him from being entered for a couple of weeks? That should be pretty effective on a large and long-term scale...
I figured the purpose of the database was to track
patterns of injuries as they relate to things like age, gender, shoe type, trainer, pedigree, distance, class level, track condition and racing surface, etc., not to target chronically lame, individual horses (which should already hopefully be monitored by the appropriate track vets).
The scary thing is that Dr. Scollay is on record as saying there is no point to comparing data between various racetracks (her example, Mnr vs Sar) because the horse populations are totally different.
Brilliant. So I guess we really don't need a
national database if we can't pool all the information. We just need seperate one's for each operating racetrack.
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Can't use lip tattoo, can't assign accession numbers to each horse, hence names. The point was to make it very easy for people to submit data.
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Why can't you use the lip tattoo? What is a lip tattoo for other than to identify individual horses? Maybe its too hard to flip the lip or something.
Assigning accession numbers seems like a viable option as well. Who cares if the same horse shows up twice? Its not like the database will ever be totally thorough and complete, and certainly you will never be able to account for every variable that contributes to a racehorse being injured on the track. So a little confounding data in such a large database shouldn't skew the overall results to any significant degree.