Kentucky's ongoing attempt to end racing in state proceeds..

[Rupert Pupkin]

Originally Posted by Cannon Shell

But how do you propose that you treat bleeding?

So essentially what you are saying is that getting rid of lasix will make otherwise inattenative trainers and incompetent vets smarter?

An example of treating the issue as opposed to the symptm is working on a horses back end when weakness or injury there might be causing overloading on its front end leading to lameness there. Trying to tie bleeding to treating a horse for lameness if the human connections didnt know in the first place that the reason they were bleeding was lameness is an exercise in futility.

I just got off the phone with one of my trainers. He says that there is almost always an underlying reason as to why a horse is bleeding. He said if you dig deep enough, you will almost always find that something is bothering the horse that is stressing him and causing him to bleed. This trainer doesn't care either way as to whether they ban lasix. He said that as long as they allow it, he will use it. He thinks there is no doubt that it is a performance enhancing drug. He says that if you follow sheet numbers, most horses move way up on lasix.

This trainer tells me that in his 20 years in the business, he can think of only one horse that he couldn't stop from bleeding. This particular horse was the only horse that he's ever had that needed lasix for his workouts. Some trainers give lasix to a lot of their horses for workouts.

This trainer went on to say that if you have a horse that runs 5 times in a row without bleeding, and then in his 6th race he bleeds (let's say he bleeds a 3 on a 1-5 scale), then you better go over that horse with a fine-tooth comb because there is almost certainly something going on with the horse.