Dr. Reg Pascoe (on the left) and Queensland Racing Deputy Chairman Tony Hanmer are photographed at Palmaday Stud at Beaudesert at the recent governing body sponsored day out for potential new racehorse owners. Dr. Reg Pascoe is a respected veterinary authority on racehorses around the world.

World-renowned veterinarian Dr. Reg. Pascoe from Oakey Veterinary Clinic was undoubtedly one of the most interesting speakers at the recent Queensland Racing educational day for prospective new owners.

Reg went over what can be done from a veterinary viewpoint “to help protect a buyer’s interests prior to a yearling sale”. Reg advised that “about eight years ago there was a tremendous upheaval in America, because of the number of horses that were being sold with things that were more or less developmental diseases of the bone - that ultimately reduced their potential as racehorses. As a result of that, an urgency then came from within the breeding industry to protect the demands of the people who were paying a lot of money for yearlings, so there was introduction of a scheme of x-raying horses joints. So basically the knees, the fetlocks and the feet of the front and back legs, plus the stifle on the back leg are radiographed and usually four views of each are taken. The prime reason for this is that it is actually possible with radiology to actually see legions in these joints and these legions have been proven in the past to impede a horse’s performance. But of course once you start embarking upon mass radiography, you start to get a lot of grey areas developing that you are not sure whether they are going to actually interfere with a horse’s performance or not. So consequently there have been a few growing pains with the taking of x-rays and there have been a few disputes over what can be regarded as a developmental fault in the horse and what in fact may be an artefact. So the thing that has been introduced in the last two to three years has been digital radiography, which means that you can actually take a picture of the horses leg using a conventional x-ray machine, but with a special plate that transfers the image directly into a computer and you can actually enhance the image in the computer so you see it very well, then that can be transferred out of the computer onto a disc and instead of having a very thick pile of x-rays going to the sales agents, a lot of people can now send them on a disc and they can be viewed as very good x-rays. So that’s met a bit of a demand. Now what does that all mean when it is all boiled down? Well some legions we know of - particularly in the hocks and the stifles - if you see them, you can be fairly happy that they are going to cause trouble. So if they are there – and they are visible – you have an impediment to the sale.

“Now the thing that sometimes happens that clouds the issue and makes it less than satisfactory, is that occasionally you’ll get the legions in the shoulder joint and the elbow joint and they are not routinely radiographed, the reason being that to get good radiographs of a horse’s shoulder, you’ve got to give them a local anaesthetic, because you’ve got to take the x-ray with the horse lying down and with the plate under them and the horse has got to remain still for a period of time. So whilst these x-rays are not done routinely at yearling sales, we occasionally find when a horse goes lame and we know it is sound everywhere else, that it can only be up in the shoulder joint, hip joint, or the elbow.

“The next thing that yearlings need to have done is that normally sometime prior to the sale they are examined with an endoscope to check out their larynx, which is part of the upper part of their wind system in the respiratory tract and the larynx is that part of the horses throat that opens when he’s breathing in and shuts when he swallows - to prevent food and water from going down the windpipe, which is disastrous. Now the nerve system to this larynx is a bit crazy, because a horse has got a long neck and the longer the horse’s neck – and the longer the horse’s body is – the further the nerve has to travel from the base of the brain and it goes right down around the back of the heart and back up into the larynx, so it has got all that length of nerve for injury to occur. Now in thoroughbreds, it is an inherited defect, so that if you mate a stallion who is a roarer with a mare who is a roarer, you will produce a roarer, it is just as simple as that. It is something that in veterinary terms is graded on a one-to-five scale. (Scale rating ) One is where the two sides of the larynx don’t work functionally together and that progressively gets worse and it is usually the left hand side one that is affected, but occasionally it can be the right one, and very, very, occasionally it can be both, in which case it is a pure disaster, as a horse has no chance of ever racing by conventional means. The Americans have recently agreed to allow horses to run with a tube in place (to overcome the problem), but only on certain tracks and those horses can now perform, because they have clear airways. Treatment of this problem in a young developing yearling to two-year-old horse is difficult, because the cartilage in the larynx is very soft, so if you go sticking things in it, to pull it around, they’ll often tear through, so your surgery may be fine the day you’ve done it, or even the next day, but maybe in about six weeks time, things will start to fall apart on you and everyone jumps up and down. We learnt that early and personally we don’t recommend doing (larynx) surgery on any horse under two-year-old.

“So if you are going to buy a yearling, I suggest that one of the things you should do is check the horse out. Don’t get into a huddle with your buddies and have a few Fourex’s and enjoy yourself. If you are there to enter into a purchase of a young horse I would suggest that you want to be very interested in what is going on. You want to see that horse and see it being lead out. That’s not a real good test however, because if the horse is a popular horse, he or she may be being led out maybe 20, 30, 40, or 50 times a day and they get sick of it and so you’ve got to remember that if you are looking at one of these horses, they are not necessarily going to be behaving normally, they’ll be getting sour and therefore they can give you completely the wrong impression. Let me give you a warning. Don’t be a Smarty Pants and dive in and touch any of these horses at a sale. It is dangerous to touch a horse you don’t know, you can get seriously hurt and if the horse gets hurt (from your actions) you might finish up on the end of a lawsuit, because someone said you created a problem. If you want to see something demonstrated, ask the owner, ask the stud manager, ask the strapper holding the horse to lift the horse’s foot up or whatever, but I would suggest you don’t put your hand on the horse.

“So if you do all those (aforesaid) things – and really after 50 years I don’t know that anyone should be confident about what they are looking for – you have covered many bases. But remember, if you are in a syndicate buying a horse, make sure all the syndicate is there because after the hammer falls, you are going to have a hard job wriggling out of your agreed purchase. If you aren’t confident in your own ability, try to get a reputable trainer to look at the horse for you and try to get as much advice as possible”.