Q&A with equine specialists on racehorse safety

University of California-Davis equine specialists were among those who watched in shock, either on television or at the track, when Eight Belles pitched nearly head first into the dirt after coming in second in Saturday's Kentucky Derby. The filly, who had broken both ankles, was euthanized.Dr. Gregory Ferraro, director of the Cal-Davis' Center for Equine Health and a longtime racetrack practitioner, and Dr. Sue Stover, who heads Davis' veterinary orthopedic research lab and studies musculoskeletal injuries in race horses, spoke separately with The Sacramento Bee on Monday about racing injuries and efforts to prevent them.-- Question: As we continue to breed racehorses for speed, are we also making them more susceptible to injuries? -- Dr. Ferraro: That's a major point of discussion among the breeders and the industry itself. Are we sacrificing durability for speed? There are no statistics to back it up.-- Q: Are racehorses different than they used to be?-- Dr. Ferraro: They're more precocious. They tend to reach their peak earlier in life. They run faster, but they retire to stud earlier, sometimes after two or three years instead of four, five or six years. To people who know horses well, today's racehorses also look different. They tend to have heavier muscles behind and lighter bones in their lower leg.-- Q: What are some of the risks that racing poses for the animal?-- Dr. Ferraro: When you train, whether it's horses or a human athlete, your bone remodels to match the stress. Bone gets thicker. But to make new bone, you have to demineralize the old bone, taking calcium out. The demineralization lines are like the perforations on a sheet of postage stamps, vulnerable to separating until the new bone fully forms. That's a delicate balance in your training regime. For Eight Belles, I would think in her case it was probably fatigue. When you get tired, you don't have full muscle control. With 1,000 pounds going 40 mph, it doesn't take much of a misstep to cause a catastrophe.-- Q: Are the number of injuries to racehorses increasing or decreasing?-- Dr. Ferraro: In California, because of our synthetic surfaces, our injuries have been trending downward. Nationwide, the rate of injuries in the last 25 years has dropped significantly.-- Q: What about the kind of career-ending injuries that leave a horse unable to race again?-- Dr. Stover: I almost hate to answer this question. The trend depends on where and what you're looking at. We know it's roughly between one and two horses per 1,000 starts, and it's been that way for a while.-- Q: What steps are being taken to reduce injuries?-- Dr. Stover: People in the equine industry are aware of the problem of injuries and they've been doing a lot to understand what's going on. Through the California Horse Racing Board's postmortem program, we're recognizing that the majority of injuries, not all, actually develop over several months. That's tremendously good news because we have an opportunity to intervene. The California Horse Racing Board also mandated that all racing tracks in California change to a synthetic surface. While the data is preliminary, the number of horses that have died in California has dramatically decreased.-- Dr. Ferraro: In California we have a rule about the height of the toe grab, a traction device at the bottom of the "U" in a horseshoe. It's limited to 4 millimeters or less. Outside California, it can go up to double that.-- Q: What else can be done to make horse racing safer for the animals nationwide?-- Dr. Stover: Optimize racing surfaces and the interface between the horse's hoof and the surface, so that in all locations and weather conditions, there is a cushion for the horse that maintains traction without slipping. Manage exercise schedules to prevent injury while still conditioning the horse. And reassess whether we allow horses to train and race on analgesic medication. If we allow horses to train when painkillers might mask mild injuries, perhaps that's not a good thing.(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)