Page 18 - February 2007 The Game

18 The Game, February 2007 Canada’s Thoroughbred Racing Newspaper
Back to School
Horses and Cocaine
by evenSteven
By trade, in addition to being a writer and exercise rider, I’m also a high school English teacher, albeit a retired one. But after three years of fighting it out in the muddy trenches of the public school system, I decided it was time for a change. Several months later I found myself a job exercising thoroughbreds, a far less treacherous animal than the contemporary teenager.
Halfway through my first season as an exercise rider, I began to notice a number of parallels between my old life and the new. In some respects, exercising racehorses isn’t much different from teaching high school; as occupations go they have more in common than I ever suspected. An education instructor once told me: "Teaching is 90% theatre–you don’t ever let them see you sweat." My instructor was talking about teenagers, but he could have equally been describing the unique relationship of rider to horse.
Like every good classroom teacher, a rider’s success depends upon her ability to gain the confidence of her pupil. Much like pubescent adolescents, horses are flighty and insecure creatures who possess an instinctual need to run with the herd. A good teacher is calm but firm, insistent but consistent, always fair and never punitive. Like high school students, horses rarely respond favourably to unforeseen circumstances. Escorting a young horse to the starting gate for the first time could be the racetrack equivalent to the surprise spelling quiz, both of which can lead to explosive and unpredictable results.
Before long I noticed certain personality types seemed to manifest themselves regularly in both human and equine students. Found in every classroom, the "keener" is one of those students who can make or break a teacher’s day. On days where every other student is completely unengaged, the keener can represent your sole salvation. Often the keener’s hand will already be aloft and waving frantically before you’ve finished asking the question–in some cases before the question even occurs to you. The keener is also that student who regularly finishes a week-long assignment in ten minutes and spends the rest of the class pestering you for extra work.
The equine equivalent to the classroom keener could be represented by the so-called ‘tough-horse,’ who threatens to pull your arms from your sockets with every stride, no matter the weather or footing. The tough horse could care less whether the lines are wet and slippery or that the cold won’t let the blood circulate through your fingers. The only goal of the tough horse is to increase its speed with every step, unless you are skillful or lucky enough to convince him otherwise. It’s the rider’s job to teach the tough horse a more relaxed way of going, hopefully avoiding the lameness or injury that can result from training too
hard for too long.
Then there’s the cheat. In a high school, the cheat is that
student who’s always looking for an easy way out. As a teacher, you always have to be warning the cheat to keep their eyes on their own work. About the worst thing that can happen is you make them sit at a desk in the corner where there’s no one close enough to spy on.
A horse who’s always looking for an easy way is an accident waiting to happen. Nothing is more dangerous than a horse who decides to shoot the gap after one lap instead of going around the second time. It’s a particularly dreadful feeling to be looking between a horse’s pricked ears as he ignores your every command and steams toward the pavement at thirty miles an hour.
One of the most frustrating students for every teacher to deal with is the underachiever. For a teacher there’s nothing harder than watching a perfectly capable student fail due to a lack of interest or effort. A similar phenomenon on the backstretch is also known as the ‘morning-glory." Every trainer has known the pain of a horse with all the ability in the world, the horse that trains like a stakes winner in the morning and runs like the cheapest of claimers come late afternoon. Desire is perhaps the one thing you can’t teach any student, horse or human.
And of course, every classroom has its ‘bad boy.’ However, ask any teacher and they’ll tell you a ‘bad girl’ is far worse than a ‘bad boy’ any day. Adolescent females with attitude are some of the most savage creatures I’ve encountered–as a teacher you don’t ever want to cross them. Last year the ‘baddest’ horse I galloped was also an adolescent female, a four year old dapple- grey mare. Pretty as a picture, at any opportunity Vi would cheerfully stove in your knees with a well-placed kick or remove an ear with a quick snap of her teeth. Vi’s personality was best captured by her handler one morning as he led us up the shedrow: "This mare is like that nasty girl at the prom, the one if you went up and asked her to dance she wouldn’t even bother to say no–she’d just kick you right where it counts.”
Fortunately, for this retired teacher and practising exercise rider, the frustrations pale next to the rewards. Every born teacher is a learner first and foremost. For me, the greatest gift I’ve received from the track continues to be the knowledge I gain every time I show up for work. Not a day goes by where I don’t feel as if I’ve learned something new about horses, discovered something about myself, or gained some new insight about a way of life that continues to grow on me. In a few short weeks I will once again be getting paid to ride some of the most amazing animals in the planet. Hopefully, more than one will turn out to be this teacher’s pet.
It sounds like the plot from a twisted Dick Francis novel – horses testing positive for cocaine, but it’s almost certainly a case of overly sensitive testing procedures as opposed to thoroughbred horses huddling in a den of iniquity over a mirror festooned with lines of high-grade coke.
At a recent convention of the American Association of Equine P r a c t i t i o n e r s ( A A E P ) , D r. R o b e r t a Dwyer, D.V.M., M.S. of the University of Kentucky’s Maxwell H. Gluck Equine Research Center got quite the rise from her audience when she opened a presentation by instructing them to take out a dollar bill and rub it between their hands. After most of the bemused attendees followed Dwyer’s instructions, she made a shocking announcement.
“Cocaine is on 80% of your hands right now,” she told the startled audience. This was part of Dwyer’s speech, presented on behalf of her fellow Gluck researchers Drs. Fernanda Camargo and Thomas Tobin, on the presence of a metabolite of cocaine that has been appearing with some regularity in the urine of horses that have been tested after
races.
“In horses, a cocaine dosage of one
milligram per horse yields less than a 100 nanograms per milliliter urinary concentration,” they reported. “One milligram produces no pharmacological effects such as performance or anesthetic effect.”
However, some horses have tested for higher levels of cocaine. When cocaine is introduced directly into horse urine, it breaks down into benzoylecgonine (BZE) which is recognized as an environmental contaminant.
“When ELISA (Enzyme Linked ImmunoSorbent Assay) tests for cocaine first became available and were introduced in California in 1989, a considerable number of horses were called positive with very low levels of BZE ,” said Dwyer. “Many of these horses had reputable and very respected trainers and it caused quiet a bit of stir for obvious reasons.”
Apparently trace amounts of cocaine had entered the horses’ systems as the animals received food or contact from human hands which had been
contaminated from touching a bill that had been in direct contact with cocaine.
“Exposure of a horse to amounts of cocaine found on dollar bills usu- ally triggers a BZE identification,” reported Dwyer.
Continued Next Page - See Cocaine
Lester Piggott Released from Hospital
Lester Piggott left West Suffolk Hospital in England on December 29, 2006 after spending the holidays in the coronary care unit due to a suspected heart problem. The 71-year old former jockey and nine-time Epsom Derby winner returned to his home in Newmarket after test results came back fine. He went to hospital on Christmas Eve as a precaution after announcing he wasn’t “feeling great” while visiting his daughter and son-in-law at their Somerville Lodge Stables.
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