Page 89 - March 2016

“With the advent of medication, the number of annual starts per horse was reduced dramatically because of the dehydration effect of Lasix (a diuretic used medically to reduce excess fluid/edema in the body, makes horses urinate more).”
later. This is what the literature tells you. The next morning, we weighed him again and he had returned to his normal weight. I wanted to know if the dosage of Lasix we were giving our horses was the optimum therapeutic amount. It seemed to me that Lasix was being greatly overdosed in our horses,” Casner says.
“I called Dr. Ferraro, who was Charlie Whittingham’s vet (and who went on to be the head of the Equine Department at UC-Davis). I asked him who established the recommended dosage. He told me there was no clinical estab- lishment for proper dose; it was all done at the veterinarian’s discretion.”
The common practice, if horses bleed through 3cc of Lasix, is to give them 5cc. “If they bleed through 5cc, you give 10cc. What people don’t understand is that if you give a horse 10cc of Lasix, he is still only going to urinate off 25 pounds of fluid because that’s
all he has. It’s like squeezing a lemon. After a certain point, there is nothing left. The horse
is just really dehydrated. And the dehydration from the higher doses will continue longer after the race and be a lot harder on those horses,” says Casner.
“In racehorses we sometimes experience what we call heat stroke, but in reality it’s nothing more than the negative effects of dehydration and loss of the horse’s abil-
ity to cool itself. When you think about it, this is so counterproductive to dehydrate a horse just before subjecting him to a high level of athletic performance. It just doesn’t make sense. But, the use of Lasix has become so entrenched in the pre-race protocol for trainers. This current generation of trainers truly believes that horses cannot run without it—that they would all bleed buckets of blood without Lasix,” he says.
“We have reduced the bleeding in our own horses down to less than 5%, probably closer to 3%. It is rare now for us to have a horse bleed. We do this by managing them without bute and without Lasix and our win percentages have actually improved. We also try to manage the respiratory environment these horses live in,” Casner explains. He tries to keep the stall as clean and dust-free as possible.
In the horse business, people do things because this is the way they were taught and this is the way it’s always been done or because someone else is doing it. They don’t question traditional practices. “Most trainers truly believe that their horses cannot win a race or perform to their optimum if they don’t go through all their standard pre-race protocol with medication.” They think they are helping the horses, but are doing exactly the opposite.
Mother Nature, over millions of years, has it figured out. What doesn’t work, does not survive. “Horses have developed as incredible athletes compared to humans. We breed horses and train them and think we can make the system better, but we can’t.”
Casner and Eoin have run their horses for five years now without bute or Lasix. “Eoin hates bute now because he has seen the detrimental effects. About two years ago, he had a filly that was the favorite for a stakes race in California. The filly had been running very well without it. Then one morning he thought she might be a little stiff, so he gave her some bute before the race. She was the favorite and was in front at the quarter pole, and then all of a sudden she stopped. When checked after the race. She had bled. Eoin kicked himself for giving her bute and never used it again. The next time he ran that filly she won and didn’t bleed a drop,” says Casner.
“We’ve gone through this experiment for nearly six years and have found that if
you run horses without bute and Lasix, they do better and feel better. They are eating well the night after a race, and kicking and squealing the next morning. By contrast,
the horses you medicate are generally dull and a lot of them won’t clean up their feed that night. They don’t feel good and it takes several days for all that medication to get out of their system before they start to feel good again,” he says.
“Our horses recover quickly. When we started running them without medication, they’d be five or six pounds lighter the fol- lowing morning, compared to being 35 to 50 pounds lighter when they were on medication. The most a horse might lose now after a race is 10 pounds, and the morning after that he’s right back to where he was. It’s amazing how quickly horses are able to recover when you don’t medicate them,” he says.
“Barrel racers are now giving their horses bute and Lasix. It’s become standard procedure. Banamine, another NSAID, will do the same thing, and many barrel racers use both. These horses are more apt to bleed, and then they give them Lasix. If they bleed through that, they increase the dosage. They are hauling these horses to all the barrel racing events and it’s really hard on the horses.”
Equine athletes have a tremendous amount of heart and willingness to run. They can be a little bit stiff and still give a great performance. “When you back them into a roping box, load them into a starting gate, or get them ready for a barrel run, they forget that little bit of stiffness and are feeling no pain at all. Their natural endorphins from excitement and adrenalin over- power a little discomfort, and those horses are running big. I’m not talking about lame horses. If they are so lame that they need to have medi- cation, they shouldn’t be running,” says Casner.
‘Heat stroke’ in horses can be nothing more than the negative effects of dehydration and, therefore, the loss of the horse’s ability to cool himself. It is counterproductive to dehydrate a horse
prior to subjecting him to a high level of athletic performance
SPEEDHORSE, March 2016 87
EQUINE HEALTH