Page 8 - 28 September 2012

CHANGES
Corrective surgeries and conformation.
Certain conformations are associated with certain heritable traits. Speed is highly associated with the offset knee, the toe-in.
by Stacy Pigott
On the Thoroughbred website The Paulick Report, I recently read a fascinating inter- view with Dr. Larry Bramlage (DVM, MS,
Diplomate ACVS), a well-known equine orthope- dic surgeon at Rood & Riddle Equine Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky. The interview focused on the impact of corrective surgeries on foals and yearlings.
According to Dr. Bramlage, corrective surgeries first became popular in the mid-1980s. Young horses with angular limb deformities of the ankles or knees (crooked legs) can undergo surgery to straighten and correct the affected joints, thereby improving their conformation and function.
There can be no doubt that correcting crooked- legged foals, whether it’s done with surgery or cor- rective shoeing or both, has tangible benefits. If the individual is destined for the sale ring, he is likely to bring more money if his legs are straight and correct, rather than crooked. That’s good news for the seller, who stands to make more money, and good news for the buyer, who takes a sounder horse home. In today’s day and age of increased transparency on all fronts,
you might be concerned that you won’t know if you’re buying a horse that has had surgery or not. Fortunately, digital radiographs—now available in repositories at most of the major sales—will show traces of any previ- ous corrective surgery that horse has had.
As that horse matures and reaches the race-
track, the benefits continue. Research indicates that straight-legged horses are sounder horses. Certain conformational flaws create specific types of inju- ries—chip fractures, suspensory injuries, broken sesa- moids— so by fixing those flaws early on, you create an individual with fewer problems down the road. I don’t think anyone would argue that sending sounder horses to the racetrack is a good thing.
But as with any man-made intervention into nature’s grand design, the question of ethics arises. One of the comments on The Paulick Report went so far as to call corrective surgeries “performance enhancing” and say they should be regulated and viewed in the same light as performance-enhancing drugs.
When asked if there are any long-term negative effects to the surgery, Bramlage responded, “Not for the individual that you do it on. You might argue that the breed has been altered. You can no longer look
at a mare and know exactly what she looked like as a foal or what her dip out of the gene pool might look like. But we know the stallions who produce stallions
that are prone to conformational problems, and truthfully we don’t care. We’ll breed to anything that produces a fast horse.”
One of the things I hear over and over again is how today’s racing American Quarter Horse is not
as sound as it used to be. Our modern-day runners just don’t hold up as well to the rigors of racing as the horses of days gone by. If that is true, the question becomes, have we created our own problems?
Say your best mare produces a filly, but that filly has crooked legs. You decide to do surgery because you plan on sending her to the yearling sale. The surgery goes well, and she generates a lot of interest at the sale. You make money. The person who buys her intends to race her, and does so successfully. He makes money. The filly is then sold as a broodmare and bred to the best stallions by a breeder who has no clue the filly was born with crooked legs. The genes she carries for that conformation flaw are unknow- ingly passed on to the next generation.
Bramlage doesn’t believe that surgical manipula- tion has altered the Thoroughbred breed, but he
does believe breeders have. The same could be said
for Quarter Horses. By breeding for speed, we are selecting for certain conformation traits that may not be ideal. In fact, Bramlage believes the racing Quarter Horse has influenced Thoroughbred conformation.
“Certain conformations are associated with cer- tain heritable traits. Speed is highly associated with the offset knee, the toe-in.
“Now, the old-time Thoroughbreds, the ones I knew when I was in college 40 years ago,” Bramlage says, “they were a different type. They were taller, more angular, and tended to be a little knock-kneed. But those horses raced more like they race in Europe, where no horse went out as fast as you could go. Everybody stayed in somewhat of a pack, and then they sprinted home the last quarter. That’s the way racing was conducted until there was an alteration and change—the racing Quarter horse influence came in when certain trainers really emphasized speed early in a race, and almost everyone has adopted some version of that.”
What do you think? Are we breeding for fast, but unsound horses, and relying on corrective surgeries to bridge the gap? Have corrective surgeries contributed to conformation changes in our breed, and even if they have, do the benefits outweigh the consequences? Send your thoughts to stacy@speedhorse.com.
8 SPEEDHORSE, September 28, 2012
UNDER WRAPS