When will Australian Harness Racing Regulatory stop taking the easy options, drag themselves into the 21st Century, move the issue out of its long-time home in the too hard basket & finally work to establish a THRESHOLD for BUTE (Phenylbutazone, an NSAID, or non-steroidal anti-inflammatory) in conjunction with a QUANTITATIVE TESTING regime for same, instead of the current and invariably unfair Qualitative Testing approach?
Currently, post- racing or post- training , Trainers will quite reasonably administer the recommended dose of Bute to their horses as it is deemed necessary by them and/or their Vet and for a variety of reasons. Bute is of course being not only a Registered, widely used and widely accepted Equine Therapeutic but it is an extremely effective, inexpensive, invaluable Training aid and Animal Husbandry tool.
The crunch comes when the same well-meaning Trainer races the horse following week, it is tested and the Trainer subsequently gets jammed up on a Positive for BUTE and this despite said Test being carried out some 72-96-120 and even as far out as 144 hours or more post administration.
Such is the sensitivity and effectiveness of current Testing methods that they are able to quickly identify and highlight the presence of even the most miniscule of amounts of Bute’s active constituent (Phenylbutazone) and its metabolite (Oxyphenylbutazone). Stunningly, a Trainer can and still will be called to account for just such a Positive and this is despite the absolutely undeniable fact that, when it’s used as directed, between 12 to 18 hours post administration the initial dose will longer be providing pain relief to the horse in question as it is no longer present at pharmacologically active levels by then, let alone 72-96-120 -144 hours post administration. It is just plain insanity for anyone to suggest otherwise.
For those readers with inquiring minds you can very easily replicate this situation and test for yourself the validity of what I’ve said above.
Try a simple exercise the next time, for example, a Broodmare of yours gets herself a foot abscess. I’ve experienced this numerous times over the years. Give her the recommended 10mls of Bute Paste over the tongue (and for the sake of giving this a time line) let’s say you did it in the late afternoon, about 4pm. Stand by to watch a relief from discomfort start to wash over her inside of about 1/2 hour. Inside of an hour she’ll be walking infinitely better. It’s 5pm now so time to go and feed up and then go inside, have your dinner & head off to bed. You’ll wake up around 7am -8am or so the next day to find that same Broodmare is rapidly reverting to being sore & lame again if she has not already done so in the early hours before sunrise while you were snoozing. You see, after 12-18hrs that 10mls doesn’t do any more for her than a Panadol you took a week ago would do for you if you got a headache today.
Currently Australian Trainers labour away under a nothing short of Draconian it has been detected or it has not been detected regime insofar as Bute is concerned.
This is a policy that can & does see them fined and or suspended… no matter how minute the amount detected happens to be and so mindlessly and patently unfairly it is exclusive of the ABSOLUTELY CRUCIAL aspect, the acknowledgement that such minute levels are of course having ZERO pharmacological effect on the horse.
Another CRUCIAL fact that seems to escaped Regulatory is that Bute breaks down as a Clock ticks, regularly, obviously, traceably.
A further CRUCIAL fact that seems to have escaped Regulatory is that if they are running Qualitative Tests then they can also run Quantitative Tests. In a great many instances Testing Labs provide both sets of results. If asked to do so by the Stewards, a Quantitative Test, with its results being viewed in light of Bute’s so very easily tracked ‘break down rate’, duly produces a clear & concise picture of whether or not an administration / post administration time line that a Trainer called to account could attest to in his/her defence is in fact correct or otherwise and to short cut that process even further, a race day Threshold for Bute could provide a swift case to answer or no case to answer determination.
It appears to me to be so incredibly simple. Numerous other Racing Jurisdictions throughout the World, both Harness and Thoroughbred, operate under exactly those conditions. Why is it that Australian Trainers must find themselves operating in the Dark Ages and so continue to pay the price?…in my opinion, quite unjustly so is many, many instances.
Is it a case of general Regulatory apathy? Perhaps it’s something that lies beyond their scope of understanding and capabilities to institute so it has been filed in the ‘too hard basket’ along with the Relegation Rule?
Perhaps it is much more simple than that? Maybe there is very little if any ‘career advancing crusader value’ to be had by the upper echelons of Regulatory? Very few headlines could be grabbed by way of them making a genuine effort to sort out this nothing short of disgraceful long time wrong?
Unlike other more ‘glamorous’ media attention grabbing campaigns, one such instance being a few years ago with VIC TB Head Steward Terry Bailey’s ill-fated and ultimately rather embarrassing ITPP crusade (wasn’t that a laugh a minute? Claims that ITPP was in widespread use and that it contains the stand alone element Arsenic-hahahahahahaha) perhaps it’s just that Regulatory are unable to ‘make their bones’ by sorting out the Bute issue once and for all? Things that make you go hmmmmm.
What really gets to The Judge more than anything else is that Regulatory have very recently shown that if and when it suits them to do so they can move Heaven and Earth to quickly institute substance thresholds, the latest instance of course being for Cobalt, and we have long had a TC02 threshold. Again, they moved quickly to do that also as I recall. So the question MUST be asked…Why in the Hell in this day and age are we still operating back in the dark ages with Bute use and subsequent Testing? It is a blight on Harness Racing that Trainers are effectively forced to run the gauntlet for doing the right thing by their horses and let us not forget, by those increasingly rare commodities, Owners and the Betting Public. It is absurd. There must be a better way.
The Judge.
Approved By Dean Baring www.harnessbred.com
Driving The Future Of Harness Racing
