Latest News – The Horse

Mineshaft, the leading handicap horse in the country, was retired Friday due to what trainer Neil Howard said was a small chip in his right front ankle.

“This morning Dr. Foster Northrop, Mineshaft’s vet, his owner, Mr. William Farish, and I had a discussion and made the decision to retire Mineshaft due to a minor problem in his ankle that we have been managing,” said Howard. “A

The chairman of the Kentucky Racing Commission has advocated a Salix-only policy on race day in the state, and said he would schedule meetings around the state to get feedback. Currently, five medications are permitted on race day in Kentucky.

Frank Shoop, during the commission’s Oct. 2 meeting near Lexington, said he wants Kentucky to fall in line with recommendations by the national

College students who are pursuing a career in equine publishing are eligible to compete for American Horse Publications 2004 Student Award. If you will be a junior or senior at the start of the 2004-2005 undergraduate college year, with at least one semester before graduation, you have a chance to win a cash award of $500 plus an all-expense paid trip to AHP’s annual meeting and seminar. The

Hurricane Isabel hit the Virginia coast with fury on Sept. 18. At its peak over the Atlantic, Isabel was a Category 5 hurricane (winds greater than 155 mph), sending coastal horse owners scrambling for safe shelter for themselves and their animals. When the storm hit land, it had faded to a Category 2 hurricane (winds from 96-110 mph and storm surges of six to eight feet), then dropped to a

The Blood-Horse magazine reported that 1986 Kentucky Derby winner Ferdinand died sometime in 2002. He likely met his end in a slaughterhouse in Japan, where his career at stud was unsuccessful.

Ferdinand earned nearly $4 million, retiring as what was then the fifth-leading money winner of all time. He was retired to stud in 1989 at Claiborne Farm near Paris, Ky. After a brief,

The death of at least one Oklahoma horse has been definitively linked to Potomac horse fever (PHF), a disease rarely found in the state. Two of her stablemates likely died of the same illness. The horse manager at the farm with the confirmed case said 11 other horses in the area have died with similar clinical signs, but blood and tissue samples from those horses were not submitted for

Texas officials have detected the state’s first case of anthrax for 2003 in a white-tailed deer near Del Rio. “It’s not unusual to have a few cases of anthrax in livestock or deer each year in Texas,” said Bob Hillman, DVM, state veterinarian and executive director for the Texas Animal Health Commission (TAHC), the state’s livestock health regulatory agency.

Anthrax naturally occurs in

The inaugural “Bridge to the Future” veterinary conference, hosted by Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine, was held in Providence, RI, on Aug. 10-11. This year’s speakers included Mary Rose Paradis, DVM, MS, Dipl. ACVIM, associate professor of large animal medicine at Tufts, who spoke about geriatric horses and ponies. Paradis discussed the results of a recent study designed to

Approval of the Parelli Natural Horsemanship University in late June as a private occupational school by the Colorado Department of Higher Education distinguished Parelli Natural Horse-Man-Ship (PNH) as the first such institution in the country to do so, according to Neil Pye, dean of instructors and of the group’s international study centers. Key to the unanimous approval given by Colorado’s

The world’s first cloned horse, created by Italian scientists from a mare’s skin cell, has been born, according to a Washington Post article.

The birth of the healthy foal, announced in the Aug. 7 issue of the journal Nature, brings to nine the number of mammalian species that scientists have cloned from adult cells, along with sheep, mice, rabbits, goats, cats, pigs,

The scientists who produced the world’s first equine clone announced that the third cloned mule foal was born about 1:30 a.m. on July 27.

The team includes Gordon Woods, DVM, MS, PhD, Dipl. ACT, and Dirk Vanderwall, DVM, PhD, Dipl. ACT, both University of Idaho professors of animal and veterinary science; and Ken White, PhD, a professor in Utah State University’s Animal, Dairy and

Cats Don’t Dance, the remaining injured Saddlebred under treatment at Hagyard-Davidson-McGee (HDM) Associates in Lexington, Ky., is recovering well, according to his treating veterinarian. On Aug. 27 he was ready to return home shortly.

The 6-year-old gelding is one of five Saddlebreds which were maliciously injected in the back of their left front pasterns with a necrotizing substance