Sports Medicine

All aspects of caring for performance horses

No Added Benefits from Higher Bute Dosage

Higher dosages of phenylbutazone (Bute) don’t make chronically lame horses any sounder than standard doses, according to a study in a recent issue of the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association. Thus, giving a lame horse

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Ponying for Exercise

Ponying is leading one horse from another. The pony horse is the one you are riding; the ponied horse is the one being led. Ponying is a good way to exercise a horse you don’t have time to ride or one that can’t be ridden. If you need to keep tw

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Sudden Death: Untimely End

Sometimes horses die suddenly when they aren’t involved in athletic competition. You walk out to stall or paddock one morning and your good trail horse or companion animal is lying dead, even though it had appeared normal and healthy when you fed the

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Eventing’s Short and Long Formats Compared

Three-Day event horses performing the short format endurance portion of an event and horses completing the conventional long format experience a similar amount of stress, according to a recent study. The public has speculated on whether or not

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Arthritis in the Performance Horse

Arthritis causes considerable pain in your horse, and understanding the disease cycle is necessary in order to prevent further damage from occurring.

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Memorial Service Set for Slain Saddlebred

CHWild Eyed & Wicked was one of five Saddlebred horses who were injected with an unknown substance in June 2003 at a farm in Versailles, Ky., where they were boarded and trained (for archived information on the attacks, see

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Training Resumes at Churchill

Horses stabled in a second Churchill Downs barn placed under quarantine by the Kentucky Department of Agriculture because of confirmed cases of equine herpes virus at the track will be allowed to return to limited training on May

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Churchill EHV-1 Update

Equine herpesvirus type-1 (EHV-1) has been confirmed as affecting horses at Churchill Downs. 


Three barns (6, 38, and 39) are currently quarantined on the backside of Churchill Downs.


To date, a total of five

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SmartPak Equine Receives Award for Innovation

SmartPak Equine announced May 23 that it has received a 2005 Innovation Award from the Smaller Business Association of New England. SmartPak, best known for offering custom-packed nutritional supplements in its patented SmartPak packaging, is th

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Intranasal Vaccine Tolerance

A study by Elkanah H. Grogan, BS, and Sue McDonnell, PhD, Certified Applied Animal Behaviorist, of the University of Pennsylvania’s Equine Behavior Laboratory, looked at how difficult it was to give intranasal vaccines using two different

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Benefits of Joint Supplements Reaffirmed

Cosequin has previously been shown to improve lameness grade in horses with radiographic evidence of joint cartilage damage, and studies have explored possible mechanisms of action for FCHG49 glucosamine hydrochloride and TRH122 low molecular weight

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Ulcer Research in Racehorses: Omeprazole Helps

Two articles on the use of omeprazole paste (GastroGard from Merial) in racehorses were published in the May 15 edition of the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association (JAVMA). The first study looked at using omeprazole

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Update on Churchill Downs Horses

Necropsies from the two horses affected by neurologic signs at Churchill Downs showed the horses had lesions consistent with equine herpesvirus myeloencephalopathy (damage to the brain and/or spinal cord). Three other horses are currently showin

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