HISA devastating for Standardbreds

Some members of our industry question why the United States Trotting Association is so forcefully against efforts to include harness racing in the bureaucratic nightmare called HISA, and to put harness racing under its enforcement arm, HIWU. After all, with the words “integrity” and “safety” right in its title, how really bad could the legislative scheme be for Standardbreds?

In a word, devastating.

Shepherded through Congress by The Jockey Club; one harness track operator and various other very elite groups without dues paying memberships , HISA is a dream come true for groups like P.E.T.A. and the goal will be to severely reduce the therapeutic treatment race horses need and eliminate racing all together.

Reading through the most recent HISA/HIWA release labeled Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority Racetrack Safety Rule Modifications, published  in the Federal Register, one can only conclude that the goal is to dissuade any person from having any interest in, or anything to do with the sport.

As we have experienced of late, more sophisticated, enhanced laboratory testing methodologies can detect substances down to 1 picogram, defined as 1 trillionth of a gram. Positives are reported without the slightest regard nor concern as to whether such an infinitesimal level of a substance is pharmacologically effective in a horse, much less a performance enhancer, or the result of innocuous, unavoidable contamination.

Recently Dr. Mary Scollay, formerly Chief of the RMTC Scientific Committee and now ensconced in that same role at HISA, indicated that further folly was afoot when she stated “if we have to test down to femtograms, we will”. A femtogram is one-thousandth (1,000th) of a picogram.

In other words, calling a positive femtogram of a substance would mean finding one-thousand of one trillion of a gram.

Sheer knee-jerk stupidity like this abounds in today’s Thoroughbred world of its elitists. If you wonder why you consistently see headlines on our website reporting Flat trainers tagged with positives, read beyond those headings and see the years long, career-ending suspensions and five-figure fines meted out; and then understand that these rulings are from a pragmatic standpoint irreversible given the towering cost of the farcical “due process” regimen built into the statute.

Beyond devastation suffered by a targeted licensee, consider that as the general, non-racing public is apprised of such actions as it surely it, the public  will clamor for the end of racing altogether.

Beyond the fact that the crowd on the so-called “integrity and safety” payroll shows no tolerance for any medication regardless of its having no performance enhancing or pharmacological effect on a horse, consider that such a mindset is ironically quite cruel to the animal. By denying veterinarians the use of the tools in their armamentarium designed to help horses therapeutically, it is the horse that ultimately suffers.

Consider the veterinarian who comes to treat your horse for next week’s race who has to think about those microscopic testing levels and how the life’s work and professional livelihood of its trainer can be essentially ended by the effective therapeutic treatment he or she knows, by training and experience, is otherwise necessary to be rendered. People who purportedly seek ethical treatment for the animal are beyond insincere when they handcuff its vet and deny it healing and curative treatment protocols.

Besides the medication can of worms being opened up by the HISA folks, consider that a catastrophic injury is now defined by the group as any instance where a horse happens to die within 72 hours of its last racing event regardless of cause. That is without regard as to whether a horse dies of West Nile virus, Rhinopneumonitis (rhino), colic, founder or anything else.

As one prominent Kentucky practitioner characterized this new HISA rule, it is “idiotic”.

Can the purpose of such foolishness be other than to make the game look inhumane, as the death of an active race horse in its stall from any cause will be sold to a caring, but otherwise misinformed public, as due to a catastrophic injury suffered as a result of the cruelty of the game?

Even worse for the wellbeing of the horse, new rules would prohibit a private veterinarian from drawing blood for the purpose of determining soundness for a thing such as a pre-purchase exam (PPE).

From yet another veterinarian who served as the examining veterinarian at the NYRA racetracks, this represents “…insanity, as one cannot verify a PPE as an evaluation of soundness without toxicology.”

As for HISA’s paperwork requirements, compliance is near impossible and totally impracticable. Additionally, tracks will face additional cost, as will horsemen on a per-start basis, and trainers and vets will come home from a long day’s and night’s work to stay up to record data and fill out endless arrays of informational journals.

If you can wade through this governing maze and still envision the existence of the sport, other than as a private club, you are very much mistaken. If you are so naïve as to think you can have input in the process and its regulation, you need to read the Federal Register to understand how many informed and knowledgeable commentator’s suggestions on the rules were outright rejected by the elite do-gooders that cloak themselves as the irrefutable bastion of uprightness in the sport.

We at the U.S.T.A. spent money and long hours at negotiating tables with the previous generation of arrogant elite Thoroughbred interests, only to be told that our input was neither necessary nor welcomed.

If such horrendous rules are foisted upon harness racing, get ready for similar cataclysmic results, as career-ending suspensions for .0000000000000001 gram positives; non-racing related fatalities attributed to racing; horses failing to get appropriate veterinary treatment and the broadcasting of all of this to the public as the product of a criminal enterprise akin to cock fighting will effectively end the industry as it did for greyhound racing and circus elephants.

If this is what some harness interests are looking forward to from HISA, count me out.

Racehorse Health and Safety Act (RHSA) is a must – HISA must be defeated

See statement from the Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry.

by Joe Faraldo, for the USTA