39th ARC - The Horse - Presentation by Dr Christopher Riggs - Bilingual Subtitles
All of us are very well aware of the many great things that come from thoroughbred horse racing,
great jobs, but huge joy to many people.
And that comes fundamentally from one thing, through the involvement of these beautiful fantastic creatures that have brought into our lives through the sport.
We have to be honest as well though, and up to the fact that there are also problems.
And we have a moral obligation to constantly try and resolve those problems, or at least make them better.
Not only is that an obligation, but we as an industry are judged on how well we do that.
There's been a lot of discussion about that, and here's something that is going to get tougher.
So we need to do it because it is simply right to do it, but also we need to do it strategically as well.
And that really was the
behind which the Hong Kong Jokhita Bequamal for Research Foundation was established in 2020 with a very generous donation from the Hong Kong Jokhita Club.
And our objective is to engage with scientists, look at particular problems, and as try and constantly resolve problems or at least improve them.
We're drawing a band of others around the world who are also doing that.
So our vision is to see science deliver improved quality of life for the Thoroughbred Racers.
Now, I imagine there might be some of you, I've certainly come across many in the past,
who think, why on earth waste money on scientists.
There are plenty of very wise people in our industry and our sport.
Many of them, most of them are rather old and have seen it all, some of them are young and seen it all.
They know what the problems are, we just need to do this.
Why spend huge amounts of money on spotty scientists leaving an academic life?
Well, it's true.
Science is slow.
It's an issue process.
It goes up blind alleys.
sometimes take a long time to deliver something that's of value.
But like to just illustrate a small and very sad story to make the point of the importance of science.
Many of us here, and I was, would have been raised by mothers heavily influenced by the teachings of doctors.
And his first book was published in 1946, and, as you can see, Common Sense book.
And that's, you know, Common Sense book of looking after babies, who needs scientists.
It's all common sense.
And Dr.
Spock that babies should put to sleep.
in their courts in the prone position facing down.
It a lot of sense, of course you do, when they form it, when it's not running out, saliva, gravity let it come out.
So own way keeps nice and fair.
Obvious.
Why wouldn't you do that?
Well, actually when science started to get involved and had a look in the early 1990s, we realized
Quite a few babies are suffering sudden infant death syndrome and the number one cause for
that or risk factor for that is babies being put into bed facing down in the cotch and the various reasons for that,
but it's been estimated in the study done in 2005.
that at least 60,000 children between 1950s and early 1990s will have died
through poor advice from medical practitioners based on the sort of belief that that was the right thing to do.
So it's a very good example.
You cannot rely.
on common sense in intuition all the time.
You rigorous science to test questions and give you evidence that you can really rely on or on upon which you can then advocate change.
So again that's what we're really focused on.
We want rigorous science.
We're not interested in Mickey Mouse that at best is not going to be worth anything and at worst is going to lead you astray and get people doing the wrong things.
So what are obviously limited funds?
What do you put those into?
Well, we had a bit of a stakeholder engagement.
You do with doing this much wider
to try and identify what are the priority topics that really impact the quality of life of the horse.
Well, clearly orthopedic injuries, whether it's a human sport or a client sport.
These are pushed to their limit.
They're very common.
There's a very high incidence of degenerative orthopedic disease that leaves these horses with lifelong problems when they retire.
We're all very well aware about the horses that break their legs in most horribly specks.
And luckily, that's not so many a number, but it is a very bad thing when it happens.
There are many diseases associated with really intense physical exercise, bleeding, cardiac problems, et cetera.
If you want to influence your stakeholders it's far better things.
I know what's best for them.
You ask them generation Zen whatever you ask them what do they want?
It's difficult to do that with horse,
but you can increasingly doing it with Really robust scientific studies that are so sure what you want and there are ways of finding out when is a horse?
in a good frame of mind.
When is its welfare compromised?
How do you know that?
There are increasingly good scientific strategies that allow you to determine that.
They need to be refined and made better.
Once you have that tool, people, then you can say, well, these group of horses are happy and these ones aren't.
What's the difference?
What's happening?
And ideally, you show these happy horses, win the races.
And you can start getting behavioural change and nudging along things like that.
Clearly, how do you look after horses when they're a tyre?
Well, actually, interestingly, death, a swift humane death, is never a welfare issue.
the lingering life in pain, et is oil for issue.
Can we assess a horse better at its time of retirement and determine, well, I'm really sorry, but this condition is not gonna go well.
Then you're probably far better off saying, well, I'm horse, when it goes.
Very humanely.
Conversely, there are other conditions, oh, those are awful, they're never too well.
Rubbish, that's based on perceptions which are probably wrong, or wrong.
We need to find these things out.
And of course, doping the welfare effects.
We've only been going,
we've had two rounds of calls for applications so far,
we've just finished our third and just started the review process and we're making contributions to these areas already.
We fund globally.
We want to collaborate globally.
And to the point, we want to see scientists collaborate globally.
We don't have lots of little groups doing different things.
We want to unite groups to really be most effective at coming up with global solutions.
I want to finish off with just this one example of how science helps us with this one,
the obvious one of horses breaking their legs.
When I did my PhD,
it so much more common,
that's back in the mid-80s,
I going up and down to the market,
getting dead legs, Luckily it's much less now through introduction, nuclear syntographies, what really meant the change there.
But racing fractures,
what we have learned from work of people in California,
Chris here, some of the work that I've done in the past is we now know.
that horses break their legs, not because they take a bad step or they put them down a rabbit hole or whatever.
It's a consequence of material fatigue.
Just as if you take a piece of metal and bend it once, it's fine.
On the 100th time, it breaks.
It's no different.
So, horse training, day in, day out, it suffers the fatigue of its bones.
There is a natural biological process which involves the bones eating out.
the damage with a bone and replacing it,
like a little tunnel,
replacing the new healthy bone, and that, as you might imagine, all these holes makes it weaker and makes it more prone to fracture.
And convincing evidence from many, many different cases, that is what is going on.
When In the Melbourne Cup or whatever it started the race probably going to break its leg.
We just didn't know And as I said, that's a critical thing.
They're pittaker out of the blue, but they don't.
Here's an example of it.
This is a horse that sustained.
You see that terrible condola fracture, very common racing fracture.
We went back and looked at the radiographs,
taken a few weeks earlier,
and you can see,
and this one's actually fairly obvious now,
but in those days,
and that was taken, we weren't so attuned to it, but you can see in the red, little yellow, There's a little fine feature there.
You can only see that on a particular radiographic projection, which relatively new.
On anything else, if you don't do that, you will not see it.
For making sure people do that, they understand that, they're informed about all that.
And then, But they're still very hard.
If we could identify these horses that are at risk of getting the fracture before they start the race,
which is exactly what Grace and her program is trying to do,
then we could stop them and say, I'm really sorry, you can't run this horse.
Another work we've done shows that 90% horses at the stress factory, given a right amount of time, will be fine.
They'll be right as rain again once the bone has remodeled and repaired.
So trouble is, you can't find these features.
These horses look fine.
they often will not give you any hint that there's a problem lurking there.
So we need to have a form of screening tool and you can see here's Chris
Wettin from Melbourne University again doing screening of a horse there.
Now, imaging with CT is probably what's required to get the convincing images to show a trainer, particularly the English.
And they're very difficult.
They're the ones that really kicked up and caused all the objection about what was going on in Melbourne.
I understand that.
And I'm disappointed.
Sure, there are some things which maybe need to be teased out a bit more first, but it's
having a damn good go to try and make an improvement.
But we really do need to learn what's important and what's not important.
The more you look, the more you will find.
The question is what really matters and what doesn't.
You need to be very smart.
not just sensitive, because you don't want the good horse that really should be running, not running because you're overly conservative and worried about it.
You really need to have good debt.
So you can't go doing an MRI or a CT on every horse that's going to run in every race.
So we need lots of different approaches.
We've the whole population.
We can start using epidemiology to identify which are the higher risk cases.
And out of that, we can take bloods and start screening for new chemicals that we've identified that indicate, well, there's something going on here.
None of these are going to be very specific, but they might be quite sensitive.
And then we start using wearable technology.
A of talk about this, you measure the horse's stride length, stride frequency.
And in the races leading up to when the horse sustains an injury, they're starting to see the horses starting to stride slightly differently.
So start looking at that.
And then you start thinking, well, I'm getting quite worried about this horse.
Then it's worth.
the hassle, the arguments, whatever, to do the CT study.
But I've said, we've got to be able to inspire people with confidence that the findings from this study really are worth taking note of.
And fair for regulators to say, sorry, come.
And this sort of research is really required.
So, in summary, we all have a moral responsibility to provide for the needs of animals in its care.
And is a definition of welfare, to Haley was saying, and that is welfare simply reflects the needs of the animals.
animal, and are they being met?
And is totally quantifiable.
We to highlight the benefits and the knowledge she issues that are associated with racing, and need to face up for them.
openly and honestly and be very proud of racing but equally say but it has good
its problems just about everything in life has if we stop doing something it's
got problems we're gonna be left with a very very very tedious life and we need
to face up to our detractors that sort of arguments but we're bloody well
doing something about it to try and improve it but we need to do it We need to do really good quality research,
so we know the evidence we get is really robust.
We're making decisions that are really valid.
And that's what our foundation, along with other people around the world, are really trying to do.
And I encourage you to look at our website.
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