Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Death Under the Palm Trees: Breakdowns at Santa Anita

The Los Angeles Times and Paulick Report blog startled me this morning with updates on the number of horses euthanized at California's Santa Anita racetrack since it opened the day after Christmas.

In less than three weeks, seven horses have been euthanized. No word on how many others have been injured.

People are accustomed to the shock and horror of horses breaking down during races, but the reality is that more horses break down during early morning training sessions, as was the case on Sunday when two horses had to be euthanized.

No mention of the deaths is made in the news section or horsemen's notes on Santa Anita's web site.

The beautiful racetrack outside Los Angleles switched from a dirt surface to synthetic last year and experienced maintenance nightmares that caused the entire surface to be replaced with an Australian surface called Pro-Ride. The 2008 Breeders Cup was run on the Pro-Ride strip when it had been tested for only a month during the track's Oak Tree meet but the championship races went off without any fatalities. The major California tracks have all switched to artificial racing surfaces.

Santa Anita re-opened for its traditional winter meet over Christmas.

California led the nation in legislating lower toe grabs for race horses, along with the switch to synthetic surfaces that normally don't require traction devices anyway. Both moves were part of a concerted effort to reduce breakdowns and improve the safety of racehorses.

Oddly enough, the documentary/reality television show Jockeys was filmed at Santa Anita during the first weeks of the Oak Tree meet. It tracks the working and private lives of seven Santa Anita jockeys as they work toward the Breeders Cup. Presumably, the show, which premieres February 6 on Animal Planet, will give some interesting insights into the surface and the safety issues that were on the minds of jockeys and exercise riders as they rode over an untested surface.

© Fran Jurga and Hoofcare Publishing. No use without permission. You only need to ask.

Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog is a between-issues news service for subscribers to Hoofcare and Lameness Journal. This blog may be read online at the blog page, checked via RSS feed, or received via a digest-type email (requires signup in box at top right of blog page).

To subscribe to Hoofcare and Lameness (the journal), please visit the main site, www.hoofcare.com, where many educational products and media related to equine lameness and hoof science can be found.

Questions or problems with this blog? Send email to blog@hoofcare.com.

Sunday, January 18, 2009

Sunday Entertainment: Why Did Donald Duck Have the Blacksmith Blues?

by Fran Jurga | 18 January 2009 | Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog 

 

Welcome to a lost classic of hoofcare humor, this time from our friends in Hollywood.

If you scroll through the blog, you will see that Popeye and Spike Jones have been featured in previous articles. The Popeye video made the Top Ten of all-time viewed stories on this blog. 

While all three videos were made during World War II, let's move ahead to the post-war era and see how Hollywood could have used horseshoeing as a crossover way to get people to laugh, by adding popular music.

This Sunday, it's Walt Disney, Himself. A very old Donald Duck cartoon has been overdubbed with the classic recording of The Blacksmith Blues by Ella Mae Morse, a vocalist who was discovered in Texas in 1939. She was just 14 years old when she ran away and joined Jimmy Dorsey's band and later, Nelson Riddle's orchestra.

Here are the lyrics:

Down in old Kentucky
Where horseshoes are lucky

There's a village smithy standin' under a chestnut tree
Hear the hammer knockin'

See the hammer rockin'

He sings the boogie blues while he's hammerin' on the shoes

See the hot sparks a-flyin'

Like Fourth of July-in'
He's even got the horses cloppin', pop! down the avenue

Folks love the rhythm

The clang-bangin' rhythm

You'll get a lot o' kicks out of the Blacksmith Blues
...


The Blacksmith's Blues was probably Ella Mae's biggest hit and most important recording. She's hailed in the annals of rock 'n roll as being a trailblazer for Elvis Presley and other 1950s rockers because she was one of the first white performers to record what would have been exclusively African-American music. And she did it on a major record label, Capitol Records.

Danny Ward, owner of Danny Ward's Horseshoeing School in Martinsville, Virginia, has the original sheet music to "The Blacksmith's Blues". He handed this treasure to me once, thinking that I'd be able to belt it out on the piano for him the next day, but it was a little tough for me. I'm still plunking it out but now that I have heard Ella Mae, I understand the syncopation a little better. I should have known this song would have a special (and familiar) rhythm!

Thanks, Ella Mae and Walt Disney.

Click here to view the original 1942 Donald Duck cartoon "The Village Smithy".

Click here for the full 1952 recording of Ella Mae Morse singing "The Blacksmith's Blues".

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Saturday, January 17, 2009

New York Court Rules That Racetrack Horse Dentists Need Not Be Veterinarians

by Fran Jurga | 17 January 2009 | Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog

UPDATE: Click here for a new link to new information on this story, thanks to a more in-depth article in Sunday's Saratogian newspaper by Paul Post.

The Daily Racing Form reported this morning that an appellate court in New York has upheld a 2007 ruling by the Nassau County Supreme Court that horse dentists should be considered providers of routine care of horses similar to blacksmith and groom duties and that a veterinary license should not be required.

Click here to read the brief announcement in the Daily Racing Form, as provided by the New York Thoroughbred Horsemen's Association.

The lawsuit lists the state wagering board as the plaintiff; the Board had appealed the earlier Supreme Court decision, which stemmed from the banning of a dentist from a racetrack.

Presumably, this decision applies to the the state board's jurisdiction at racetracks. It's not clear if this decision affects how the state's veterinary medicine practice act might be interpreted off the premises of the state's racetracks.


© Fran Jurga and Hoofcare Publishing. No use without permission. You only need to ask.

Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog is a between-issues news service for subscribers to Hoofcare and Lameness Journal. This blog may be read online at the blog page, checked via RSS feed, or received via a digest-type email (requires signup in box at top right of blog page).

To subscribe to Hoofcare and Lameness (the journal), please visit the main site, www.hoofcare.com, where many educational products and media related to equine lameness and hoof science can be found.

Questions or problems with this blog? Send email to blog@hoofcare.com.

Friday, January 16, 2009

A Great Wooden Smithy Doorway Opens into the 17th Century Claverdon Forge in Warwickshire, England



Claverdon Forge is yet another British smithy with a horseshoe shaped door, although this one is the most rustic and broad-toed one I've seen. It's wooden rather than stonework, but it's still there. This type of construction is called "half timber". And it looks cozy in there!

Thursday, January 15, 2009

Special Media Eclipse Award to AAEP "On Call" Racing Injury/Safety Program

by Fran Jurga | 15 January 2009 | Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog

AAEP On Call team member Dr. Larry Bramlage (right) interviewed on NBC during a Triple Crown race (AAEP photo)

(from an NTRA press release)

The National Thoroughbred Racing Association (NTRA), Daily Racing Form and the National Turf Writers Association today announced that the veterinary On Call media-assistance program of the American Association of Equine Practitioners has been honored with the 2008 Special Eclipse Award. The Special Eclipse Award honors outstanding individual achievements in, or contributions to, the sport of Thoroughbred racing.

Representatives of the On Call program of the AAEP will be presented the Special Eclipse at the 38th Annual Eclipse Awards on Monday, January 26 in Miami Beach, Florida.

“It is an incredible honor for the On Call program to be recognized for its contributions to racing and its role in increasing the public’s knowledge of horse health issues,” said AAEP Executive Director David L. Foley. “We dedicate this award to the many AAEP members who have volunteered their time and expertise to serve the industry, the media and, most importantly, the horse.”

The On Call group was formed in the wake of the accidents and injuries which occurred in the 1990 Breeders’ Cup, and the lack of equine medical information available to the viewing public. Since its creation in 1991, On Call has developed into an innovative media-assistance program of equine professionals, who provide accurate veterinary information to the broadcast and print media during live, network races. More than 20 media-trained equine veterinarians are available to respond to crisis situations at 100 televised races throughout the year, or whenever there’s a need to address a media inquiry about matters that affect horses’ health and safety, such as the national inquiries that followed Barbaro’s Preakness injury in 2006.

“Members of the National Turf Writers Association, other media members who cover racing’s major races, and the entire racing industry owe a great deal to the American Association of Equine Practitioners’ On Call Program,” said Tom Law, president of the National Turf Writers Association and managing editor of Thoroughbred Times. “Since the program’s inception in 1991, the On Call Program has educated and informed members of the media as well as the general public about any injuries or tragedies that unfortunately occur on the racetrack, and its team members do so in a very calm and collected manner that is good for the short- and long-term health of the game.”

© Fran Jurga and Hoofcare Publishing. No use without permission. You only need to ask. Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog is a between-issues news service for subscribers to Hoofcare and Lameness Journal. This blog may be read online at the blog page, checked via RSS feed, or received via a digest-type email (requires signup in box at top right of blog page). To subscribe to Hoofcare and Lameness (the journal), please visit the main site, www.hoofcare.com, where many educational products and media related to equine lameness and hoof science can be found. Questions or problems with this blog? Send email to blog@hoofcare.com.

The World Is Flat? The Hoof Is Round? Horseshoe Designs Cover Both Extremes


I call this the "banana moon" shoe. Another great photo by Loic Entwistle from Germany.

Or is it that the world is round and the hoof is flat? Sometimes it is hard to tell.

Here in America, we have banana shoes and Dr. Ric Redden's rock-and-roll shoes, but here's a really rocking, all-belly laminitis shoe borrowed from the archive of German farrier Loic Entwistle, whose collection of photos never fails to fascinate me.

I don't know anything about this case and there is no photo of the bottom of the foot. But it started me thinking.

In my part of the world, we have special shoes called "bog shoes", or "marsh shoes". Not so long ago, horses had to be able to travel over the salt marshes, because that's where the hay was. In the early colonial times around here, the only open fields were the marshes. So the horses were fitted with big flat platform shoes so they wouldn't sink.

This old illustration is actually from Holland, where they probably perfected the bog shoe centuries before the Pilgrims made it to Plymouth. This image bothers me because I am so distracted by the horses' shoes that I don't question the rest of the scene. Can someone tell me why the wheels of the wagon wouldn't just sink up to the hubs?

These days, great minds in farriery tinker with the bottom of a horse's foot like it's meant to be a radius; Loic's shoe doesn't have a belly point like a Danny Dunson banana shoe--it's all belly.

Some days you want the world to be flat, some days you want it to be round.

An antique store near the Hoofcare & Lameness office has a collection of bog shoes; no two are alike and there must be 100 of them hanging from the rafters. It is appropriately called Salt Marsh Antiques. And they're not for sale, although I did borrow the collection once for an exhibit. The proprietor even has a salesman's catalog for readymade bog shoes like this very heavy steel plate. Most are wooden and look like thrifty yankee farmers made them out of barn boards. They resemble the Dutch shoes in this old print. I think this one is from Michael Wildenstein's collection. Most people who go to see the antique store's shoe collection leave with a new table or some old tools. Note: the toe is at the bottom of this photo, I think.

© Fran Jurga and Hoofcare Publishing. No use without permission. You only need to ask.

Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog is a between-issues news service for subscribers to Hoofcare and Lameness Journal. This blog may be read online at the blog page, checked via RSS feed, or received via a digest-type email (requires signup in box at top right of blog page).

To subscribe to Hoofcare and Lameness (the journal), please visit the main site, www.hoofcare.com, where many educational products and media related to equine lameness and hoof science can be found.

Questions or problems with this blog? Send email to blog@hoofcare.com.