Tuesday, November 02, 2010

Hoof Pathologist and Educator Dr. Roy Pool Honored by American College of Veterinary Pathologists

Dr. Pool Bestowed Honorary Membership by the ACVP Today the American College of Veterinary Pathologists (ACVP) will bestow an honorary membership to Roy R. Pool Jr., PhD DVM, director of the Surgical Pathology Service and director of the Osteopathology Specialty Service at the Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences (CVM).

This award -- only given to a select few individuals -- will be presented to Dr. Pool for his many important contributions to his professional discipline over his more than 40-year career as a veterinary musculoskeletal pathologist at the ACVP's annual meeting.

Honorary membership is bestowed upon a nonmember by a majority vote of the Council, and confirmed by a majority vote of the membership of the College.

Over the years Pool has contributed a great deal to the understanding of the causes and pathological diagnosis of musculoskeletal diseases of domestic animals. A list of his research topics includes research on many species and especially the pathogenesis of biomechanical lesions of bone, joints, tendons, and ligaments of athletic horses.

Pool is the last of the original five veterinary musculoskeletal pathologists still active today in academic practice in this country. He has taught numerous courses, in several veterinary institutions across the United States and Europe including the University of California at Davis, Cornell University, and Mississippi State University.

Dr. Pool was recruited by the Texas A&M seven years ago where, in addition to his diagnostic duties, he teaches lectures in his specialty to professional students in the veterinary curriculum.

"Although I am a clinical professor of pathology with primary diagnostic and teaching responsibilities, I continue to be involved in orthopedic research (e.g. healing of defects in articular cartilage and in tendons facilitated by stem cells)," said Pool.

I will never forget meeting Dr. Pool. He was so interested in Hoofcare and Lameness, and I was so interested in a project he was working on, related to navicular disease. One of the first sentences out of his mouth was, "I just love the navicular bone!" and I could tell he meant it. He went on to tell me that he had collected hundreds of them, and that he never tired of looking at them. Over the years, he also has never seemed to tire of answering my questions, and offering advice for deeper reading or where to find someone who might know the answer to my question.

Dr. Pool opened his lecture at the AAEP convention in San Francisco with one of the best lines ever: "Some people collect stamps. I collect navicular bones!"

Hoofcare and Lameness has tried to keep up with Dr. Pool's research. In 1996, Hoofcare published a summary of 15 years of his equine research, Equine Joint Mechanics: An AAEP/H&L Report, after his presentation at the AAEP convention in Lexington, Kentucky.

In the 1980s, Dr. Pool was the first to notice the incidence of what was then called degenerative suspensory ligament desmitis (DSLD) when he was at the University of California at Davis. What may have been an observation on his part helped veterinarian Jan Young DVM formulate the first articles on the conditon, which were published in Hoofcare and Lameness. In 2002, he was the co-author with Dr Jeanette Mero of the paper, Twenty Cases of Degenerative Suspensory Ligament Desmitis in Peruvian Paso Horses, presented at that year's AAEP Convention in Orlando, Florida.

Not only students and the research community have benefited from Dr. Pool's research, his studies and his affection for the navicular bone--we all have benefited from his generosity and his curiosity. We should all give him an award for helping us understand what happens when something goes wrong with the musculoskeletal systems of athletic horses.

Thanks to Texas A&M University for assistance with this article.

© Fran Jurga and Hoofcare Publishing; Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog is a between-issues news service for subscribers to Hoofcare and Lameness Journal. Please, no use without permission. You only need to ask. 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.
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Sunday, October 31, 2010

"Wave Your Flag" New Breeders Cup Music Video


Are you excited about the Breeders Cup yet? This new take on the classic FIFA World Cup unofficial theme song from k'naan leaves me scratching my head, but it's fun to watch.

In case you were under a rock and missed the excitement from South Africa that was the biggest sporting event in the world, here's the Coca-Cola version of the song:


What are the lyrics, saying, anyway? Their sentiment could inspire hard-running young horses from outside the blueblood Bluegrass as much as they did the soccer-loving street kids in Soweto and Somalia, Asia and all the stops all over the world where this video was shot.

They'd inspire anyone, for that matter. Listen and read the lyrics here.

I never thought I'd hear African music on the Breeders Cup web site!

© Fran Jurga and Hoofcare Publishing; Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog is a between-issues news service for subscribers to Hoofcare and Lameness Journal. Please, no use without permission. You only need to ask. 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.
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Preview Zenyatta and Mike Smith on 60 Minutes: Breeders Cup Anticipation Begins in Earnest NOW!



Double click on the square icon (to the right of "share" below the window) to view the video in full screen mode.

The racing world has begun its countdown to the historic moment when Zenyatta runs in the 2010 Breeders Cup Classic and attempts to repeat her 2009 victory against the colts and preserve her unblemished career racing record at 20 straight victories. That's right: Never a loss, not even a second place, no matter who else was in the race.

It all happens next Saturday around 6 p.m. at Churchill Downs. The Classic is the richest single horse race in the world and, in turn, the Breeders Cup is the richest sporting event in the world.

But around 7 p.m. tonight (Sunday, October 31) we should all take a break and sit down with some Halloween candy to watch Zenyatta on 60 Minutes on CBS. That's mainstream tv in the USA, no cable subscription needed.

What you are likely to hear is what her fans will tell you: that it's not just that she wins--although her record speaks for itself. It's how she wins. With equal amounts of style--ears pricked forward, dancing in the paddock and the post parade like a grand prix dressage horse--and drama. She comes from dead last and seems to use her massive hindquarters to motor out of the racetrack like a supercharged Hummer when it's time to make her move. But she also seems to know exactly where the finish line is and she runs just far enough and fast enough to beat whomever is in her way. Ears up, she just gallops on by, often winning by half a length, just enough to seal the victory.


Zenyatta has caught the imagination and the affection of the nation. Whether she wins or not, she has been a shot of adrenaline for horseracing, a sport that so many had written off as dead, dying or diseased beyond repair. Churchill Downs next Saturday will be filled to overflowing to see her, and hopefully some of her fans will just happen to fall in love with some of the other races and some of the other horses while they're hanging around waiting for her race.

Ahead of us lies a week of Zenyatta fun and media antics. She takes it all in stride. Her trainer and owners seem to chuckle right along while you know they are deep in the important business of insuring her health and safety and fitness as the big day approaches.

Yesterday Zenyatta had her final workout at her home base at Hollywood Park in California. On Tuesday, she will fly to Louisville, Kentucky.

You can watch two full days of Breeders Cup races on ESPN and ABC. As crazy as this sounds, it looks like Zenyatta's race will only be shown on cable television. ABC probably has a more important (to them) football game.

© Fran Jurga and Hoofcare Publishing; Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog is a between-issues news service for subscribers to Hoofcare and Lameness Journal. Please, no use without permission. You only need to ask. 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.
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Friday, October 29, 2010

USDA Audit Recommends Abolishing DQP System, Shows Would Hire Veterinarians to Inspect Horses for Soring Violations Under Horse Protection Act

The United Stated Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Office of Inspector General (OIG) recently performed an audit of the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service's (APHIS) oversight of the humane treatment of Tennessee Walking horses at shows as mandated by the Horse Protection Act. The audit also addressed the long-distance transport of horses destined for slaughter outside the United States.

To quote the audit document: "Concerning the treatment of show horses, we found that APHIS’ program for inspecting horses for soring is not adequate to ensure that these animals are not being abused. At present, horse industry organizations hire their own inspectors (known as designated qualified persons (DQP)) to inspect horses at the shows they sponsor. However, we found that DQPs do not always inspect horses to effectively enforce the law and regulations, and in some cases where they do find violations, they deliberately issue tickets to friends or family members of responsible individuals so that the responsible person could avoid receiving a penalty for violating the Horse Protection Act."

The report said that APHIS employees attend very few horses and that, when they do, APHIS employees routinely bring armed security or the police with them in the interest of their personal safety.

In the executive summary of the audit, OIG recommended that APHIS "seek the necessary funding from Congress for the Horse Protection Program, as the current level of funding does not enable the agency to oversee it adequately. Given the weaknesses in the inspection process, APHIS employees need to attend more shows to ensure that horses are inspected adequately."

OIG's review of the slaughter horse transport program found that, in their view, APHIS needs to improve its controls for ensuring that horses being shipped to foreign plants for slaughter are treated humanely. At present, the summary said, "APHIS does not deny authorization to individuals with a record of inhumanely transporting slaughter horses to ship other loads of horses, even if unpaid fines are pending for previous violations. Regulations simply do not address denying this authority, and so APHIS provides the authorization, regardless of the owner’s history. Without regulations or legislation to establish more meaningful penalties, owners have little incentive to comply with regulations, pay their penalties, and cease inhumanely handling horses bound for slaughter."

Finally, OIG found that there were "control deficiencies in how APHIS tags horses that have been inspected and approved for shipment to foreign slaughterhouses. The agency requires shippers to mark such horses with backtags, which are intended to allow APHIS employees to trace horses back to their owner and also to verify that the horses have passed inspection by an accredited veterinarian. We found, however, that the agency’s controls over these tags were weak, and that owners could easily obtain them and apply the tags to horses without APHIS’ knowledge."

In addition, APHIS "does not currently have an effective control or tracking system to trace all backtags used to transport horses to slaughter. Without regulations controlling the distribution, use, and tracking of these tags, owners can transport horses that do not meet the requirements for shipment. APHIS needs to seek the appropriate legislative and regulatory changes to ensure that only qualified individuals (such as APHIS personnel or USDA-accredited veterinarians) apply backtags to horses being shipped to slaughter. It also needs to obtain the resources necessary to adequately oversee the Slaughter Horse Transport Program."

Recommendation Summary

1. Abolish the current DQP system and establish by regulation an inspection process based on independent accredited veterinarians, and obtain the authority, if needed, to charge show managers the cost of providing independent, accredited veterinarians to perform inspections at sanctioned horse shows, sales, and other horse-related events.

2. Implement a control to ensure that individuals suspended from horse shows, sales, or exhibitions due to Horse Protection Act violations do not participate in subsequent events.

3. Seek the necessary funding to adequately oversee the Horse Protection

4. Revise and enforce regulations to prohibit horses disqualified as sore from competing in all classes at a horse show, exhibition, or other horse-related event.

5. Revise Slaughter Horse Transport Program regulations to allow APHIS to deny shipping documents to individuals who repeatedly violate humane handling regulations and who have fines outstanding.

6. Develop and maintain a control (database or list) of all individuals who have violated the regulations of the Slaughter Horse Transport Program and have not paid the associated fines.

7. Revise regulations or implement adequate controls to ensure that APHIS provides backtags to qualified personnel who can inspect horses bound for slaughter and apply, or oversee the application of, backtags when approving transport documentation.

8. Develop and implement an appropriate control to track individual horses by backtag number on all shipping documents approved so that reconciliation can be performed, violations can be investigated, and enforcement action can be initiated against the horse’s owner and shipper.


© Fran Jurga and Hoofcare Publishing Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog is a between-issues news service for subscribers to Hoofcare and Lameness Journal. Please, no use without permission. You only need to ask. 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.
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Thursday, October 28, 2010

What Do Zenyatta and Mister Ed Have in Common?

The San Francisco Giants look like they want to make quick work of the Texas Rangers and have a short 2010 World Series. If baseball season ends early, that will leave plenty of time on the news and in the papers for coverage of next week's Breeders Cup, and our favorite horse Zenyatta, who graced a billboard for the Dodgers in Los Angeles. She's based nearby at Hollywood Park.

The question was: What do Zenyatta and Mister Ed have in common?

As it turns out, they both seem to have registered themselves as baseball fans. LA Dodger fans, to be exact. And as the sun sets on the 2010 MLB season, we can have some fun with the baseball exploits of Zenyatta and Ed in the midst of the World Series.

Champion Thoroughbred Zenyatta is the queen of good news, whether she's at home at Hollywood Park or mixing with the media at Churchill Downs, site of next weekend's Breeders Cup. The stories about her personality and her antics make even the most hardened racetrackers chuckle. And next week she'll be the queen of this blog, as she prepares for the Breeders Cup Classic and what we all hope will be a repeat win and her 20th consecutive lifetime victory--with never a defeat!

Zenyatta is the best thing to happen to racing since...well, for a very long time, let's just leave it at that. But how does racing take advantage of this great horse so that some of the affection for her might possibly benefit the rest of the sport? Can Zenyatta bring people back to the track? Can some of those warm and fuzzy feelings for Zenyatta transfer to other horses running in this year's Breeders Cup? Couldn't Quality Road or Blind Luck or Blame or Goldikova or even Workforce be portrayed as likable as Zenyatta?

If there was any doubt that that warm and fuzzy Zenyatta feeling was going mainstream, look back in time no further than back in July when National Public Radio aired a special interview about the supermare. And whom did they choose to interview? None other than Laura Hillenbrand, the author of the bestselling book Seabiscuit,another champion racehorse who captured imaginations and won hearts.

Take a few minutes to listen to Laura's interview and then post a link to this blog story on your Facebook page and forward this to your friends, especially if they aren't already racing fans. I bet Zenyatta will convert them.

Zenyatta is not the first horse to promote the Dodgers. Back in 1963, Mister Ed showed Leo Durocher, Sandy Koufax, Moose Skowron, Willie Davis and Johnny Roseboro how it's done. Imagine how Zenyatta could round those bases! But knowing her running style, she'd definitely win it for the team on the last out of the ninth inning...by hitting a home run!



© Fran Jurga and Hoofcare Publishing; Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog is a between-issues news service for subscribers to Hoofcare and Lameness Journal. Please, no use without permission. You only need to ask. 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.

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Dick Reid: One of the Last Traveling Horseshoe Salesmen Has Died

Dick Reid, left, shown with Dan Burke of Farrier Product Distribution, right, sold Diamond Horseshoes for more than 30 years. He was a familiar face and phone voice in the US farrier industry.
There are professions that have sort of faded away. There aren't too many milkmen. No one delivers telegrams. And the age of the traveling salesman seems to have been taken over by online shopping carts and email confirmations. If you own a store and you want to see what's out there to buy, you have to go to a trade show if you want to see it, touch it, smell it and throw it against the wall to see if it sticks.

But it wasn't always that way. Companies had salesmen who came around to stores and businesses and showed their clients new products, took orders, and acted as informal business advisers about what should be in the store, how and where it should be displayed, and what color a shop owner should paint the barn. They'd figure out a name for a puppy or help you decide which cash register to get.

There was an intimacy between these salesmen and their customers--if the salesmen were any good, that is. They made themselves indispensable.

For most of the second half of the 20th century, it was the Diamond horseshoe salesmen who knit the farrier industry together.  Diamond, headquartered in Duluth, Minnesota, was the leading brand, and Dick Reid was one of their leading sales experts. 

The Diamond Tool and Horseshoe Company headquarters in Duluth, Minnesota once employed 800 people.
Diamond was sold to the Triangle Corporation in 1981, and plans were made to gradually phase out the Minnesota factory and move the company to South Carolina. Dick Reid retired from Diamond soon after that. He started a regional sales rep firm with his wife, Ruth, in 1986. They called it Farrier Products Marketing and represented then-independent Cooper nails, Russell Breckenridge Company, Bellota Rasps (Kentucky Farrier Supply) and GE Tools in ten midwestern and northern states.

But Dick's heart condition didn't like the idea of not being retired, and after a few years Dick left the farrier scene, only to return for special visits.

Dick died on Saturday, October 22nd. He lived in Urbana, Ohio and was 89 years old. I guess he must have known an awful lot about horseshoes but I know he knew even more about people.

The vast network of farrier supply stores, warehouses, internet shops and trade shows that farriers enjoy today grew out of a few lonely outposts scattered around the country until the farrier industry boom in the 1980s. What exists now was built on the shoulders and hard work and dreams and good will of generous people like Dick Reid.

A monument has been erected in Duluth to the memory of the employees of Diamond Tool and Horseshoe Company. The buildings have been razed.

© Fran Jurga and Hoofcare Publishing; Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog is a between-issues news service for subscribers to Hoofcare and Lameness Journal. Please, no use without permission. You only need to ask. 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.
 
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