OT - Barbaro's Successful Surgery

[Hector]

In my opinion one of the most beautiful and thrilling sights in all of sports is a thoroughbred race horse running at full speed. It was devastating to see Kentucky Derby winner Barbaro break down during Saturday's Preakness Stakes in Baltimore. According to Equine Veterinary surgeon Dean Richardson, the procedure to repair Barbaro's injury went well, although it is still a coin toss as to whether he will survive. Here is an article about Barbaro's Successful Surgery

[Rave]

yeah I was talking to a couple vets yesterday who used to do those type of SX's ... they weren't too optimistic. I'm holding out hope though! Did you see the replay with the pastern flopping about? Oweee!

[WyoBC]

I didn't see the race. Not to be mean, but I have never liked to watch horses race like that. But I really hope he gets better. My prayers are with him. God Bless

[Eileen Stein]

Very interesting article -- that x-ray is pretty amazing, isn't it?

 

I remember watching Ruffian break down in her match race -- one of the saddest sights I ever saw.

[Falcon]

Reminds me way too much of Charismatic... I mean, he lived, but still...

[Hector]

Yes, that x-ray and the medical techniques they are using to treat Barbaro are truly amazing. Before this I didn't realize that treating such a major injury in a horse was even possible. I certainly hope that everything goes well in his recovery. Here is a link to more Barbaro photos.

[AK dog doc]

Ditto on Ruffian - she was really an outstanding filly and her like has not come along again for a long time. It was just hearbreaking... both to see her break down and that she destroyed her repair on coming out of anesthesia. There've been advancements in equine anesthesia and surgery that could have probably prevented that, nowadays, although that's always a risk.

 

I took one of my horses to New Bolton Center when I was grooming racehorses for a living. It's really a top flight facility. There aren't better hands anywhere in the northeast for Barbaro to be in, IMO.

[juliepoudrier]

Yep, when I heard about Barbaro I immediately thought of Ruffian. All these years later I can still see her circling her jockey on the track with an air cast on her leg. I hope Barabaro comes to a better end.

 

J.

[PSmitty]

That was absolutely heartbreaking to see! My thoughts and prayers are with Barbaro. He's made it this far, I hope he can pull through.

 

BTW, did you guys see that ESPN is making a movie about Ruffian? I think it will be shown next year some time. Of course, since I know how it'll end, I don't think I'll watch. Too sad!

[laurie etc]

What a brave horse and a devastating injury! Keep all your fingers and toes crossed - after xraying horses for 17 years and assisting with this kind of salvage procedure in surgery numerous times at an equine referral hospital, I can promise a recovery is not gonna be easy - in fact the odds are really against him ever taking a step out of that recovery stall. Unlike a person or a dog, horses can't just lie around for months while all those fractures heal. Barbaro has to be smart, careful and LUCKY enough to stand on that leg, move around his stall, lie down and get back up, without his 1000 pounds of torque un-doing all the repairs. I've seen one mis-step destroy a 7 hour surgical repair. And that doesn't even take into account all the complications that can follow...

[nancy in AZ]

Does anyone think there is a chance in hell that a high profile breakdown like Barbaro's will raise any debate about the way the racing industry is responsible for these horses breaking down by starting them when they are still babies? Afterall, what happened to Barbaro is unforgiveably common in the industry. The main difference is, being a multi-million dollar horse, no expense will be spared to try to save him. Let's face it, the majority of the industries racehorses are quite disposable.

 

I too saw Ruffian breakdown in her match race against Foolish Pleasure. The memory still brings me to tears.

[muddy bob]

Love the horses, the speed, the competive spirit of the beasts and their obvious joy of RUNNING. Hate the racing industry. Can't stand most race horse owners. I'm so saddened by these injuries.

 

Muddy

[laurie etc]

Yep - Ruffian is still ingrained in my mind. With today's veterinary technology and advancements, she probably could have been saved. It's too bad that the horse racing industry in this country is all about the almighty dollar and not really about the horses... Unfortunately, IMO the growing surgical and pharmaceutical technology makes it less likely that the horses' welfare really comes into play - because it is becoming easier and more economical to just patch them up when they break and keep running them rather than give them time to mature and/or heal.

[Maralynn]

Does anyone think there is a chance in hell that a high profile breakdown like Barbaro's will raise any debate about the way the racing industry is responsible for these horses breaking down by starting them when they are still babies?

I doubt it. In the last dozen or so years, in the Triple Crown races there have been at least a half dozen career ending injuries, and at least 2 where the horse was put down. Including Preakness winner Prairie Bayou.

 

Thanks for posting, Hector. The article was an interesting read. Barbaro looked incredible in the Derby. It's so sad about his injury. I hope he recovers from it.

[nancy in AZ]

Wasn't it Charismatic that was pulled up and basically saved by the quick reaction of his jockey? The injury of Barbaro (though I missed the race, I saw a brief clip on CNN) was so horrifying to watch, I had a naive hope that this catastrophe would at least bring to light the plight of how badly these animals are exploited.

[Black Watch Debatable]

Hector, thanks for this thread. There are more photos in the video on this site.

 

My best horse ever was a bay thoroughbred mare, a wonderful trail horse and a good training level dressage competitor. She taught me tons, and gave me a whole new perspective on the breed.

 

My first horse was an off-the-track, 5/8 thoroughbred running quarter horse with a nasty tendency to bolt. Some of you will know that charming sensation of reins that suddenly seem connected to a freight train... Which is why I want express all kinds of admiration for Barbaro's jockey, Edgar Prado. He did an incredible, quick and careful job of stopping Barbaro on the track (with a plain snaffle, ye gods), and all the doctors and others pointed out that without Prado's skill, the situation would have been much worse. [stands, applauds for Edgar]

 

(There's been a lot of talk about injuries being "part of the game" of horse racing, yadda yadda. In the real world of riding, as opposed to racing, a three year old colt is a baby. Not even a teenager---a baby. Horses aren't allowed to compete in the Olympic equestrian events until they are at least six years old, and most Olympic mounts are years older than that. Three day event Olympic champion Custom Made was sixteen when he won the gold in Australia. But we have this greedy tradition of racing horses at three and even two years of age )

 

I watched the Preakness with my dad, who'll be eighty this year. A long time ago, on a neighbor's grainy black and white TV up at Big Bear Lake, Dad and I watched Secretariat win the Belmont. Fond memories of a horse-crazed youth...

 

ETA: Nancy, I agree with you---unfortunately, as long as the Almighty Dollar calls the shots, I don't expect anything to change. One Kentucky columnist wrote, "These injuries are a disgrace! We must [wait for it] improve the footing on our racetracks!" Yeah, that's the ticket.

[Rave]

In all my years of watching racing, I've never seen a horse break out of the starting gate like Barb did ... anyone see that before? Man, he looked so ready to run. What a shame.

[nancy in AZ]

And while we're at it, let's be honest. Starting horses too young for purposes of competition is certainly not the exclusive provenance of the racing industry. There are reiners, cutters, etc, all in which it's accepted practice to start 'em as babies so they can be on the payroll as soon as possible. Again, the difference in many of those competitions is that you seldom see the consequences of this practice in quite the dramatic way or with the same size audience as in the Triple Crown

[Falcon]

Originally posted by nancy in AZ:

Wasn't it Charismatic that was pulled up and basically saved by the quick reaction of his jockey?

Pretty much, yeah. At least his injury was late in the race, so it wasn't nearly as hard to pull him up.

 

And y'all had to bring up Ruffian. Just thinking about her still makes me cry. Heck, I still have an old video of that race.

[hastyreply]

Horses like Barbaro wouldn't even exist if it weren't for horse racing. There would be no reason to breed them.

 

I've had horses for over 45 years. While none of them have done much of note except make me and my family happy, they are decended from horses like Barbaro (going back far enough) and they benefit from the progress in vet care/animal health made possible from the finacing and research provided by the horse racing industry and the other horse industries that make money.

 

I think there is abuse going on in horse racing but no more than anywhere else, in the horse or dog world.

 

Doing that sort of surgery on Barbaro was a giant leap forward in learning how to deal with injuries like that. They don't just happen to race horses. The more it's done the more affordable it becomes and new methods are developed that one day will save my horse or yours.

[nancy in AZ]

While I concede that the industry is partially responsible for funding some significant advances in equine medicine, that's a little like saying Josef Mengele made a contribution to the medical community.

[painted_ponies]

Originally posted by nancy in AZ:

Wasn't it Charismatic that was pulled up and basically saved by the quick reaction of his jockey?

Yes, that was the late Chris Antley of Elloree, SC who pulled Charismatic up, dismounted on the track, and held the horse's leg elevated in his arms until help arrived. A very brave young man.

 

There's a non-fiction book about it: Three Strides Before the Wire.

 

I've been doing a little research on the rate of fatal breakdown injuries in TB flat racing since Barbaro's awful injury on Saturday. Even the racing commission stats show fatal breakdowns occur on average in 1.6 out of every 1000 starts, and non-fatal breakdowns in about 4 of 1000.

 

Anyone remember the Irish trainer in Jane Smiley's Horse Heaven? I thought she was a wonderful character whose ambivalence about her profession shed a lot of light on the "dark side" of racing.

[SoloRiver]

Yep - Ruffian is still ingrained in my mind. With today's veterinary technology and advancements, she probably could have been saved.

 

I highly doubt it. That was a truly devastating injury, and it's much worse to break a foreleg than a hind because a quadruped's center of gravity is closer to the front end than the back. They can do a lot more these days but they still can't work miracles.

 

I've never seen footage of Ruffian's breakdown, but I saw Go For Wand's break down in the Breeder's Cup Distaff, which was included in an HBO documentary about jockeys. I think Go For Wand broke the same leg as Ruffian, but in her case she actually went down and threw her jockey. They euthanized her on the track.

 

I was very excited to watch the Preakness this year. Barbaro looked like a real contender. Of course, we've been let down year after year, but after he walked away from a very deep Derby field I had a lot of hope. I wish breeders would take durability more into account when making breeding choices. But these days the top horses retire when they're still babies, so who would know if they were truly durable or not.

 

Ruffian's sire, Reviewer, broke down three times before being retired at a relatively young age (4? 5?). You would think this would be a sign that perhaps he shouldn't be bred. Of course, then we would never have had Ruffian, but we wouldn't have lost Ruffian either, nor would she have suffered so.

 

This article is an interesting read, in this context. Anyone interested in Thoroughbreds can find a lot of great stuff on this site; anyone interested in pedigree research and breeding in general -- not just horses -- can learn a lot here.

 

http://www.reines-de-course.com/ruffian.htm

 

I hope Barbaro pulls through.

[Black Watch Debatable]

Get your Barbaro updates here.

 

Interesting article in today's NY Times.

 

Another update.

[AK dog doc]

Hmm. The proximal cause of death for Ruffian was that she detroyed her repair on recovering from anesthesia. This is much more preventable now. Had she not done that, there would certainly still have been hurdles ahead, but foreleg fractures are significantly more manageable now than they used to be, despite the fact that horses DO take 60% of their weight on the front legs. Depending on the type of fracture - and I never saw Ruffian's xrays (I was in junior high when that happened), so I can't say if hers WAS such a fracture - there are means of stabilizing the leg which bridge the fracture zone so that the forces of weight bearing are taken up by the fracture stabilization method and kept off the fracture itself. This allows the fracture to heal while the horse is still wieght-bearing on that leg. We had a quarterhorse go through the U who had a right fore cannon bone fracture that did very well this way. That horse returned to athletic soundness, though I'm not sure if he went back to his prior level of performance. (A Q-horse, being more heavily muscled for the amount of bone, would actually have MORE force on that bone than a Thoroughbred would, typically.) That one was by no means the only one who did well after a forelimb fracture, but his was the most similar in type to Ruffian's (this per the equine specialists at the U.) Of course we'll never know what would have happened if Ruffian had broken down this week instead of in 1975... but IMO, we can't say she wouldn't have made it, and I think we CAN say her chances would have been lots better.

 

No argument that hind leg fractures are "better" than foreleg fractures in the sense that the hind leg bears less weight, but that doesn't mean a foreleg fracture can't be fixed, and very successfully. IIRC, Go For Wand had an open fracture (Ruffian's was closed), which is a whooooole different disaster, and in that case the chances of recovery would be essentially nil - at least as medicine stands today. Hence the wisdom in euthanising her on the track.

 

As a BTW, the article about the genetics is interesting, and it may certainly be that the Native Dancer lines carry something that increases the breakdown liklihood, although his son, Northern Dancer, was arguably the best racing thoroughbred sire of his century; I'm not disputing the genetics, as I know too little about hte lines and the breakdowns seen to comment. However, (as a point of information) it's misleading to say that there's "soft" bone in those horses. Bone is piezoelectric, and in an animal as big and heavy as a horse, with bones as big and heavy as the cannon bone (which it the most susceptible to this type of injury) the piezoelectric effect is more pronounced. In this effect, on full load the bone compresses and allows electrons to transfer up and down the structure of the bone in a way that does not occur when the bone is not under full load. This can render the bone, for that instant in time, extremely brittle. Under those circumstances, the bone can essentially explode from the inside out - hence the devastating nature of these injuries, since the leg just shatters. It's not just a nice simple fracture, but a jigsaw puzzle in there. At any rate, there certainly may be an increased incedence of fractures in those horses - but it may actually be because there is MORE bone, not less, in those lines. (FWIW, I had at least two "Dancer" line horses in my care during my grooming career, and neither had a soundness issue. There was a Slewpy colt in the barn who DID have soundness issues, and was a right ba*^%#rd to work with, as well - I'm surprised he didn't seriously injure someone. I saw him come close on several occasions. The trainer sent him on - didn't want someone in the barn getting killed. So legs are not the ONLY unsoundness that might become an issue, IMO - and there certainly may be a genetic componant to that, as well.)

 

And now I have to go see if the moose cow and her two calves have departed from my driveway so that I can go to work (I'm already 15 minutes late, which time I spent on this...) Nope, still there....