equine welfare | Horse Racing Free Tips

Proposed Kentucky Legislation Would Help Lighten Financial Strain From Animal Control In Abuse Cases

Animal cruelty and neglect cases are often fraught with legal and logistical challenges for the law enforcement or animal control officers handling them – not the least of which is what to do with animals that must be seized. A 2016 case of large-scale equine neglect in Mercer County, Ky., highlighted many of those challenges as dozens of horses had to be kept in place and fed by volunteers with donated hay while authorities investigated and worked to determine their ownership. One of the challenges in that case was finding someplace for the horses to go once volunteers received clearance to move them.

That case received plenty of publicity and horses were dispersed to rightful owners or to rescue facilities quickly, but in many lesser-known cases in more outlying areas, animal control officers don't have many resources to care for seized animals. Animals seized in the course of a cruelty investigation cannot be adopted out or sold until the case is closed or unless the owner gives consent, sticking already-strapped local law enforcement with months' worth of bills. When horses are involved, a seizure can be even more expensive than a case limited to dogs or cats.

Kentucky State Rep. Cherylynn Stevenson (D-District 88) is hoping new legislation could make that burden lighter. HB100 could make the owner of an animal seized during the course of a cruelty investigation responsible for the cost of the animal's care during the course of the criminal case or until the animal is relinquished.

The bill was born from a discussion Stevenson had with an animal control officer in her home district of Lexington, but improving Kentucky's animal care laws has been on her radar for some time.

“As I was campaigning and going door to door canvassing, we realized that nine out of ten houses in my district had an animal, so we started carrying cat treats and dog treats with us,” said Stevenson. “We realized that it was a really great bridge for the political divide. A lot of people care about animals and want to see [animal welfare] improve here in our state.”

For many years the Animal Legal Defense Fund placed Kentucky last on its rankings of states based on the strength of their animal welfare laws. Stevenson said that ranking may improve slightly after the state amended a law last year that had previously prohibited veterinarians from reporting suspected animal cruelty.

The cost of seized animals is no small consideration – Stevenson recalled one seizure of over 100 cats where board bills for the animals topped $80,000. Many local authorities don't have facilities to house horses at all and are reliant on non-profits to find a stall or pasture space. Then they're faced with the fact that horses are even more expensive to feed and maintain.

“I think we'll see a greater number of animals be saved if this goes through, because there will be a recourse then for all the upkeep, any vet care,” she said. “Ultimately if shelters aren't doing this and taxpayers aren't paying for it, that's a win for everybody.”

Legislation on other types of animal welfare topics has sometimes faced an uphill battle in Kentucky, where agriculture is prevalent and many residents have strong feelings about private property rights. Stevenson admitted this bill could face some opposition from those factions, as well as from defense attorneys who might bristle at the idea their clients could face financial judgments in addition to fines or other sanctions. It's not uncommon for attorneys or clients to prolong cases a part of their legal strategy, which would result in a higher care bill for the animal's owner under the proposed legislation. Sometimes, Stevenson said, animals are returned to their owner prior to the end of a case because the county can no longer afford to care for them.

The bill does have bipartisan support however, and the Kentucky Equine Education Project (KEEP) has placed its support behind the language.

“I think getting that equine stamp of approval is very helpful,” she said. “I think there's going to always be some folks out there who look at that property rights issue and they're not going to budge. And that's ok – not everyone has to agree all the time … we're trying to be as transparent as we can and have conversations with folks before it comes up before committee.”

Stevenson expects the bill to come before committee on Feb. 17.

The post Proposed Kentucky Legislation Would Help Lighten Financial Strain From Animal Control In Abuse Cases appeared first on Horse Racing News | Paulick Report.

Source of original post

A ‘Horse-on-a-Chip’? The Future Of Equine Drug Research Could Look Very Different

The research process for drug toxicology in horses has always been long, slow, and expensive. Too often, when veterinarians want to more about the way a drug behaves in horses, they find themselves relying on limited data collected from a small number of horses. That's because there is a lot of expense and regulation associated with using live animals for research of any kind, even a simple drug administration study aimed at determining how quickly horses' bodies metabolize a therapeutic substance. It's also expensive for universities to maintain horse research herds of significant size year after year, awaiting their use in a short study.

A research group at the Gluck Equine Research Center is hopeful they have a solution that will make it quicker and easier for scientists to understand how drugs behave in horses, and it sounds like something out of a sci-fi drama: microscopic equine organ systems.

It's no longer science fiction. Dr. Carrie Shaffer said researchers aren't reconstructing full-size organs, but rather are using defined layers of cells that mirror what you'd find in an equine kidney, liver, lung, or intestine. The cells come from tissue-specific stem cells collected from a Thoroughbred foal that had to be euthanized due to an unrelated structural deformity. Stem cells have the ability to become any kind of differentiated cell upon command, so the researchers are able to direct the cells to form a particular organ tissue.

“We can prove, using a variety of different methods, that our equine microscopic organ systems are stem-cell derived and have the same characteristics and architecture as the corresponding tissue in the horse.”

These microscopic organ systems are grown in clear, plastic microfluidic chips that are about the size of a AA battery. In human medicine, similar microfluidic chips have been developed to mimic the human liver, lung, intestine, kidney, and blood/brain barrier and are used to study various aspects of cell biology and tissue responses to therapeutics.

The metabolism of a drug isn't dependent on the full-size physical structure of an equine liver or kidney, according to Shaffer – it's how the cells of those organs interact with drugs they encounter as the substance passes through an animal's bloodstream and into the organ tissue. Shaffer is able to grow specific liver cells in one channel of the microfluidic chip while creating artificial blood vessels and blood-like fluid flow on the opposite channel of the chip. This simulates a continuous blood supply interfaced with the mucous membranes that are normally found in the body. The blood flow can go in only one direction, which also mimics the horse's body, where veins and arteries carry blood through an organ in only one direction at a time.

“In the case of the lung chip and the intestine chip, we can also introduce relevant biomechanical forces that simulate complex biological processes,” she said. “We can introduce physical stresses into the chip that mimic breathing and lung inflation, or recreate defined patterns of stretch across the intestine chip that simulate the wave-like pattern of nutrients and waste products moving along the equine intestinal system.”

These forces have been shown to direct gene expression in the cells, which create small, but critical, changes that make the microfluidic chips behave more like the cells found in a live animal.

Previous iterations of this technology didn't include biomechanical forces like stretch, so the tissue wasn't as true to that in a horse's body. Additionally, previous tissue culture systems did not allow for directional fluid flow, but rather exposed a single type of liver or kidney cell to static fluid containing a drug at a fixed concentration. That's not how real kidneys and livers actually work, said Shaffer – the organs contain multiple cell types that are exposed to blood flowing at a relatively high rate. Therapeutics within the bloodstream pass through various organ systems within seconds, and carry metabolized drug away from one organ system for delivery to another.

“Under normal drug testing conditions, we are able to analyze a blood sample from a horse after a drug is administered, but we cannot tell in that blood sample where the drug metabolism occurred,” she said. “We don't know whether the drug was liver-metabolized, intestinal-metabolized, or metabolized in the lung. Our horse-on-a-chip microfluidic technology allows us to isolate exactly where drug metabolism occurs within the horse.”

Some drugs metabolize at different rates in different organs, and organs probably take turns at metabolizing a drug but there's currently no way to know in what order metabolism occurs for a given therapeutic. That information could be useful because some drugs linger longer in the body than expected, and scientists often don't know where the hold-up is.

Shaffer said her lab has performed only a handful of studies with the technology because it's so new. So far, the team has pulsed a drug through an equine lung-chip and a liver-chip for sample collection from the apparatus at defined times post-administration to see how much of the drug had been metabolized by specific tissues in a set timeframe.

The team is still validating these emerging methods and drafting papers for peer-reviewed journals describing the process they've used to create this technology. Shaffer said they're still a few months away from using the organ chips en masse for huge studies – and they need to expand to include tissues from other breeds – but she thinks the microfluidic chips could be useful for pre-clinical analysis of new therapeutic drugs.

“The big sell with our horse-on-a-chip technology is that it's going to significantly reduce animal use for studies – reduce euthanasia, reduce the need for research herds,” she said. “We can now perform the majority of upstream pre-clinical analyses in the lab using our technology that recreates the dynamic environment within the horse. Before, we'd study the effects of a new drug using expensive and limited research herds. Now, we can perform critical toxicity and safety studies before the candidate drug is ever injected into a horse.

“The key to our technology is that we don't need to euthanize additional horses. We can go back to our cryobank of Thoroughbred tissue and enrich for tissue-specific stem cells to essentially grow equine microfluidic organ-chips indefinitely. My research team has developed several innovative methods that allow us to keep using and expanding these diverse equine tissues indefinitely.”

The post A ‘Horse-on-a-Chip’? The Future Of Equine Drug Research Could Look Very Different appeared first on Horse Racing News | Paulick Report.

Source of original post

‘Responsibility Grief’ Weighs Heavily On Horse Owners

Researchers at the University of Nottingham have completed a study on how the horse-human relationship affects decision making around key events in a horse's life, including euthanasia. The team found that many owners have enjoyed their horses for multiple years and consider horses part of their family, which makes end-of-life decisions particularly difficult.

Drs. Harriet Clough, Mandy Roshier, Gary England, John Burford and Sarah Freeman found that feelings of guilt and the burden of responsibility can take an “extraordinary” toll on horse owners. The research team created an online survey that targeted horse owners who had experience with both purchasing and euthanizing horses. It delved into their experiences and relationships with their horses.

The survey received 938 responses; 870 of those respondents owned the horse, and nearly 94 percent of these considered the horse part of their family. These findings highlighted what the team called “responsibility grief.” These are the feelings of guilt and betrayal some horse owners have over making the decision to euthanize their horse. The scientists found this grief had both short- and long-term impacts on owners.

The short-term impacts include being unable to make the decision to euthanize the horse at the correct time to limit suffering. The long-term impacts included feelings of guilt and responsibility months or years after euthanizing their horse. These feelings may affect future decision making for other horses.

The team suggests further study to learn more about how this unique grief impacts equine welfare, and what resources owner need to cope.

New York Poised To Pass Legislation To Make Transfer Of Thoroughbreds For Slaughter Illegal

A bill that would seek to interrupt the slaughter pipeline for Thoroughbreds in New York has passed the state's senate and gained bipartisan support, according to a report by the Thoroughbred Daily News. Senate Bill 1442, which is sponsored by Sen. Joseph P. Addabbo, Jr. (D-15th District), would prohibit the slaughter of racehorses and breeding stock, and would make it illegal for a person or other entity to “import, export, sell, offer to sell or barter, transfer, purchase, possess, transport, deliver, or receive a race horse or race horse breeding stock with the intent of slaughtering or having another person, corporation, association or entity slaughter such race horse or race horse breeding stock.”

The bill also prohibits similar actions in cases where the person knew or “should have known” that the horse was intended to go to slaughter. It additionally requires breeding programs to designate money to go to aftercare.

The bill would give the New York State Gaming Commission the power to take action against the licenses of anyone found to be in violation, and could also stop breeders from receiving breeders' awards in the state.

There is currently no other law in any other state that makes it illegal for someone to sell or transfer a racehorse for slaughter. Horse slaughter itself is not illegal in the United States, but has not taken place commercially for more than a decade because there is no funding allocated for federal inspections of horse slaughter plants. It remains legal for horses to be exported to Canada or Mexico for the ultimate purpose of slaughter. Anti-slaughter policies are in place at some racetracks, but their enforcement is considered a private property matter and racing commissions do not participate.

Addabbo said the state's owners and breeders came to him with the idea for the bill, and he anticipates no problems with the bill passing the New York State Assembly.