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The Blueberry Bulletin Presented By Equine Equipment: Lessons From A Draft Cross To An OTTB

This is the second installment in our monthly column from editor-in-chief Natalie Voss following her journey with her 2021 Thoroughbred Makeover hopeful Underscore, fondly known as Blueberry. Read previous editions in this series here and learn Blueberry's origin story and the author's long-running bond with this gelding and his family here. You can find Blueberry's Facebook page here.

Horse racing is a sport predicated on comparisons – both of horses actively competing against each other and those generations apart. For some years, Racing Twitter loved nothing more than to pit two greats from different eras against each other in a theoretical race (Man o' War vs. Secretariat is the one that used to make the rounds) and ask which one would have won. It's a question people still love to ask jockeys and trainers who have been lucky enough to work with more than one top-level runner. The interviewee almost never has a very stunning or insightful answer and I frankly think that's because it's a ridiculous question.

As someone who rides, I have a keen sense for what unique individuals horses can be and that's probably why I've never found these comparisons all that interesting. Great horses are no more similar to each other than mediocre ones, so a lot of it has seemed like comparing apples, oranges, and bananas for me.

And yet, I find myself doing exactly the same thing in my own riding life.

Although I've been riding my whole life, Blueberry is just the second horse who has been my own. My first is an opinionated Percheron/Thoroughbred cross mare named Jitterbug, who I have written about here before. She was a neglect case in her youth, essentially feral until the age of three. I began working with her when she was five and unbroke. While teaching her to carry a saddle and rider was surprisingly easy, it took years for her to become a reliable mount with a solid walk/trot/canter who could reasonably be said to stand for the farrier, bathe, tie, clip, load – the most basic list of skills you see in most sale ads. She has been a challenging ride, made more challenging by the fact I encountered her at a time I was retraining my hunt seat to dressage.

We have accomplished a lot together when I think about where she started – a buggy-eyed, rank individual of Too Much Weight and Too Much Brain, shuddering in the back of her stall the fall morning I first met her more than a decade ago. We've competed successfully in horse trials, combined tests, dressage and jumper classes; we've hacked many miles in the local parks and on hunter paces; she is now reliable enough to carry children around, as long as they have no ego at all and tell her how pretty she is. I cannot pretend that she has always been easy or good for me as a rider. Flatwork sessions on late nights under the arena lights have sometimes ended in frustrated tears. She's bigger than me, and she will never unlearn that. We know each other so well, we crawl into each other's brains and play chess over 20-meter trot circles. A lot of effort goes into minimal improvements in our dressage training, but I have to admit there were many times I had doubted she would be rideable at all so perhaps I should take what I can get.

Jitterbug is now 17, and Blueberry's arrival in my care after his retirement in November was impeccably timed. Jitterbug is partially leased by a kind family who ask relatively little of her, and she and I needed a break from pushing each other's buttons. As I've brought Blueberry along under saddle these last two months, it's been hard not to think about all the positive qualities he had that the big mare … well … doesn't. (A work ethic, for example.)

The author with the big mare

I'm trying to reframe this way of thinking, as I don't think it's totally fair to the OG. So instead, I've been trying to think about the lessons one horse has taught me in order to prepare me for her polar opposite.

A horse with a good mind is worth their weight in gold. Mentality was more important to me than anything else when I began thinking about my next riding partner, and that's what attracted me to Blueberry. Jitterbug has kept me safe through fireworks shows, rogue wildlife, loose horses flying by us at horse shows, and all manners of klutzy moments as I've led her to and from the field in icy mud. So far, Blueberry has shown similar wisdom, tuning out galloping pals in neighboring paddocks on late evenings in the arena, staring placidly at loose horses at shows (it's a jungle out there) and learning to ignore a Most Unsettling Power Saw. He's an athletic little thing, but even if he moved like a giraffe, I'd know I was safe. As I get older, I have come to appreciate that I do not bounce so well when I hit the ground, and as such I value a horse that will avoid any unnecessary gravity checks.
At some point, if you chose well, your developing horse will outclass you. This discovery with Jitterbug came when she progressed from smaller fences to three-foot monsters and I realized suddenly that all that talk about a tight lower leg was not a suggestion based on aesthetics but practicality. That was several years into our journey together. In true OTTB fashion, Blueberry learns new things quickly both mentally and physically, so it was a matter of weeks before he went from doing the drunken sailor/baby horse wobbles around corners in the arena to proudly holding himself up. While he was getting stronger, I was staying basically the same and as soon as he was capable of taking bigger, more upright strides, I started looking like a beginner. Floppy lower legs, a wobbling core, weak wrists – it's all I can see when I watch video of us working together. I suspect all riders hate watching their own equitation but I'd forgotten just how much I hate it. I think I'd assumed I had more time to develop myself and now we're waiting on my fitness level to catch up to the 4-year-old greenie.
The answer to this is always to drop your stirrups and suffer through as much posting trot as you can. This is tougher once you get a horse with a Thoroughbred-sized stride, by the way. I hate this truth, but I can't escape it.
Smart horses will learn from you every moment, even when you aren't trying to teach them things. I can no longer blame my horses for immediately running out of gas after a nice transition from canter to trot. I apparently am so relieved to have kept a consistent position from one kind of bouncing gait to another that I immediately become a wet noodle, inadvertently suggesting 'You know, this is a great time for a nap.' All this time I had blamed the half Perch for halting a few steps after a lovely canter, and in fact I am the lazy one. Sorry, Jitter.
You're playing the long game here. It's easy to become discouraged when considering the above, especially when you're an amateur rider like I am, fitting in lessons and training rides around the edges of a full-time job. It's easy to feel like you're behind where you could or should be. Jitterbug has taught me though, that any real progress worth measuring takes place over months and years. I hope Blueberry and I will be partners for many years to come, and that means each of us will have periods of rapid progress and plateaus, both physical and mental. Yes, he seems like an easy ride right now, but we will have our struggles eventually. That's just life with horses. The more important thing will be looking at how far we've come, and working through those challenges as a team.

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New Mexico State University To Study New Method Of Mustang Population Control

Throughout the United States, wild horses still roam through the wide-open spaces. While they may be wild and free, they come at a cost to taxpayers, as much as $1 billion from 2019 to 2023, according to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.

That's an opportunity for Wildlife Protection Management, Inc., or WPM, to be a leader in helping the government with humane ways to control population growth and keep the horses, and other wildlife, healthy. Thanks to a $256,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, WPM will work with New Mexico State University faculty to manage the data they've been collecting.

Roch Hart, WPM's CEO, used NMSU's entrepreneur and business incubator Arrowhead Center services to work through the NSF grant application process. WPM had already grown by using several of the Arrowhead Center programs.

Hart first attended the six-week AgSprint, a cohort-based business accelerator that deepened his understanding of the market and future customer needs. He then participated in Arrowhead's Technology Incubator to build the WPM's first vaccine-delivery prototype. The prototype, attached to an alfalfa feeding station, remotely implants radio-frequency identification, or RFID, chips, vaccines and contraceptives into horses.

“We have been highly successful with the RFID. Better than we had hoped,” Hart said. “If we could cut costs by not having to implant every horse with a chip, then we could cut costs considerably. For that, facial recognition technology was the next avenue to explore. New Mexico Small Business Assistance helped us go in that direction first, which helped us to move forward with the NSF grant.”

Hart also used Arrowhead Center's NM Federal and State Technology, or NM FAST, partnership program that provides help to businesses seeking federal funding through the Small Business Innovation Research grants.

“Hart has seen a lot of growth through using the range of programs at Arrowhead Center,” said Del Mackey, senior economic development officer at Arrowhead Center. “The AgSprint program helped him define the need for the tech. NMSBA helped him take it in a new direction, and the NSF SBIR Phase I grant will help him validate the feasibility of using facial recognition alongside the RFID for the identification of not only wild horses but also feral pigs and deer.”

“We do hope to take this technology for horses to other species and scale that technology up. This grant certainly helps that traction,” Hart said.

More traction for WPM will come through the collaboration with NMSU's College of Engineering Associate Professor Laura Boucheron. With the support of a graduate student, Boucheron will spend a year dissecting WPM's data and creating an effective method of animal recognition through videos and images.

“While they have RFID chips, the horses might have recognizable patterns on their faces or flanks or even scars that we can use to build an algorithm that detects individual animals,” Boucheron said. “The ultimate goal is to recognize individual animals based on videos or images and match them up with their RFID identification.”

Boucheron said the collaboration with WPM through Arrowhead Center allows her research to see different applications for her work and help with the inception of entrepreneurial activities.

“What we do can have a direct impact on a problem with the horse population,” she said. “It's something that has quite the real-world applicability.”

Read more at New Mexico State University.

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Fact Check: The Pharmacology Of Betamethasone In Horses

It's clear that the battle over the outcome of the 2021 Kentucky Derby is likely to wage on for years to come. The Kentucky Horse Racing Commission (KHRC) has yet to make a ruling, but preliminary and split sample tests on winner Medina Spirit both came back positive for betamethasone in violation of Kentucky rules. Attorneys for Medina Spirit trainer Bob Baffert and owner Zedan Stables have been vocal about their feelings that the finding in the horse shouldn't matter for a variety of reasons — they say the administration of the drug to the horse came from a topical and not an injectable, they claim that post-race drug testing is designed to find therapeutic drugs at an unreasonably small concentrations, and they claim that the concentration found in Medina Spirit had no appreciable impact on the outcome of the race.

Further, Baffert attorney Craig Robertson said in a CNN interview June 3, a small amount of betamethasone detected in blood couldn't even be having an appreciable impact on the horse's body.

“Just because that's the rule doesn't mean that it's a proper rule,” Robertson said to anchors John Berman and Brianna Keilar on New Day. “And the reason why it's not a proper rule is that at that level, there would be zero pharmacology in a horse – zero – and it would have had no effect on this race. And one thing that you haven't heard, and you will not ever hear, is an equine pharmacologist to come out and say that 21 picograms, 25 picograms would have any pharmacology in a horse. They're not going to say that, because they can't say that.”

But the research – what little peer-reviewed research exists on betamethasone in horses — doesn't support that.

It's difficult to know what concentration of a drug in a horse does or doesn't influence a race; that's a separate question altogether, but there have been two peer-reviewed studies published in recent years which suggest that even small amounts of betamethasone in the blood may indeed reflect some effect on a horse's body.

A study published in the Journal of Veterinary Pharmacology and Therapeutics in 2015 sought to learn more about the pharmacology of intra-articular betamethasone injections in horses. Researchers administered two intra-articular betamethasone to eight 4-year-old Thoroughbreds and exercised them, then took blood and urine samples to check on levels of betamethasone and hydrocortisone for six weeks.

They found that the administration of betamethasone coincided with a reduced production by the horses' bodies of hydrocortisone. Hydrocortisone is naturally produced by the horse's body and acts similarly to its fellow corticosteroid betamethasone. There are synthetic versions of hydrocortisone out there in therapeutic medications, too.

It's thought that circulating levels of a closely-related, administered drug are read by the horse's brain similarly to the endogenously-produced substance, and the brain will halt production of its own corticosteroid until the synthetic corticosteroid wanes. The study found that the suppression of hydrocortisone was present for 96 to 120 hours after the administration of betamethasone.

The study found the last detectable level of betamethasone in plasma at an average of 64 hours post-injection and 69 hours in urine, although those measurements were using .05 nanograms per milliliter (or 50 picograms per mL) of plasma and .25 nanograms per milliliter (or 250 picograms per mL) of urine as their limit of detection – much larger concentrations than what was detected in the Medina Spirit case.

More interestingly though, in 2017 the journal Drug Testing and Analysis published a study which examined the concentrations of betamethasone in blood, urine, and joint fluid in Thoroughbreds. That study found that when betamethasone was injected in a horse's joint, concentrations of the drug in fell below detectable levels much sooner in plasma (96 hours) and urine (seven days) than it did in joint fluid. It took between 14 and 21 days for the drug to disappear from joint fluid in the joint that received the treatment.

“One of the basic tenants of pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic analysis is that blood levels reflect drug concentrations at the site of pharmacologic effect, thereby allowing the extent and duration of effect to be estimated based on blood concentrations,” wrote the study authors, led by Dr. Heather Kynch. “However, this does not appear to be the case for intra-articular corticosteroids.”

The study's findings were not wholly surprising, given that corticosteroids generally are known to be a little fickle in their withdrawal times. One previous study found triamcinolone in joint fluid for 35 days after a joint injection, and another found methylprednisolone 77 days after a single intra-articular dose.

Knych's study also noted that the diffusion of drugs from joints may vary from one joint to another.

“Although more comprehensive pharmacodynamic studies are necessary, these findings suggest that the anti-inflammatory effects may continue even though drug is no longer detected in blood,” wrote the Knych team. “A major concern with this finding is that horses may be able to return to racing before they are completely healed following an injury. Even though blood concentrations would be below the recommended threshold, allowing the horse to race, therapeutic drug concentrations in the joint may mask the clinical signs of an injury that is not completely healed. This could ultimately increase the risk of additional damage to the joint.”

At the time Knych and her team performed that study, the Racing Medication and Testing Consortium (RMTC) recommended a seven-day withdrawal of corticosteroids to clear a regulatory threshold of 10 picograms per mL. In the intervening years, jurisdictions like California and Kentucky backed up their corticosteroid administration timeframes to coincide with additional layers of pre-race veterinary checks performed to improve safety after the Santa Anita fatalities. In Kentucky, any level of corticosteroids like betamethasone in a post-race sample is a violation, based on the belief that the drug now can't be found farther out than 14 days post-administration.

Perhaps incredibly, those two studies seem to be the bulk of the peer-reviewed, published research that has been done on the behavior of betamethasone in a horse's body. It's not uncommon for research into equine medications to be limited, even for commonly-used therapeutic drugs like betamethasone.

Baffert's view on the Medina Spirit case would likely dismiss both studies as irrelevant. He asserts he gave the drug via a topical cream to treat a skin condition, not a joint injection, as was done in both studies. Further testing of the blood and urine from Medina Spirit will seek to clarify whether the betamethasone found in the horse came from an injection or an ointment, and it seems that will be an ongoing point of debate for his legal team. But with the limited peer-reviewed research available, the suggestion that the drug doesn't have any pharmacological effect at low levels of detection in blood is going to be an uphill battle.

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Can Horses Help Overcome Pandemic-Related Social Anxiety?

Life coach and leadership expert Stacey Warner uses horses to help teach people about themselves and how they interact with others. With COVID-19 restrictions lifting in many parts of the country, Warner sees her classes as even more relatable as people come out of isolation and are learning how to interact with the world once again.

Warner's classes are dubbed “Horse Powered Leadership” and they focus on encouraging team harmony in a corporate setting. The classes are designed to teach attendees something about themselves, how they work with others and how teams work together, the Courier Journal reports.

A California transplant, Warner says classes utilizing horses in this teaching capacity are very common in California and Arizona. Horses offer clear feedback to class attendees in a way not often seen in a work-related setting. Understanding social cues is a skill that has gone mostly unneeded as many people have worked remotely for over a year.

Warner teaches several different types of classes, but the end goal of each is the same: to let the horse expose the attendee's strengths and weaknesses, then to use that knowledge to become more productive.