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Churchill Downs Racing Club’s Warrior’s Club To Join TRF At Chestnut Hill Sanctuary

The Thoroughbred Retirement Foundation (TRF) will welcome graded stakes winner Warrior's Club to the TRF Sanctuary Farm at Chestnut Hall through a generous $30,000 donation from the Churchill Downs Racing Club.

“The Churchill Downs Racing Club has been a real thrill and has generated hundreds of new Thoroughbred owners,” said Gary Palmisano, Churchill Downs Racing Club Director. “Warrior's Club has taken his members and the club on an incredible journey and he deserves, like all Thoroughbreds, to live out his days in a place where people can visit him and he can enjoy his retirement.”

Warrior's Club was the first horse for the Churchill Downs Racing Club which was started in 2016 and the son of Warrior's Reward took the 200 partners involved in his group on a whirlwind ride over the course of four years winning races at marquee tracks across the country with victories at Churchill Downs, Saratoga, Oaklawn and Keeneland. Trained by Hall of Famer D. Wayne Lukas, Warrior's Club amassed earnings of over $850,000 including a victory in the Grade III Commonwealth Stakes at Keeneland Race Course and competed at the sport's highest level, even participating in the Breeders' Cup Sprint (GI).

The Churchill Downs Racing Club has a commitment to aftercare. Through the success of Warrior's Club on the racetrack, the group was able to purchase several other horses, all of whom have gone on to second careers and homes after racing. To date, the club has either claimed back or purchased back all but two horses, both of whom are actively still racing, to ensure safe and happy retirements.

On behalf of Warrior's Club and the Churchill Downs Racing Club donations also were made to Second Stride, New Vocations, the Permanently Disabled Jockeys Fund and Thoroughbred Charities of America.

The TRF Sanctuary Farm at Chestnut Hall opened in April 2021. The farm, a first-of-its kind, was designed to give the Louisville community and fans from around the world a direct connection to the horses at the heart of horse racing. The new TRF Sanctuary Farm at Chestnut Hall will be the permanent home of 11 horses from the organization's national herd of 500 retired Thoroughbred racehorses. These “herd ambassadors” will serve as educators to tell the story of the long life and diverse second careers that await these equine athletes when their racing days are done. Located on nearly 30 acres of historic farmland in Oldham County and featuring a beautiful farmhouse restored to serve as an event venue, Chestnut Hall has been created for the express purpose of connecting Thoroughbred horses to the people of Louisville, the Commonwealth of Kentucky and beyond. Starting mid-May, the farm will be open to the public for tours through Visit Horse Country and will be available as a unique venue for educational events and fundraisers for nonprofits across the Louisville community.

USDA Transitions To Private Equine Quarantines In Miami

The United States Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) will end equine import quarantine at the Miami Animal Import Center. Instead, equines being imported through the Miami area will spend their quarantine period at one of the three privately operated, USDA-approved quarantine facilities nearby.

Effective July 2, 2021, APHIS will no longer accept new reservations for equine quarantines at the Miami Animal Import Center. Reservations made through July 1 may be completed at the Miami Animal Import Center but by the end of July, all equine quarantines will take place at the private facilities.

APHIS is making this change because the private equine quarantine facilities in the area offer greater capacity and more options for importers than the USDA-operated facility. Importers and brokers can find contact information for the Miami area private equine quarantine facilities on the APHIS website.

APHIS will focus on providing greater customer service for the other services offered at the Miami Animal Import Center and through the Miami Port Office. They include: avian quarantines, import inspections, export inspections, and export endorsement services for veterinary health certificates.

There is typically a seasonal increase in equine imports from October through March, and the local private facilities have the capacity to meet these seasonal demands. We are notifying stakeholders who use the Miami Animal Import Center now, so they will be able to plan ahead for the next busy season.

Read more at the Equine Disease Communication Center.

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About That Connection Between SGF-1000 And Dexamethasone

When news broke last weekend that Medina Spirit had tested positive for the corticosteroid betamethasone, Paulick Report staff received several questions from readers asking about a phone conversation intercepted by federal agents. Court documents from the federal indictments of March 2020 recalled a conversation between trainer Jason Servis and veterinarian Dr. Kristian Rhein in which they were discussing a substance called SGF-1000, which prosecutors say was one of the misbranded or adulterated drugs at the heart of the case. Rhein told Servis that the substance could sometimes create a false positive for “dex,” widely believed to refer to dexamethasone, and Servis asked Rhein to alter his veterinary records to make it appear as though horses had been treated with dexamethasone in case of a positive test.

Read more about SGF-1000 in this Paulick Report feature.

Since both dexamethasone and betamethasone are corticosteroids, some readers wondered whether a positive test for betamethasone could actually be a guise for something more sinister.

According to Dr. Mary Scollay, executive director for the Racing Medication and Testing Consortium, the answer is no.

Scollay explained that the testing and confirmation process used in mass spectronomy makes it virtually impossible for one drug to be misidentified as another. She doesn't believe betamethasone is a false positive result, nor that SGF-1000 could actually have shown up as dexamethasone in post-race tests. (No one ever said the indicted individuals were always accurate in their intercepted conversations.)

Mass spectronomy works by identifying foreign molecules inside blood or urine and weighing them as part of a process called screening analysis. Those molecular weights are then checked against the lab's drug catalogue. The catalogue contains the molecular weights of known substances and is developed through rigorous testing of known drugs. If a molecular weight matches something in the catalogue, that's an initial finding.

Before the lab can actually call the test a positive for the substance though, it goes through a second process called confirmatory analysis. It's possible two substances could have the same weight but be made up of different components, so the lab must find out if their compositions are the same. In this process, the molecules of the substance are bombarded with energy until they split apart, and the ratios of the resulting pieces are measured against the catalogued substance.

“Each specific molecule has its own way of fragmenting,” said Scollay. “It's like a Hershey bar – it's scored in a certain way, it's going to break the same way every time if you apply force at certain points. When you go to identify the molecule, you look at the candidate ions, the ions that result from fragmenting it, and also the ratio of those ions to each other. They should be present in very specific proportions. If they're not, or if the candidate ions are not present, or even one of them is missing, you have not identified the substance.

“I would argue that if you identify the candidate ions in the right ratio, you've identified betamethasone.”

By the time a lab calls a positive using this testing method, it's justifiably confident that the substance at play has been correctly identified.

So what of the SGF-1000/dex connection?

“Maybe dexamethasone was in the SGF-1000, and that's why they said it would show as dexamethasone, but if a molecule has the same exact molecular weight as dexamethasone and you apply energy to it and it fragments, and the fragmented parts are the ions you would get from dexamethasone in the relative concentrations, I'm going to say you've identified dexamethasone,” she said.

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Does Inadequate Sleep Affect Equine Memory?

As a prey species, horses have evolved to sleep in unique ways that will allow them to be nearly constantly vigilant about predators. One way they can stay on alert is dozing while standing up. Though they don't enter the necessary rapid eye movement (REM) phase in this position, they are able to fulfill some sleep requirements. To get deep REM sleep, the horse must lie down.

Though horses can cope with short periods of REM sleep, it's imperative that they are able to enter this regenerative sleep phase. Dr. Linda Greening and colleagues from Aberystwyth University created a study to determine the cognitive effects on horses if environmental factors precluded them from entering the REM sleep cycle.

The researchers tested environmental effects on equine sleep patterns using two light regimes and two different depths of straw bedding. The team then tested each horse to see if his cognitive performance was affected by sleep patterns.

The team placed 10 adult horses into two groups for the five-week experiment. Each group had either the lights on or off overnight and straw bedding at nearly two inches or nearly six inches for six days. The horse then measured the horse's response to a cognitive test.

The team found that the horse's sleep stages were affected by both the lighting and the depth of bedding. Horses that were bedded more shallowly spend more time standing, meaning they didn't enter the REM sleep cycle.

The lighting and bedding did not have a significant impact on the memory test, which included placing four buckets around the arena and asking the horse to remember which one contained feed.

Read the full study here.