Garry White is facing a possible suspension having been accused of injecting four horses before a race with an unnamed substance but probably a performance enhancing substance of some sort. His four runners were scratched from last Sunday’s Hawkesbury meeting after an investigation by the NSW Investigations and Surveillance Unit and Stewards.
They allege that he injected the drugs less than 24-hour’s before they were due to race. Under current Australian racing rules horses cannot be injected within a day of the event. He’s been charged by the stewards under AR 254-injections prohibited at certain times.
Items have been seized from his stables for testing at the Australian Racing Forensic Laboratory. He can’t train until the charges have been heard. He might be further charged after the analysis of the drug samples. There will be an enquiry once the test results are available. Garry White has trained more than 350 winners during his career.
50 best excuses why a racehorse didn’t win its race
Drugs and horse racing
The story prompted me to delve briefly into the world of horseracing, drugs and deception. PETA is very helpful in this regard. They say that many racehorses become addicted to drugs. One expert said that is impossible to find an American racehorse that’s been “trained on the traditional hay, oats and water”. In other words, nearly all the horses that you see in horse racing events in the US have been drugged in one way or another.
A former Churchill Downs public relations director, according to the PETA report, said: “There are trainers pumping horses full of illegal drugs every day. With so much money on the line, people would do anything to make their horses run faster”.
Racehorses are becoming more and more fragile and to keep them going trainers give them drugs such as Lasix, which controls bleeding in the lungs, phenylbutazone, an anti-inflammatory and corticosteroids for pain and inflammation. They are legal but they mask pain and make horses run faster. They report that the labortaries cannot detect all the illegal drugs and it is suggested that there are thousands of them, as per the executive director of the Racing Medication and Testing Consortium.
A trainer of the successful 2008 Kentucky Derby admitted to giving his horses a steroid called Winstrol which is the legal to give the horses in 10 states in the US. Before Winstrol was banned in Pennsylvania nearly 1,000 horses were tested for steroids and more than 6 in 10 tested positive.
The veterinarian for the 2008 Kentucky Derby winner, Big Brown, said that racehorses are dependent upon steroids because “without steroids, they lose some horses that can’t keep up the pace and race every three weeks or every month”.
In December 22, 2020, PETA published an article about the success of their horse doping investigation which they said changed horseracing. They reported that the enacting of the federal Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act came about as a results of their investigation several years ago. The law includes new safety procedures, mandatory drug testing, regulations on medicines, anti-doping measures and federal oversight.
PETA investigated the activities of one of America’s top trainers, Steve Asmussen. Their investigation was covered by The New York Times in 2014. It sent shockwaves, they say, through the industry resulting in prosecutions and fines. Below is a video created by PETA on the topic.
Note: This is a video from another website. Sometimes they are deleted at source which stops them working on this site. If that has happened, I apologise but I have no control over it.
Tasmania: PETA want to prove that horse whipping during a race is animal cruelty
They state that racehorses both race and train full of drugs to the point where they will run even though their body is telling them not to because they have bleeding lungs or cracked bones. Race horses are sometimes pushed to exhaustion at which point their limbs might snap. PETA say that the sound is louder than a gunshot. Three horses per day die on the track in the US.
Their investigation found that at the Steve Asmussen’s New York stable, trainers administered thyroxine into many and perhaps all of the horses. They did it through their feed. The drug speeds up metabolism. The drug is normally given for thyroid problems. The horses did not have thyroid problems, as I understand it.
All of the horses were injected with Lasix which today is restricted in America at major tracks. As mentioned, it prevents pulmonary bleeding in the lungs during extreme exercise. It is a diuretic and it can mask other drugs. It also dehydrates horses to make them lose weight and run faster.
In addition to the above, horseracing trainers administer horses a cocktail of sedatives, muscle relaxants and painkillers and other drugs for ailments such as lameness and ulcers. They do so sometimes even though the horse has no apparent symptoms. That is the accusation and statement of PETA on their website. I believe them by the way. There’s too much money involved. Where there’s money involved it’s going to foster bad behaviour, corruption and abuse of animals.
SOME MORE ON HORSES:
