Michael Watts MRCVS
Before you ask, I do not do children’s parties. Predicting the future conjures up images of bling-laden Roma ladies swathed in bandannas peering into crystal balls or half empty teacups and speculating about people’s marriage prospects and life expectancy in fairground tents, their palms have been suitably crossed with silver beforehand. You are welcome to bung me a few bob if you like but I don’t do the smoke and mirrors bit. My party piece is much simpler: I shoot the breeze about the greyhound industry, pontificate and generally put the world to rights. These days it seems to be called “Blue Skies Thinking” for reasons that entirely escape me.
What follows is one man’s view of a brave new world of medication control.
The technology for analysing blood, urine, vomit, even hair samples to detect traces of substances “the origin of which could not be traced to normal and ordinary feeding” as the G.B.G.B “Rules of Racing” describe them has become more and more sophisticated with the passage of time and last year’s cutting edge technology becomes this year’s normal routine. As a result the Great & Good can now detect increasingly tiny amounts of drugs in a greyhound’s system, making it all the more difficult for the low life element in our sport to stop or drive dogs. This cannot be a bad thing as it enhances the public perception of the integrity of the sport as a gambling medium and helps to encourage them to dig deeper into their pockets when backing up their judgement with hard cash. More importantly it has beneficial effects on the welfare of greyhounds and so permits us industry insiders to look the “antis” straight in the eye and confidently parry at least some of their criticisms of our way of life. If this trend continues, and there is no reason to believe it will not, the last few crooks and chancers will final be driven out of the greyhound game, the G.B.G.B anti-doping and medication control crew will sign on down the local job centre and the rest of us will ride off into the sunset on white horses and live happily ever after. You could not be bad to that!
It looks good on paper but when is life ever so simple? If increasingly tiny residues of prohibited substances can be detected, then greyhounds are going to have to be kept off the track for increasingly long times after receiving veterinary treatment so that their owners and trainers can be confident that they will be drug-free when they return to the racing strength. The old familiar Seven Day Rule will become less and less of a rule and more of an anachronism, a historical footnote. Canny readers will be able to see where this argument is going. Owners will have fewer opportunities to watch their dog race, fewer opportunities to have a bet and fewer opportunities to lift a bit of prize money. In short they will have more bills and fewer chances to recoup their expenses, and all this at a time when many owners are already leaving the game. The trainer with a BAGS contract may have to keep more dogs so that he can meet his commitments when increasing numbers of dogs are on the easy list. Racing managers countrywide may find themselves tearing their hair out trying to fill cards as more and more dogs need more and more down time. Suddenly our blue skies thinking is leading us to a place where dark clouds loom menacingly on the horizon.
Before anybody is tempted to take a long walk on a short pier, perhaps it might be worth putting all this in some sort of perspective. If keeping a dog off the track for seven days is no longer likely to be enough to ensure he is free of drug residues when he rejoins the racing strength, then how much longer might we be talking about? You might as well ask how long a piece of string is. There are something in excess of three hundred veterinary medicinal products licensed for use in dogs in the U.K., not to mention a whole raft of others that are licensed for use in other species which in some circumstances can legitimately also be used in dogs under the so-called cascade system.
To get even a ballpark figure, an educated guess as to how long a greyhound treated with one of these would need to be sidelined you would have to administer it to a number of greyhounds at a range of recommended dose rates and collect a long series of urine samples over the succeeding hours and days and test them until a time came that no further residues could be identified. Every greyhound is of course an individual and potentially responds slightly differently to the administration of any drug, so that each test would have to be repeated many, many times to arrive at some sort of estimate of the average time required for that drug to clear from an average dog’s system. Added to that you would need to have some idea of the length of the longest clearance time you would be likely to encounter so that you can make some sort of estimate of how much extra time you might be wise to allow over and above that average to be sure to be sure. Any man with an eye in his head can see that it would take untold numbers of greyhounds, an army of technicians and a Klondike of money to carry out that amount of research, and all this to benefit the connections of a thankfully relatively small number of greyhounds returning to the track after illness or injury. It will come as no great surprise then to learn that nobody, not the pharmaceutical companies nor the G.B.G.B., has ever done that amount of work and, given the time and expense involved. it is hardly likely that they ever will.
Of course one sure-fire way of avoiding your greyhound testing positive for a banned substance is avoid using any pharmaceutical products to treat it in the first place. This may be a valid approach up to a point. Maybe some minor injuries can be satisfactorily treated by physical therapies alone, by physiotherapy or hydrotherapy, by the used of lasers or ultrasound, maybe even by acupuncture. However we are skating on pretty thin ice here. The day we as an industry start advocating the withholding of for example anti-inflammatory or analgesic drugs from injured greyhounds and thus compromising their welfare in the interests of avoiding the consequences of positive urine tests is the day we sign our own death sentence. The road to Hell may be paved with the best of intentions but it still leads to somewhere uncomfortably warm deep beneath us.
Increasingly accurate analytical methods may very well drive the drug cheats out of business, but in so doing they also may make it more difficult for the ordinary decent owner and trainer to stay within the rules in more ways than one. What if the search for perfection results in the identification in a greyhound’s urine of tiny traces of chemicals not deliberately administered to him by inadvertently picked up from the environment around him? Will a day come when a dog tests positive for residues of the detergent used to wash the kennel floor or the paint from the kennel walls? Maybe I am talking through my derriere. Maybe that day is decades away or maybe it will never come at all, but it is a brave man who puts his hand on a stack of Bibles and swears it will never happen.
Even now instances crop up from time to time were greyhounds test positive for morphine in tiny amounts which can be traced back to poppy seeds inadvertently fed in waste bread or for theobromine with which commercial dog meals are sometimes accidently contaminated at the feed mill. The current disciplinary practice in G.B.G.B circles seems to be to take a lenient view of such episodes where it is clear that these potentially performance-altering drugs were unwittingly offered to greyhounds in contaminated feed. It takes either a brave man or a fool to try and read the minds of those in the corridors of power at the G.B.G.B. but perhaps the same view would be taken should residues of environmental contaminants be picked up in a urine sample at the track.
Now it is tempting to say that a whiff of Trigene or a few flakes of limewash never hurt anybody and that residues from sources of that kind are generally likely to be so minute in quantity that they are unlikely to affect the performance of a greyhound one way or another. That might very well be the case, but when push comes to shove it is not possible to be absolutely certain. Someday somewhere there may very well be some greyhound who is unusually sensitive to the effects of some commonplace household product or a dog who through some peculiar circumstance is exposed to an exceptionally large amount of one and subsequently breaks the clock or trails in last.
Come to that, how much do we really know about the effects of licensed veterinary medicines on race dogs? Take Meloxicam for example, a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug now available under a bewildering array of brand names which is used to alleviate inflammation and pain in both acute and chronic musculo-skeletal disorders in dogs. The manufacturers of one popular brand suggest giving dogs 0.2mg/kg bodyweight of Meloxicam by mouth on the first day of treatment and following this up once a day with a maintenance dose of 0.1mg/kg. Now we can be pretty happy that at these dose rates it will alleviate pain and inflammation because the manufacturers will have had to satisfy the Veterinary Medicines Directorate that it does what it says on the tin. We are however a lot less certain what its effects are at lower doses. Intuitively we might predict that it is likely to continue to have some anti-inflammatory action at doses a little lower than this recommended level. If we were to discontinue treatment and thus cause the amount of the active ingredient in the greyhound’s body to gradually fall, we might expect that its anti-inflammatory action would persist for a variable time after the last dose was given, although probably to a lesser degree than when treatment was being administered. We might also anticipate that a day would come when the residues of Meloxicam circulating in the dog’s body would be too small to have any identifiable effect on his performance, although they might still be detectable in his blood or urine. The problem is that we have no robust transparent way of identifying that end point. We cannot put hand on heart and say that a concentration of Meloxicam in a greyhound’s urine of so many milligrams per millilitre represents a concentration in the dog’s body above which identifiable effects on performance are likely and below which no effect on performance can be safely assumed. To identify that threshold concentration would once again require a whole lot of testing of a considerable number of greyhounds and the same exercise would have to be repeated for each one of that long list of licensed drugs we discussed earlier. Furthermore, how are we to identify the effect of a drug on a greyhound’s performance? No greyhound is likely to run the same race in the same time on a number of occasions for any one of a million and one reasons, whether or not it tests positive for banned substances. In the good old bad old days when urine samples when paper chromatography was the state of the art and the Seven Day Rule held sway, life was pretty straightforward and uncomplicated. If residues of prohibited substances were detected in a greyhound’s urine they were assumed to be significant, and residues which the technology of the day could not detect were considered not to be significant. Now however the technology has improved beyond all recognition and residues can be detected at concentrations which at an educated guess probably have little effect on a greyhound’s performance on the track. As a consequence somebody in 6 New Bridge Street EC4 will some day have a policy decision to make. Do they punish the connections of a greyhound in whose urine residual amounts of a prohibited substance or its metabolites are detected however small those residues are, or do they draw a line in the sand and deem residues below a certain figure not to be significant and so the owners or trainers of greyhounds who test positive for the presence of residues below this level are not subject to disciplinary sanction?
Of course there is no need to apply the same approach to all positive test results. We have already seen that a lenient view is often taken in cases where greyhounds test positive for morphine or theobromine where it is likely that this is the result of inadvertent or unwitting contamination of the dog’s diet as laid down in Paragraph 6.2 of Appendix VI of the G.B.G.B. “Rules of Racing”. There are also those veterinary medicines whose use is permitted in race dogs without restriction, the vaccines and parasite control products, for example, and those ointments and potions in the G.B.G.B. published list of permitted treatments. Then there are the oestrus suppressants. Here the waters get a bit more muddy. We know these affect race performance. I am not talking about the widespread belief that some progestogen oestrus suppressants have a deleterious effect on bitches’ race form. I am going to stick my neck out an inch here and suggest that all oestrus suppressants affect race performance. By suppressing heats they tend to smooth out the natural peaks and troughs in the race form of an unsuppressed bitch and make it more predictable for the benefit of the punters. Speaking as a sometime owner of racing bitches, I would prefer them to run in a manner that only I can predict so that I can get my money down when the price is right, but maybe that is just me. If we accept that we can legitimately give one class of performance-enhancing drug to racing greyhounds under certain circumstances why not extend the practice to other drugs in other circumstances? Since 2012 the regulatory authorities in New South Wales have permitted greyhounds who have been identified as suffering from a chronic inflammatory eye disease known as pannus to race even when they are receiving treatment with a specific named drug which in some circumstances may affect race performance. A couple of years later back home in Ireland Bord na gCon allowed greyhounds that had been diagnosed with epilepsy to race while on phenobarbitone therapy, even though at certain dose rates this drug undoubtedly has a detrimental effect on race performance. This approach allowed some dogs to continue to race who might otherwise have been forced into premature retirement and who might in the circumstances struggle to find pet homes. Perhaps there is a place for instituting Therapeutic Use Exemptions for some specific drugs in specific named race dogs where this potentially enhances the welfare of the dogs involved without adverse effects on the public perception of the integrity of the sport as a gambling medium. Some of the horses competing in the Breeder’s Cup meeting at Santa Anita next month will do so after receiving raceday injections of furosemide to prevent “bleeding” and there never seems to be any no shortage of punters queuing up to bet the rent money on them. There is a certain irony in a National Treasure allegedly getting a Therapeutic Use Exemption for corticosteroids to treat asthma while a licensed greyhound trainer is fined for using corticosteroid drops to treat a greyhound’s sore eyes. Surely what is good enough on two wheels should be good enough on four paws?
