Michael Watts MRCVS
Life is hard, they say, and then you die. A greyhound runs in the semi-final of a decent stake and qualifies for the final one week later. Victory seems almost within their grasp and connections can almost smell the money, but hardly is he off the track before somebody notices him favouring a hind leg. It is decision time. Their first concern is for the welfare of their dog, which is as it should be. Should they throw in the towel and withdraw him from the final? On the other hand he maybe doesn’t seem so very lame and they have a few days in hand during which he just might return to match fitness. After all, there is an eye-watering amount of prizemoney up for grabs here and it would be a shame to pass up a chance of hitting the jackpot, however slim that chance might be. Enterprising citizens that they are, they decide to call with their own vet on their road home that night and seek his expert advice.
Although it was near bed-time when they reached the vet’s place, such was his dedication to his calling that the diamond geezer turned out and had a look at the injured greyhound for them. That is my kind of guy. What the exact diagnosis was need not concern us here. Suffice it to say that the consensus was that the damage was not as bad as first impressions might have suggested and that he still had a squeak of chance of taking his place in that final. That said, he was still sore and lame enough to warrant some treatment that night. Accordingly he was injected with Meloxicam, a drug of the type called non-steroidal anti-inflammatories which is often used to treat a wide range of aches and pains in greyhounds. Many readers will probably have first-hand knowledge of the stuff as it is widely available under any one of perhaps half a dozen brand names. I am not going to try to list them. I am happy to leave readers to figure that one out for themselves. Me, I get no kick-backs from drug companies for plugging their products, neither do I want to have their legal eagles breathing down my neck following the slightest suggestion that I had cast aspersions about their company or its products. Least said, soonest mended, and all that.
Those in search of guidance on matters pertaining to the administration of medicaments to greyhounds can do no better than go straight to the horse’s mouth. Reference to the relevant section of the G.B.G.B. “Rules of Racing” unearths Rule 217 which states that “a greyhound when taking part in a Race or Trial must at that time be free of any substance that could affect its performance or well being”. Amen to that! It further states that “any substances administered or applied to a Greyhound by a Trainer or Veterinary Surgeon shall be duly recorded in the Trainer’s Greyhound Treatment Book, and that greyhound must not race or Trial for seven Days thereafter”, which seems pretty clear even to a simple soul like myself.
Fortune favours the brave. The next day the dog’s condition had improved beyond all recognition and his chances of running in the final were looking distinctly rosier. As the final was a big money affair, all those taking part would have to provide a pre-race urine sample, so there was no margin for errors here and nothing could be left to chance. Still and all, with seven clear days before the final was down for decision, time was on the connection’s side, although there was none to spare. They decided not to give him any of the oral medication supplied by their vet in the belief that if he did cold turkey for the seven days stipulated in Rule 217 he should be drug free by the time he took his place in the line-up for the final. It looked good on paper at any rate.
Life has a way of cutting you down to size. As the day of the final dawned the dog looked fit and well and ready to run the race of his life. That was certainly how the punters saw it. He was backed as if defeat was out of the question and went to traps as the money-on jolly. His supporters did not have long to learn their fate, as a rough ride and a bump or three at the first bend put paid to his chances early on in the race and he finished down the field. The best laid plans of mice and men gang . . . as the man said.
As if that wasn’t enough, five weeks after the event connections were dumbfounded to be informed that the pre-race urine sample taken from their luckless charge on that forgettable night had tested positive. Despite them carefully withholding all medication from him for the seven days leading up to the final, he had still tested positive for Meloxicam.
Once the dust had settled and the air was less blue, thoughts turned to how the positive test might have happened. Sad losers like your humble servant who regularly read the official accounts of G.B.G.B. Steward’s inquiries will know that the problem in such cases often lies in innocent confusion in the home kennels. One member of the team forgets that the dog in question is down to race in a couple of days and unthinkingly gives it the medication. Maybe the medicated feed intended for an injured dog on the easy list or for a retired veteran is accidently given to one of the race dogs instead. The combinations and permutations are endless. If we are honest we have all probably done something similar somewhere along the way. The man who never made a mistake never made anything.
If nobody has ‘fessed up and all hands are pretty satisfied that a cock up on the catering front seems unlikely, how else might a positive test have come about? Without wishing to blind anybody with science, when you give a dog a single injection of any drug the concentration of that drug in the dog’s system rises quite quickly initially until all the drug has been absorbed from the injection site, then decreases gradually s the drug is metabolised into something else, excreted in the urine or faeces or metabolised and then excreted.
In the case of Meloxicam, reference to the manufacturer’s data sheet for one popular brand informs us that the maximum concentration of the drug in the blood plasma is reached approximately two-and-a-half hours after a subcutaneous injection of the product. We are also advised that “there is a linear relationship between the dose administered and the plasma concentration observed in the therapeutic dose range in dogs” which in plain English means that if you increase the initial dose by a small amount the concentration of the drug in the blood plasma increases by a proportionate amount. Meloxicam is metabolised to an alcohol, an acid derivative and to several polar metabolites. What these are need not concern us here. What is important about these metabolites from our point of view is that while their presence may suggest that a dog has been treated with meloxicam they themselves are pharmacologically inactive and should not affect that dog’s performance on the track.
Significantly the manufacturers advise us that meloxicam is excreted in bile, and ultimately in the dog’s faeces, and that only traces of the parent compound are likely to be found in the urine of treated dogs. The recommended dose of Meloxicam when given by subcutaneous injection is 0.2 milligrams/kilogram bodyweight .The manufacturer do not tell us how long it might take for the drug to disappear from the body of a treated dog but they do advise that the initial injection can be followed up with the same drug in oral form after an interval of 24 hours. I have long grumbled about the lack of available data on excretion times of drugs to anybody that would stand still long enough.
The sad truth is that few drug companies make enough money selling drugs for use in greyhounds to justify the cost of the research involved. However Greyhounds Australasia, the regulatory body of greyhound sport Down Under, published details of a small survey of excretion times of some common drugs back in 2008. In the case of Meloxicam, their researchers treated two greyhounds with 0.2mg/kg of the drug on the first day of the trial and then gave them half the initial dose at 24 hour intervals for a further four days.
In one dog the drug had disappeared three days after the last dose while in the other it took five days, so while it did not take long to clear from the dogs’ systems there was a marked variation between the two dogs tested. If I was a betting man – and I am not saying I am, mind – I might be tempted to conclude from this that whether it took three days or five for Meloxicam to be eliminated from my dog’s system, in either case it took less that the G.B.G.B’s magic figure of seven days so I should be safe enough to race my fellow seven days after his last dose. In all honesty a survey involving only two dogs is statistically pretty meaningless. All that you can conclude from these results is that it would not be a bad idea to run more trials on a larger scale involving a whole lot more dogs to try an clarify the situation. Returning to our friends who dog tested positive for Meloxicam seven days after his one and only dose, while nobody is prepared to put their neck on the block over this one, it does seem that if he was initially injected with the drug at the recommended dose rate the likelihood of him having a clear test seven days later was quite high.
That being the case, could his positive test be the result of his inadvertently receiving a further dose or doses of Meloxicam during the seven days in the run up to the final of the big stake? This is not as crazy an idea as it might first appear. Meloxicam is used not only in dogs but also in horses and cattle. It is always possible that greyhounds fed on knacker meat may consume the flesh of animals that had been treated with Meloxicam before they shuffled off this mortal coil and thus test positive for the drug. You pays your money and you takes your chance. Such are the perils of feeding meat from all but the most reliable sources.
What if our fiends’ kennel routine was watertight and they fed compound meal from a bag and never used knacker meat, how then could their pride and joy have tested positive despite their best endeavours? The main thing that we know about the pharmacodynamics of Meloxicam in racing greyhounds is that we know we do not really know enough about it. Every dog is different and maybe even at recommended dose rates it takes more than seven days after the last dose for some dogs to be free of Meloxicam residues.
The problem here is the strict liability of the connections of a greyhound who tests positive for a prohibited substance. If you are the registered owner or trainer of a dog who tests positive, no matter how that positive test came about, it is your genitals that are in the mangle, so you cannot afford to take any chances.
Of course this is just a story, a cautionary tale, and any resemblance to any greyhound living or dead is entirely coincidental. Like every good fable however at its heart lies a message. Maybe we are trying to put the cart before the horse here. We have been looking at the hard science behind the metabolism and excretion of Meloxicam in greyhounds when perhaps we should be looking at the hard science that underpins the Seven Day Rule. When push comes to shove, the seven day thing is an arbitrary rule of thumb not really supported by much recent research. It is in all honesty an anachronism, a hangover from halcyon days in the past when analytical chemistry was less accurate that it is now and low levels of drug residues simply went undetected, when the philosophy behind drug control was simply that residues too small to detect were too small to affect performance.
As the analysis of urine samples gets more and more sophisticated the Seven Day Rule becomes increasingly irrelevant. If it is now little more than a historical curiosity, and one, reliance on which may lead ordinary decent folk into deep waters, maybe the time has come to remove all reference to it from the G.B.G.B. “Rules of Racing”.
A week is famously a long time in politics, but it may not be long enough in greyhound racing.
Twitter: @GSUnderTheRadar
