Michael Watts MRCVS
What does a guy have to do to be right? A bitch he trains qualifies for the final of a prestigious stake. Mind you, she had a long look at the rapidly vanishing heels of the ante post favourite in the semi-final and has a bit to find to be in with a shout. That said as the only wide seed left in the competition she has got the box she needs in the final, which does her chances no harm. Anyway there is a tasty four-figure sum up for grabs here so all the stops are going to be pulled out to try and make sure she takes her place in the line-up come Wednesday night. The problem is that shortly after running in the semi-final the main lady develops sore eyes. Maybe she has contracted an infection while at the track, or from another dog at home in Your Man’s kennels. Maybe she just got too much sand kicked back in her eyes when going under in the semi-final. It matters little. Her two lamps are now red and obviously irritated and it is decision time.
Is the problem serious enough to force her withdrawal? Eleventh hour withdrawals of greyhound from major finals are the kind of thing that gives Racing Managers grey hairs and ulcers, besides earning the lasting enmity of bookmakers who find themselves forced to rejig the betting market at the last minute to try and cover their liabilities. Of course the welfare of the greyhound is paramount, and trumps the needs of the track management, sponsors and punters alike. Nobody is seriously suggesting running a greyhound that is not in the whole of her health and fighting fit, but there is serious dough at stake here, a rare thing in the greyhound game these days, so clearly nobody would want to withdraw her if there was any valid alternative. Now as luck would have it there are ten clear days between the semi-final and the final so Your Man has a window of opportunity in which to get his bitch back on the straight and narrow. Come to that, he might even have enough time to put her on medication briefly and still have seven days off treatment before the big day. Now we are not talking about a wee S10 contest back home in Ballyhackmacreevy, where a low-life owner might be tempted to run a greyhound to avoid him going out of his time, even though he had got spiked during his last race and was given a shot or two of penicillin afterwards. All of us in the greyhound game are gamblers at heart, and some owners might be tempted to play the percentages and race a dog that is likely to test positive for something or other, secure in the knowledge that the chances of any one dog being randomly selected for testing are pretty small. However Your Man’s bitch is a horse of a different colour and is racing in the Big League where she is absolutely guaranteed to be sampled for testing for drug residues before a major final so that it is imperative that she should be free of the last trace of each and every prohibited substance if her trainer is to keep his neck off the block and out of trouble.
The interval between the semi-final and the final is such that Your Man should be able to treat his bitch and, if she responds quickly to treatment, keep her off the medication for long enough for her to be drug-free when she next races. Reference to the G.B.G.B “Rules of Racing” turns up a Note for Information tacked on to Rule 217 which reads like this: “Although most prohibited substances will clear the Greyhound’s system within seven days, some products may still be detectable more than seven days after administration. However it is the responsibility of Owners and Trainers to satisfy themselves in every case that a Greyhound complies with Rule 217 when taking part in a Race or Trial”. A cynic might summarise this as saying that a guy is likely to be safe enough if he keeps his greyhound off the track for a week after its last treatment but that if the dog does test positive after seven days he is on his own. Truth to tell, this so-called “Seven Day Rule” harks back to a time when the techniques available for analysing urine samples were not nearly as sophisticated as they are now. Seven days might have been long enough way back when, but it is increasingly less likely to get you there as time goes by. So how can Your Man satisfy himself that his Pride and Joy will comply with Rule 217 when she goes out to race in the big final? Is there perhaps some reference book or database to which he might refer in order to get some sort of hard and fast information as to who long he needs to allow for a particular drug to clear from his greyhound’s system, I hear you ask. I am famously bad at maths, but my quick count of the veterinary medicinal products currently licensed for use in dogs by the Veterinary Medicines Directorate came up with just over three hundred brand names. Only a very little thought is required to realise that to work out how long each of those products might take to clear from your average greyhound’s body would take a very large amount of testing involving more dogs than you could count, especially when you bear in mind that you might need to look at excretion times for both dogs and bitches and for growing puppies as well more experienced campaigners. Also, should a dog be receiving several drugs simultaneously, as for example in the case of a bitch whose season is being suppressed, the time taken for one drug to clear from its system is potentially affected by the presence of the other drugs in its body. Furthermore in order to get a solid, reliable result, each test would need to be repeated many times in many different dogs in order to overcome the effects of any possible idiosyncratic response one or two greyhounds might have to an individual drug or combination of drugs. In an ideal world somebody somewhere would run all the tests and compile some sort of database of the results. When push comes to shove however the drug companies do not make enough money selling veterinary medicines to the greyhound industry for them to be prepared to commit the money and resources to carrying out such a huge body of work. They are already legally required to do a large volume of costly testing of each product simply to get it licensed and are unlikely to volunteer for any more. In a way I am not sorry, as I have a deep irrational dislike of the use of animals in drugs tests and medical experiments and am always profoundly saddened by the plight of all those white mice, rabbits and beagles who live short unhappy lives in stark laboratory cages. If the drugs companies with all of their resources find it hard to bankroll such work on the scale required, the G.B.G.B. would probably struggle to fund such a massive project even if they were to carry it out jointly with the Irish Greyhound Board say, or Greyhounds Australasia. The long and the short of it is the work has never been carried out.
Where does that leave the trainer, or for that matter the veterinary surgeon, who is trying to work out when a particular greyhound can safely return to the track following a particular course of treatment? To a fair degree the answer is up shit creek without a paddle. There is a tiny amount of data available for greyhounds and some that can rightly or wrongly be extrapolated to greyhounds from studies of other species. In the heel of the hunt however most of the time the best you can do is make a semi-educated guess based on your own experience and that of others, allow a wide margin for error and cross your fingers. It is not a very satisfactory way of dealing with the problem but will have to do in the absence of any more solid data on excretion times.
So in the unlikely event of Your Man walking bitch in hand through the door of my surgery in search of my advice how hypothetically might I proceed? I am no expert and I might well be wrong, but instinctively I have an idea that any medication that might be applied to the surface of a greyhound’s eye, in contrast to a medication given by injection or by mouth in tablet form, is likely to appear in the dog’s bloodstream and subsequently in her urine in very small amounts. In the first place the quantity of the drugs used is likely to be rather small, typically perhaps no more than a drop or two in each eye a couple of times a day. Before it appears in the dog’s urine it has to be absorbed through the surface of the dog’s eye which in a mild case such as this is likely to be pretty much intact. Intuitively you might think very little of any of the active ingredients, if any, is likely to appear in the urine of a treated greyhound for any great length of time. Why trust to intuition? One of the few pieces of research into Witholding Guideline Periods was a small survey carried out on behalf of the Australia and New Zealand Greyhound Association staring back in 1995. Now it is easy for the statisticians and number crunchers to say that this survey involved too few dogs to produce consistent repeatable reliable results. That is undoubtedly the case, but at least it came up with something at least marginally better than guesswork. If nothing more it generated some baseline data, a sighting shot if you like, a foundation to build on. Included in the short list of products they looked at were a number of eye ointments and drops containing corticosteroids, the type of product that might commonly be prescribed for use in a dog suffering from conjunctivitis like Your Man’s. One such was Chlorasone Eye Ointment™ which contained 5 milligrams per gram of the corticosteroid Hydrocortisone. When 1.5 cm of the ointment was applied to each eye twice daily for five days, no trace of Hydrocortisone could be detected in the urine of treated dogs 24 hours after the last treatment. Now this result is based on tests carried out on a very small number of greyhounds and undoubtedly the technology for detecting drug residues is vastly better now than it was in 1995. I cannot claim any particular expertise in this area bit in my humble opinion it does rather bear out my suggestion that drugs administered to greyhounds as topical eye ointments were not likely to remain long in the systems of treated dogs. The researchers Down Under also carried out similar trials using Amacin Eye Ointment™ which contains 2.5 milligrams per gram of the corticosteroid drug Prednisolone. Again no trace of the drug could be detected in the urine of treated greyhounds 24 hours after the end of a five day course of treatment. Likewise when the same experiment was repeated using Prednefrin Forte Eye Drops™ which include among other active ingredients 1% Prednisolone Acetate, treated greyhounds had a negative swab 24 hours after the last dose had been given. These particular products are not to my knowledge licenced for use in dogs in the U.K. One similar product which I sometimes prescribe in such cases contains 1mg/ml of the synthetic corticosteroid drug Dexamethasone which is generally more potent than Prednisolone or Hydrocortisone. This product is however licensed only for use in humans, so there is no data relating to Witholding Guideline Periods in race dogs. Wiser men than me tell me that in other species 50%-100% of a dose of Dexamethasone applied to the surface of the eye is likely to be absorbed into the animal’s system. Can we extrapolate these results from one species to another? The jury is out on that one, but relying on data available from a similar situation in another species beats just guessing. In the absence of any evidence derived from studies on greyhounds, it seems wise to assume that a similar situation might prevail in dogs but to add on a Safety Margin when trying to estimating an adequate Witholding Guideline Period.
The 1995 Greyhounds Australasia survey also includes some work carried out into the excretion of injectable corticosteroids which make an interesting comparison to those obtained for the eye drops and ointments.. Where greyhounds were injected under the skin with 20 milligrams of Prednisolone Acetate residues could still be picked up in their urine at least seven days later, a neat illustration of why one should not rely overmuch on the old Seven Day Rule. In another study quoted in a recent G.B.G.B. Disciplinary Committee Inquiry, when 30 kg dogs were given 1 milligram of Dexamethasone by injection, which would be a rather small dose in the context of clinical veterinary practice, levels of the drug in urine had fallen to below 2.5 nanograms per millilitre, a tiny amount, thirty hours after administration. It is not clear whether or not the dogs used in this trial were greyhounds, a breed whose unusual biochemistry and physiology may result in the metabolism of some drugs proceeding at a different rate to that seen in pet dogs or misfortunate laboratory beagles, but as before the data, although imperfect, is better than nothing. In brief, it seems that whatever way you give short-acting corticosteroid drugs like dexamethasone to greyhounds they do not persist long in their systems. Logically therefore if a greyhound shows a high concentration of Dexamethasone in its urine this is likely to arise from the dog receiving the drug relatively recently, from the dog receiving a large quantity of the drug, or some combination of the two. On the face of it it seems unlikely to have arisen from the administration of eye drops in the conventional manner but as we have seen the lack of much data on the excretion of drugs by greyhounds means that this is not the exact science one might imagine that it is or might wish it to be.
Corticosteroid drugs are potent anti-inflammatories with a range of side effects including metabolic disturbances and a reduction in the body’s response to infection. Clearly they may potentially affect the performance of race dogs and in some cases prejudice their well-being. The big question of course is does the detection of concentrations of Dexamethasone in a greyhound’s urine of the order of 1.5 nanograms per millilitre suggest that enough of the drug was given recently enough to suggest that it’s race performance might have been affected or its welfare compromised. Instinctively one has one’s doubts, but in the absence of solid evidence to that effect the precautionary principle applies. If this is not an exact science, how does that impact on those determining the outcome of disciplinary proceedings involving the connections of greyhounds found to have drug residues of that order? Speaking as an Irishman, I always had the probably naïve idea that British justice deemed defendants to be innocent until proven guilty and therefore if the cause of a positive test result in a race dog could not be clearly identified then perhaps the powers that be should err on the side of caution and not, for the sake of argument, be tempted to punish malefactors for an offence of which they could not clearly be convicted or to make an example of them to send a message to the wider greyhound community. Let him who is without all sin cast the first stone, as it says in the Big Book. Mind you, I said nothing….
