HORSE RACING: Spotlight on three more properties

The New Zealand Thoroughbred Racing (NZTR) have started identifying three other Hastings properties involved in the outbreak of the highly infectious non-notifiable equine respiratory disease strangles.
"We need to look at whether it should be notifiable and the responsibilities that go with it," Ross Neal, of NZTR racing operations, told SportToday at the weekend.
Neal said the strangles scare during the Hawke's Bay Spring Carnival in Hastings in the past few weeks had highlighted the significance of reviewing its policy on the disease.
While the two-page report last week from the NZTR chief veterinarian Dr Andrew Grierson was confined to the Hastings outbreak, Neal said from Wellington it had raised the question of a national protocol to ensure the disease wasn't too harmful to horses or licence holders.
"We're looking at other thing too, such as float operators and where sales are held," he said, adding NZTR was investigating but mindful the stakeholders had no legal obligations to inform them of strangles on their properties or horses.
Hastings owner/trainer Kay Cottle's Pakipaki property has come under intense scrutiny since the premier Mudgway Partsworld Stakes race day on Saturday, August 29, when it was revealed a horse on the property had returned a positive test for strangles.
However, things came to a head on September 19 when Grierson scratched Hastings owner/trainers Tim Symes' two horses, Molly O'Reilly and Our Dan, just before the start of the Windsor Park Plate race day.
The NZTR stipendiary acted on the complaints amid concern from several stakeholders, including some from the Bay, at the risk of Australia preventing premier racehorses from competing in their lucrative spring carnival because of strangles. Symes and another Hastings trainer, Kelly Burne, have been using Cottle (pictured) and Symes' adjacent properties for track work.
Grierson visited the properties last Monday on a fact-finding mission and consequently submitted his report recommending the trio and their 28 horses be barred from competing in the country for 21 days from September 16 because of the eight infected horses on the Cottle property. That effectively rules out Symes for the minor races of the final carnival meeting, the Kelt Capital race day this Saturday. A frustrated Cottle had also broken her silence exclusively through SportToday, claiming stakeholders were hypocritically treating them like lepers amid a state of panic over the disease.
She said the disease infiltrated her property through a mare she bought from the Karaka sales on August 2. The mare was transported in a horse float with several other horses, which were dropped off at three other properties in Hastings, thus highlighting the urgency to inspect stakeholders who took possession of them.
Her veterinarian, Dr Richard McKenzie, of Veterinary Services (HB) Ltd, also called for transparency and for an organisation such as Hawke's Bay Racing to mitigate in combating a disease he expected to be around for two to three more years after an absence of almost 20 years in the region.
On Saturday, Grierson, of Auckland, said strangles had been prevalent in the late 1970s in the country when he started his practice. It was rampant in Christchurch this time last year, too.
"It's a disease that hovers around. It comes and goes. It's been quiet, but in the past two years it's come back."
He felt stakeholders were protective of their "prime athletes" [the best horses for premier races] and kept them apart from other horses and facilities.
Consequently, Grierson believed the out-of-town horses coming to the Bay spring carnival posed "zero" risk to the region even if they came from Waikato, an area he had labelled "endemic" in his report.
Having made his recommendations to the NZTR, Grierson said he had fulfilled his obligations "end of story".
The non-notifiable status of strangles could not be amended in New Zealand because the country was a signatory to something that was gazetted worldwide.
"I read somewhere the other day that strangles was notifiable in Australia. That's just utter rubbish. No way does strangles fit that bill."
Grierson said he had met an Aussie from Woodham Valley at the Karaka sales last month who had informed him strangles had been around for as long as he could remember.
"A blanket recommendation [to control the disease] has a problem because every case can be different."
Grierson said it would be naive not to accept that notifying authorities could rob stakeholders such as stud farmers of their livelihood.
"If people are honest, as they have been in Hawke's Bay, then it's easy to contain the risk.
"Isolation is very important, notwithstanding. The carrier stage is asymptomatic with a horse carrying the disease for three years and not showing any signs at all."
The severity of disease, which can remain in barn bedding for up to eight months, also depended on the maturity of the host and the amount of bacteria inhaled.
On the bright side, he predicted a dry summer in the Bay could stymie strangles bacteria if soil was exposed to direct sunlight.