Breeders hit back at criticism of the Australian thoroughbred
Michael Kent Snr believes Australians are ‘doing ourselves a disservice’
Breeders have made an impassioned defence of the sector after criticism was levelled at stud farms which claimed they were only concerned about producing sales horses rather than racing stock, which was to the detriment of the nation’s thoroughbred industry.
Victorian trainer Michael Kent Snr this week called for a review of breeding practices in Australia to not only improve the longevity and durability of racing stock but also help alleviate some of the welfare issues the industry currently faces.
Kent, who admits he tries to avoid buying at yearling auctions these days, suggests he and fellow trainers around Australia are now facing an increase in soundness issues with their horses due to the lack of quality control of the standard of animal being bred and, in particular, the toll that intensive yearling sales preparations are having on young horses.
“In the last 20 years the sales keep going up and up and people breed just to sell and don’t care for their race life and will do anything to get that horse to that point,” Kent said.
“As trainers we want to buy a big, physical colt but to get him there he’s been fed excess carbohydrates, boxed and hand-walked for 12 weeks and then you get skeletal issues getting them there so fast.
“We are doing ourselves a disservice by breeding poor quality animals that look big and physical but don’t last.
“What we have to do to those yearlings to get them to grow that quick and look so good so early is not good for the longevity of the horses and that’s where mistakes are being made.
“So many big expensive colts end up with fractures and knee soreness and fetlock issues. I have never seen so much cortisone used in a horse as it is today.
“We are definitely doing something wrong and I am convinced it’s growing the horse just for sale and not thinking about it’s race day future and beyond.”
Rushton Park’s Kayley Johnson, also a Thoroughbred Breeders Victoria board member, yesterday said preparing horses for yearling sales was “a fine line” but rejected Kent’s premise that breeders weren’t producing horses with the aim of success on the racetrack.
“I guess everybody has their own preference on how they want to prepare their horses, and I can’t speak for other farms, but I know how we do things. Obviously, we put a lot of faith in our product because we race a fair few horses ourselves and they consist of both horses we’ve bred and also horses we’ve bought through online auctions and things and transferred to different trainers and tried a different approach,” Johnson said.
“With the rise of what’s happening in the industry from a welfare point of view, I think most farms carefully nurture and grow the product they set out to breed and that just doesn’t start at (yearling) prep time.
“It obviously starts from the minute they are conceived and, in some cases, even earlier. I think good farms use solid nutrition, they follow manufacturers’ guidelines when it comes to the amounts that they feed.
“Given the rise of x-rays and things in the yearling industry, you have got to be very mindful of what is happening to their joints and things as they grow and that is why we use recommended feeding programs and things for our horses.”
Johnson also pointed out that Rushton Park, and many other vendors, ensured their young stock spent the majority of their time in paddocks rather than being confined to stables.
“When it comes to the actual prep side of it, we don’t prep our horses from boxes a lot any more, they are predominantly given a fair amount of paddock time,” she said.
“Some of our horses hardly see a box at all during the prep and that is predominantly done from a mental wellbeing point of view for them, but it is also for physical wellbeing for them. If they are given exercise which entails lunging or horse walkers, it is only done to a degree so that they are able to manage the days of parades down at the sales complex.”
Kent is passionate about the Australian thoroughbred and its status nationally and internationally and believes its reputation is being compromised by a number of factors that stem back to the breeding and yearling sales barns.
“Welfare is not just an issue for trainers and owners, it’s breeders as well,” said Kent.
“As a collective we should be proud of our horses and our breed but why are we going to Europe, the US and Germany and buying so many horses and why are they not buying them off us?
“It’s because we just don’t have longevity in our horses anymore. When I first started training you used to race a horse at two and he would still be racing at eight. Now that’s not the case.”
According to Kent, these issues not only make it difficult for owners and trainers to get the very best out of their horses, they also add to the breakdown rate in races which subsequently negatively affects the public image of the sport.
Long term, he says, it also affects the suitability of horses to other pursuits once their careers on the track are over.
“Breed a better horse that’s going to last longer and then there’s less wastage and ones that when they do retire, retire sounder, so they have more of a life after racing,” he said.
While Kent and some of his peers have called for greater transparency from breeders, Johnson argues that the trainers and racehorse owners also need to be upfront about a horse’s issues when it comes to them being sold as breeding propositions.
“If they are asking their breeders to be 100 percent transparent with everything that’s happened to that horse in its time, essentially from the time it was born through to the time it was sold at the yearling sales, I guess breeders can only ask for the same information when we purchase broodmares and stallions that are out there in the marketplace,” she said.
“If you want to do things like breeding out the roarer gene, that information needs to be disclosed.
“It comes down to that if I was standing at a horse sale and I had a passport, you could say, for a mare that I am looking at buying and that passport discloses that she was a roarer or that she used to do trackwork on Lasix or something like that, I can make a decision about whether I buy her or not.”
Melbourne Cup (Gr 1, 3200m)-winning trainer Mike Moroney welcomed Kent’s forthright comments.
“I think he is right. He has some very relevant points and I think it’s got to the stage where we’ve got to talk about it,” Moroney told RSN.
“We’ve got to the stage now where we are breeding a lot of horses with a lot of ailments.”
Group 1-winning trainer and a prolific buyer of yearlings Tony McEvoy supported Moroney’s statement.
“Our horses are getting softer and softer and we blame firm tracks. In previous eras they’d race on firm tracks and cope with it,” McEvoy told the Victorian racing radio station this week.
“There’s a couple reasons. One is we’re breeding yearling sale horses and not racehorses.
“We spend a fortune on buying them and they either go in the wind or they get pods disease (palmar osteochondral disease). I’d never heard of it back in the day and now it’s very common.”
Toby Liston of Victoria’s Three Bridges Thoroughbreds said horses on the family’s property were also reared in natural settings.
“They roam about in 180-acre paddocks and we replicate what happens in nature,” he said, adding 55 foals were bred on the farm last year.
“There are many breeders doing the right thing, trying to make the best horses possible as naturally as possible.
“They have to stand the rigors of racing. They need to be tough. If you’re going to select a potential athlete, do you want the one on the couch playing Nintendo or the kid who’s out there exercising and doing sports?”
Johnson, who runs Rushton Park with her husband David from a property near Murchison in Victoria’s Goulburn Valley, believes the industry needs a united front to overcome the welfare challenges it is facing.
She said: “I certainly do believe we have a lot of good things happening, but we have to work together to make it work or it is just going to get swallowed by infighting within the industry and that is not great for us as a whole.”
Liston agreed that a national approach was needed.
“Every state is trying to fix it on their own but we need a national approach,” he said.
“We need to be accountable for the horses we breed and we need to know where they are. There needs to be better systems in place.
“The difficulty is when the horse goes to the third and fourth home, not the second home.”