Coughing woes for Summerveld by David Thiselton
The Summerveld training centre has been hit with a bout of coughing and that coupled with rain over the past week appears to have affected the recent performances of horses based there.
Coughing is not unusual for this time of the year, while the rain that blighted the training centre last summer has already had an effect this season.
The coughing often coincides with the arrival of young horses in the yards and with the change of seasons.
Veterinarian, Johnny Cave of Baker and McVeigh Equine Hospital, said that the current bout is nothing to be overly concerned about and it is usually just a matter of time before it clears up.
Young horses come from all parts of the country and bring viruses with them.
Being young they have not had time to build up anti-bodies to common viruses and, like human children at pre-school, are very susceptible to them.
Furthermore, the stress of being in a new environment like Summerveld makes their resistance even lower.
The older horses then contract the virus from their proximity to these young horses.
It is very difficult to isolate and identify the virus that is effecting a horse and it is normally just a matter of time before it is cleared out of the system.
In the meantime anti-biotics are administered to prevent secondary bacterial infections.
The difficulty for trainers is that some horses that might have mucus build up sometimes show no outward symptoms.
However, on raceday they might run below par and a subsequent scope will then show the mucus.
To scope every horse before a race is an expensive exercise and sometimes even if they are scoped the mucus that is building up is not in evidence and they show up clear.
A further woe to the Summerveld yards was that last week the sand training tracks were only usable on Monday and Wednesday.
Yards were forced to either just trot their horses or try and get them onto the grass for their final sprint ups.
The Summerveld tracks were fine yesterday morning, but the weather forecast this week has five of the days showing a 30% chance of rain.
Clairwood and Ashburton horses are displaying no signs of abnormal coughing.
Ashburton had a problem with wet tracks from Wednesday last week through to Friday and Pitermaritzburg has a similar rain forecast to Durban this week.
Clairwood has had little rain and have had no interruptions to their training schedules.
The Clairwood tracks have no base to them, being on the natural former sand dunes, and overall are possibly “kinder” to horses.
At Summerveld horses are at some risk running on wet sand as their hooves could end up hitting the base.
The Clairwood yards are also in very good form as was witnessed at Scottsville on Sunday when Garth Puller saddled a double and both Corinne Bestel and Tyron Norton had winners.
Three of the other winners came from Ashburton and beyond courtesy of Duncan Howells, Julie Dittmer and Michael Roberts, while Summerveld yards, despite fielding the majority of the runners on the day and five of the favourites, only had two winners between them.
The Mike de Kock yard is one of the worst effected as far as coughing goes and their outstanding early season form has tailed off - at least temporarily. They have not had a winner in the last four KZN meetings.
Punters will have to be weary of all the factors that are having an influence on horse's well-being at present.
Horses from Clairwood, which appears to be less affected by rain than the other centres, should be noted.
Doug Campbell, who trains out of a private training establishment in Richmond, often does well in the rainy season too.
Some will say that in the current testing going conditions the older, stronger five-year-olds should not be ignored in maiden plates against the immature and weaker three-year-olds.
Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.
Topic Author
