By Dan Ross
With a view to pulling the veil back on the hows and whys of their operations, a representative of the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act (HISA) Authority will every week answer a question of industry importance posed by the TDN.
If you have any questions you'd like to ask HISA, please feel free to send them over to us at the following email address: danross@thetdn.com
Q: The TDN has compiled data showing how statistically, scratched horses are notably more likely to face extended periods of time off than non-scratched horses. They typically take longer to get back on the work tab and to the races. A significant number simply never make it back.
At the same time, many industry stakeholders see room for improvement in the way this whole process works to ensure sound horses aren't unnecessarily swept up in the net.
At the recent Town Hall, HISA CEO Lisa Lazarus mentioned how bringing everybody onto the same page will take “some time and some work.” She also mentioned how Dr. Jennifer Durenberger, HISA's director of policy and industry initiatives, is working on a “mapping project around vets' lists” with the idea of bringing “everything under one umbrella and one set of principles.”
Can you explain HISA's current role in how regulatory vets go about their work? Can you discuss what you think needs to happen to indeed bring the work of regulatory veterinarians onto the same page (and how you see HISA's role in that)? And can you also provide more details about Dr. Durenberger's project?
Jennifer Durenberger:
HISA develops rules (subject to FTC approval) and the majority of Regulatory Veterinarians who enforce those rules work for state racing commissions and racetrack operators.
HISA's Veterinarians' List rules were derived from existing model rules and standardized stand-down times and protocols for removal from those lists. What was not in the existing rules were definitions of terms used, criteria for placement on various lists, etc. We are working to change that.
The core challenge is how to calibrate the entire regulatory process to minimize the number of horses that get “unnecessarily swept up in the net”, to use your term, or flagged for further evaluation, while simultaneously preventing horses at increased risk of injury from experiencing a bad outcome.
A policy decision must be made about which is more important to the problem we're trying to solve. Is it more important to prevent “false positives” (horses unnecessarily flagged) or to prevent “false negatives” (horses not removed from competition who go on to sustain injury).
A certain number of false positives is the cost of an overall safer and more sustainable environment. Our job is to work to minimize the number of false positives without compromising safety.
Right now, Regulatory Veterinarians are trying to shoehorn horses of concern into legacy categories that were created 30 years ago, when horse racing was under an entirely different local regulatory scheme, and one without heightened social license concerns.
HISA is currently surveying tracks to better understand where non-uniformity might be addressed via either policy directives or, where necessary, comprehensive rule change.
In its surveys, HISA presents scenarios and asks participants (stewards and regulatory veterinarians) to state what list the horse would be placed on, if any, and what the next steps would be. Some of those scenarios produce as many as four different possible outcomes, depending on the track. To the extent HISA can provide better direction and uniformity of process, we can and we will.
Simultaneously, we are listening to our international colleagues to see what lessons might be learned from their experiences. More information on HISA's mapping project is available here: https://hisaus.org/news/hisa-announces-comprehensive-review-to-update-veterinarians-and-stewards-list-categories
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