Endurance.Net Ridecamp Archives

Sisu West Ranch wrote:

> After reading the well thought out posts on the inherent problems with 
> lameness grades, and by extension with grading of metabolic problems, 
> I have had some thoughts on the whole thing.
>
> My basic question is: What do we really want the recorded pull 
> information in the database to accomplish?
>
> I have come up with some possibilities, and welcome more and welcome 
> comments on the possibilities
>
> 1. Punishment of riders who have their horses pulled. Indications that 
> some want to punish riders of pulled horses are found in comments 
> about riders using RO to disguise lame or metabolic pulls. In the past 
> comments have also been made to the effect that potential sales of 
> endurance horses are jeopardized if L or M pulls show up, again it is 
> a punishment of the owner of a pulled horse by lowering its value.

Who is punishing who and for what reason. If someone things someone is 
out to get them by publishing the status of a pull, they have a bigger 
problem than John Nash.

> Much has been made of the percentage of pulls that are RO, and how 
> there could not be this many riders who can not go on. The relevant 
> percentage is the percent of starting riders that RO pull. My math, 
> from remembered numbers, comes out at <1%. This does not seem 
> unreasonable for an extreme sport with aging participants.

Yep - good point and an think right on the mark.

> 2. Protect the horses. I find this to be non-persuasive. An L or M 
> horse is protected when it is pulled, irrespective of what the 
> official record says later. We do not have a system that enforces 
> rest, treatment, less demanding distances, or r slower speed after a 
> pull.  . Such a system would require a logbook like Australia or the 
> UK. (I do not favor logbooks, but that is another story).

This is more a issue of political will of the AERC than anything else to 
put some sort of system in place than the quantization of the pull code.

> 3. Research to protect horses in the future. Certainly a worthy goal, 
> but I am not sure that enough information is collected to be actually 
> useful. This is the source of my "feel good" comment a few days ago. 
> We already know that some horses get L or M. since no other 
> information is collected, it would take a major change in the 
> incidence of L or M problems to be significant. I doubt that a 
> tweaking of a rule, or procedure will ever produce enough change to be 
> seen. Because simply putting a grade on L's and M's would not truly 
> show what happened this would also likely be futile. I don't even know 
> if an increase or decrease in pulls after a rule or procedure change 
> would show that horses are better protected.
While any idividual pull only contains one bit of information,  the set 
data does contain a lot of information. If the "noise" is uncorrelated - 
a reasonable assumption - trends can eaisly be determined and these 
trends can be used to do targeted studies such as the one now being done 
or draw conclusions on the own right. Analogy is GPS. The GPS signal 
power density on the gournd of 0.00000000000000001 watt per Hz. That is 
less power per Hz than the electromagnetic background noise floor. 
However, your GPS receiver works just fine to pick it up. That's because 
the receiver detects how the information is coded (trend) and the 
information and encoding is statistically independent of the 
electromagnetic background.

There is a trade off in being more percise and the impact that required 
percision would have on the rides - require more vet time and complicate 
the forms for the vets and RM's.

Truman

> Ed
> Ed & Wendy Hauser
> 2994 Mittower Road
> Victor, MT 59875
>
> (406) 642-9640
>
> ranch@xxxxxxxxxxx
>
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"The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. The opposite 
of a profound truth may well be another profound truth."    Niels Bohr 
-- Nobel Laureate, Physics




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