Friday, October 23, 2020

Blameless


Another runner tomorrow (Saturday).  Our second of the week.  Hard to know what to expect.  Only five runners in the race, which makes it easier to figure in the frame.  I'd rather be running The Rocket Park on turf as he's a proper dour staying horse, and such horses are generally more suited by turf races than on the AW.  But he doesn't want the ground to be too soft, which means that he won't get his preferred conditions on grass until maybe April or May, so the next six months or so it's the AW or nothing.  So we'll try the AW and see how we go.  He's seems very well and has run well (finishing first and third) in both his runs this season, so we'll hope for the best.  And we'll hope that we don't get wet because we've gone from consistently wet to very changeable, which can mean sunny but can also, of course, still mean wet.


The several areas of the country going into Tier Three of lockdown spell bad news for many aspects of society, most particularly the inhabitants of these areas, but it's bad news for racing too with the racecourses' income dropping further with large numbers of betting shops being closed and thus not buying the television coverage of the races.  The courses are semi-qualified to weather the behind-closed-doors paying-customer-less storm by virtue of being paid by the betting shops for the pictures of the races.  But when so many betting shops are closed, it becomes a double whammy.  Depresssing.  


On a happier note, it seems as if the zilpaterol mystery has been cleared up in the most satisfactory manner.  I was stupid because naively I had assumed that the feed companies would buy basic ingredients and then create the feed mixture, and that thus zilpaterol must have found its way into the mix by a major blunder.  However, if I'd used even a small amount of common sense I'd have worked out that for some of the ingredients the feed companies buy previously-processed food to put into the mix, and it seems to be one of these that has contained zilpaterol.


That's just common sense.  Soya beans are grown overseas, so the obvious thing to do is to process the beans into the soya meal near where they are grown, and then export the meal.  That applies even more with sugar cane.  I would guess that it takes a mountain of sugar cane to make a gallon of molasses, in the same way that it needs a mountain of sugar beet to make a bag of sugar; and in Britain they reckon that there's no point in growing sugar beet unless you live within maybe a 60-mile radius of a sugar beet processing plant because the costs of transporting it are too high.


Anyway, don't take this as gospel as I may have got the wrong end of the stick, but this is my understanding of the situation.  Pretty much all horse feeds contain molasses to make them palatable.  Molasses are made from sugar cane.  As outlined above, the feed companies don't import sugar cane and process it in the British Isles; the sugar cane is processed where it is grown, and then molasses are imported into Ireland and Britain and added to the feed.  Straightforward.  The molasses generally come from India, where a lot of sugar cane is grown.


However, this is the year of COVID.  Apparently COVID has been bad in India and has disrupted some aspects of agriculture there, and there has been less sugar cane grown in India.  However, there has been plenty grown in South Africa, so a molasses importer/wholesaler has switched from buying molasses in India to buying it in South Africa.  And that's very straightforward because molasses is a totally natural feedstuff, wherever it's produced- it's just processed sugar cane, and sugar cane is sugar cane wherever it's grown.  Seemples.


However, it is not only US cattle-farmers who like to bulk up their cows unnaturally by feeding zilpaterol, which isn't an anabolic steroid (technically it is a beta-agonist) but has similar effects to anabolic steriods.  South African cattle-farmers use it too.  (It isn't legal in the EU - and this is a reminder that we don't want to be lowering our food standards on leaving the EU).  And apparently their preferred method of getting it into their cows is in the molasses which are part of the cattle feed.  Anyway, it seems to be the case that a batch of molasses which was imported into Ireland from South Africa turned out to be molasses which had been made for cows rather than horses, which shouldn't normally be an issue because molasses are molasses whoever is going to eat them.


Anyway, I don't think that Gain even knew that their molasses were any different to the totally natural ones which they had always used.  I don't think they even knew that the country of origin had changed, never mind that their molasses were no longer natural, un-doctored molasses.  You wouldn't: molasses are molasses are molasses (you'd think).  It genuinely has been an innocent error which was out of Gain's hands.  So at least we can rest assured that there has been no attempt to feed anything unnatural to the horses, either by the trainers or the feed companies.  And I can't see that either can be castigated for what has happened.  Hopefully no winner has tested positive to zilpaterol so we wouldn't need to agonise over this, but my opinion is that it would be very harsh to disqualify any such winner or to discipline his/her trainer.

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