A Racehorse Herbal

As is often said, "The only thing that remains the same is change itself." At times, the static, unmovable nature of Thoroughbred horse racing seems as an unsurpassable preponderance at odds with this wisdom, but change does occur for better or worse. The top photo shows some youngsters being schooled in the pre-starting gate era's tape barrier, which can be compared to the bottom photo of three-year-olds doing the same in the Iron Gate a few decades later. This progress moves on. Some of our hallowed progress is not so good, and we need to reexamine if we shouldn't go back to some of the old ways. We have lost something in the transition, and our sport is suffering.

This site is the precursor to my literary/scientific text, A Racehorse Herbal. I am a racehorse contrarian not only on how to treat racehorses medically, but how they should be trained and raced. This book will provide a comprehensive study of old-timey training/racing methods and remedies as compared to the modern trends found in the horse industry of both the Standardbred and Thoroughbred. It will allow the racehorseman to utilize and integrate common medicinal plants and holistic techniques into his everyday regime of keeping his animals fit and racing. He will be able to identify and process ignored weeds into useful, cost-effective, and unique remedies. This text will not only review modern herbal research as it applies to equine performance injuries and stress but also never dismiss the relevance of many cures successfully proven by centuries of past folk usage or by the work of long extinct renegade researchers. It will also review traditional Veterinary equine therapeutics from the past and apply all relevant treatments to the modern racehorse. The herbal genius of Dr. John Christopher and Dr. Richard Schulze, who are products of the earlier-mentioned movements, will be interwoven into this therapeutic tapestry. This site contains excerpts from my text and should provide the reader with the flavor and the practical value of A Racehorse Herbal.

I think you will find the pages contained in this site unique, and I know you will find my proposed herbal text different and eye-opening. My writings will not just be regurgitated herbal medicine gleaned from past texts before me, as often seems to be the custom of modern works. Lynn Margulis writes: "The efficiencies of specialization bring mixed results. Although effective for organization of numerous individuals, specialization separates us from our sense of the whole." Our modern life and view of veterinary medicine have become so complex that no one can remain familiar with many multi-specialized fields without ultimately tending to lose sight of the whole. I want to see the whole and not be myopic! I have spent too much of my life in the very specialized field of simply training racehorses without learning much about how and why they are as they are and how they heal as they do. This text will delve into multiple fields and try to grasp some resemblance of the truth on why things are as they are. I strive to think out of the box and apply valuable principles in other disciplines to the racing horse. The publication date is projected to be in late 2024. May this website open the eyes of performance horsemen and horsewomen to new thoughts, treatments, and a better understanding of conditioning programs. Enjoy, learn, and be inspired by this knowledge, but mostly, win races.