Q&A with Dr Frances Peat

Ahead of the Racing Victoria Veterinary Seminar at Oaklands Junction this Friday, we spoke to leading equine vet Dr Frances Peat who will present alongside other experts including Dr Angus Adkins, Prof Chris Whitton and Dr Alex Young to unpack the topic of preparing, racing or spelling the younger horse.

Dr Peat, a Registered Specialist in Veterinary Sports Medicine and Rehabilitation, has a PhD in pre-sale X-ray imaging and was part of the team of researchers who analysed more than 2,700 yearlings which went through the Keeneland Sale in Kentucky (USA).

Q. Maybe start by telling us how your love of the horse first came about?

A. My love of horses started from a young age. My grandfather was really interested in racing, and he would take me along to the yearling sales with him every year. So it was a real passion for him and he passed that passion onto me. I started riding lessons at a fairly early age, then slowly graduated to three-day eventing competitions and I also rode trackwork at a racing stable during my university holidays.

Q. How old were you when you got your first horse?

A. I took riding lessons for about seven years before I was allowed to get my own horse at the age of 14. He was a retired racehorse, and sadly he passed away just last year at the grand old age of 29. He was very special to me, and I don’t think I’ll have another horse like him. He wasn’t much of a racehorse but he was a very good jumper, and we had a bit of success in eventing. He was a Crested Wave gelding who raced as Toulouse, but I called him Toby. It was a bit of a juggle to find enough time during my vet schooling, but we evented at two star level and had a lot of fun. I’ve had other horses but at the moment work is taking up a lot of my time, so my riding has had to take a back seat unfortunately.

Q. What was your first involvement in the thoroughbred industry?

A. During my time at vet school I worked at the yearling sales for New Zealand Bloodstock, essentially helping the vet teams with their scoping duties. For a time I also worked for trainer Jamie Graham, mucking out the stables and riding trackwork in the mornings.

Q. What was your first job out of vet school?

A. Working at the MVS (Matama Veterinary Services) practice that I have recently returned to after spending almost a decade overseas. When I first joined there were a lot of vets working here, and particularly Dr Dave Keenan, who had completed a lot of work performing X-rays and vetting horses at the yearling sales. So from when I was an intern I was involved in looking after our clients’ drafts at the sales, and it went from there. Sitting in the repository reading X-rays, there were questions around whether or not any small issues that showed up really mattered. That really sparked my interest in researching the correlation between pre-sales X-rays and future racing performance.

Q. You’re a member of the Orthopaedic Research Centre at Colorado State University, could you tell us what the centre hopes to achieve?

A. It has a clinical arm which is equine sports medicine, and they have a specialist training program which I was lucky enough to be accepted onto. They focus on orthopaedics, lameness and its impact on poor performance. There’s the clinical training and also the research arm of the centre, which you have to contribute to. Over the course of the ten years I was there they built a $50 million Translational Medicine Institute, which researches horse’s joints and injury prevention but also looks at the crossover and similarities to human athletes.    

Q. I believe you have an athletic background yourself?

A. Yes I was a reasonable runner, I like to think I still am a runner but I certainly can’t run the sort of times I did when I was in my youth! I was a middle-distance runner, so anywhere from 1,500 to 3,000 metres was my pet distance. I had a bit of success around the Auckland region, but then suffered a spate of injuries which is probably where my interest in athletic training-induced injuries stems from. Most of the injuries we see in thoroughbreds is training related, so the subject of how bones and tendons adapt to different training methods interests me and is something I can relate to. I did a lot of things wrong during my athletic training, so I’m speaking from painful experience!

Q. What was the focus of the extensive research you undertook into pre-yearling sales X-rays?

A. The quality of research that the Orthopaedic Centre is able to produce and the people they have access to is world-leading, so I recognised what a great opportunity it gave me. We went to the Keeneland Sales at Kentucky, which is the biggest yearling sale in the world, and enrolled as many of the vendors there as we could. We looked at the X-rays and in some instances ultrasound scans of more than 2,500 yearlings, with a particular focus on two specific areas: sesamoid bones and stifle joints.

Q. Why did you focus on those two areas in particular?

A. Vendors were having huge difficulties selling horses where X-rays identified there may be a potential issue in one of these areas, and there was a lot of conflicting advice and opinions about their importance. Our research was two-fold, the first part was to look into what the scans meant for future racing performance. So we followed these horses for the first three years of their racing careers, and gathered all the data for comparison purposes. The second part was to research whether the potential issues identified on X-rays improve over time, or whether they get worse with age. A percentage of the buyers at the yearlings sale do so with the intention of selling them on at the two-year-old breeze-ups, so they want to know what changes (if any) the X-rays might show in a further 12 months’ time. There are five major two-year-old sales in the states, so I spent a lot of time in Florida at those sales the following year catching as many of those horses as I could a second time.

Q. So will this be the main subject matter of you presentation at the vet seminar?

A. Yes, it will be a short summary of the key findings from that major study. It’s twice as big as any previous study on the same subject, it took several years to complete and required significant funding but hopefully the people who attend the seminar will get some use out of it. The most important part of the research was to get the practical information and takeaways out to as many people as possible in the thoroughbred training and breeding industries. The feedback so far is that it makes it easier to buy and sell good quality yearlings without being put off by X-ray findings, which in many cases are fairly minor and inconsequential.