What, or who, is killing so many racehorses?

When a stranger rang Debbie Lee and her partner, Steve Hogno, to ask if they'd like to race their beloved quarter horses at a country club resort, the pair thought their dreams were finally coming true.

"We said, 'Oh boy, we sure would!'" Lee recalls. "The guy who rang said he even knew of a property near the resort where we could keep our horses, and Steve and I couldn't wait to check it out."

The caller was Ian Howard, part of a consortium planning to restore the long-closed Kooralbyn Valley Resort near Beaudesert in south-east Queensland and set up regular quarter horse sprint races. Late last month, after meeting Howard and inspecting the proposed agistment block - "It seemed like the perfect spot" - Lee and Hogno moved 25 horses from land they rented in Toowoomba to the Kooralbyn Valley property.

But less than a fortnight after the healthy young horses were released to roam their picturesque new 81-hectare home - with three dams and a running stream - they began dying at an unprecedented rate. By Wednesday, six days after the first mysterious deaths on the unoccupied property were reported to the RSPCA by passers-by, all but four of the quarter horses, uninsured, were dead. And despite exhaustive testing by Biosecurity Queensland, the mass deaths continue to defy scientific explanation.

The most likely cause is thought to be paralysis ticks (up to 50 were found on each dead or stricken animal), especially rampant after last summer's flooding, combined with the fact the prized horses came from a tick-free area and had no immunity to tick toxin.

"No one told us about this danger," a devastated Lee said this week. "Steve and I loved these horses; we'd never have taken them there if we'd known about the killer ticks - it would have been like sticking a child who'd never been exposed to colds and flu in with a bunch of sick people."

But horse trainer Hogno is far from convinced ticks are the real culprits. Employed as a mining supervisor in a remote part of Western Australia, Hogno flew back to Brisbane last week to inspect the dead and dying horses.

"With tick poisoning, the paralysis always works forward from the hindquarters and tail," the veteran horseman said. "But in all of these cases the paralysis started from the head. Also, no one has ever heard of a case where so many animals have died so suddenly. Tick deaths occur over quite a prolonged period, yet many of these horses were dead within an hour or two of going down."

Hogno suspects that "elements" opposed to sprint racing within the broader horse racing industry may have been connected with the mystery deaths. Opposition to sprint racing, run over short courses, arose from a perceived threat to thoroughbred racing. It led to a rule change in 1993 that effectively banned races over less than 800 metres from Australian race tracks.

Since then, Hogno and other enthusiasts have been trying to find ways around the ban, focusing recently on privately funded, or proprietary, racing at independently owned venues. (Ian Howard told The Sun-Herald he and others involved in the Kooralbyn Valley Resort project hoped to stage regular sprint races there if a licence could be obtained through the Queensland government.)

"It was no secret that the large number of horses arriving at the Kooralbyn paddock were destined for sprint racing," notes Hogno. "The [Kooralbyn Valley Resort consortium] have circulated their intention of establishing sprint horse racing on a very large scale, with offshore wagering and so on … [and] we know from past experience that there is an element vigorously opposed to sprint racing ever being allowed to get re-established in Australia."

Hogno's suspicions deepened after being told via an anonymous phone call that people had been seen feeding his horses "late at night" over a fence at the Kooralbyn property, which borders a public road. A spokesman for Biosecurity Queensland said that while still unable to rule any potential cause for the deaths "in or out", he was unaware of anything indicating introduced poisons.

The property where the horses died and are now buried is owned by Ian Barry, who was travelling when the tragedy began unfolding. The job of fronting the media and burying the horses fell to his brother, David, who moved the surviving animals to his own property, administered serums against ticks and botulism, and stayed up around the clock to tend his charges. Last weekend, after returning from his travels and making a short inspection of the block where the horses died, Ian Barry found three paralysis ticks on his own body.

"He pulled one out from behind his ear," David Barry said at the property. "Next morning he woke paralysed down one side, and had to spend three days in hospital. The side of his head was blown up like Quasimodo's."

David Barry says he hadn't realised the horses were like pets to Hogno and Lee until inspecting the dead and dying animals with the couple last weekend. "Deb was crying and identifying them by name … she'd hand fed some of them from an early age. After that, I went into overdrive to try to save the remaining four."

But, despite showing signs of improvement earlier this week, one of the survivors died on Thursday. Another, which had been "running and playing" on Thursday morning, collapsed that afternoon.
Hogno got the latest grim news at his desert outpost. "This is a week after [the last four horses] were sprayed, and all ticks were removed, and after having tick anti-serum," he emailed soon afterwards. "Adds to the theory of some [deliberately] introduced virus or disease. Very strange."

Like Hogno, Ian Howard - who unwittingly set the scene for the tragedy - says he and the vets he has consulted cannot accept that ticks "could knock over that many horses that quickly".

Yet he also struggles with the notion of foul play: "I just can't believe that anybody could be that bloody-minded. But if it was [a deliberate act], and the culprits get caught, I wouldn't like to be in their shoes."


Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/environment/animals/what-or-who-is-killing-so-many-racehorses-20111015-1lq8q.html#ixzz1b8AaLwVK