In 2018, the British Horseracing Authority (BHA) mandated the requirement for trainers to publicly declare wind surgeries. This included domestic and international runners having their first post-surgery run in Great Britain. The BHA ruled wind operations should be regulated to provide betting customers with access to data and to aid monitoring of equine welfare and ethics in relation to wind surgeries.
The five surgeries requiring declaration include soft palate cautery, Hobday, tie back, tie forward and epiglottic entrapment surgery. This study has reviewed three years of declarations assessing prevalence and performance outcomes in Thoroughbred Racehorses competing in Great Britain. The focus being soft palate cautery.
Between 2018 and 2021, 5483 wind surgeries were declared. Jump horses accounted for 60% of declared surgeries whilst the remainder were flat or dual-purpose horses. Soft palate cautery was the most common surgery (63%), followed by Hobday (23%) and tie-forward procedures (7%).
Using historical BHA data, 970 horses (258 flat, 712 Jump) that underwent soft palate cautery were compared with 1271 matched controls. All horses had completed three races pre and post-surgery. Wilcoxon Mann-Whitney tests and generalized linear models, were applied to compare performance.
Case horses showed significant drop in performance in their pre-surgery run. Post-surgery, for all horses, four out of six outcome measures showed no difference between cases and controls, suggesting limited immediate performance benefit. Flat horses demonstrated some evidence of post-surgery improvement with four of six outcome measures returning to or exceeding pre-surgery levels. Conversely, five of six outcome measures for Jump horses failed to improve.
This was the largest British study of its kind and supports ongoing collection of wind surgery data to improve equine welfare and performance transparency. Several recommendations were made, and the study highlighted the complexity of evaluating racehorse performance and the need for multiple outcome metrics.