New Jersey horse hospital is at the forefront as equine care gallops into the future

Saturday, August 05, 2006

BY BRENT JOHNSON
Star-Ledger Staff

Scott Palmer was sitting in the owner's box at the Preakness in May when he witnessed every horseman's nightmare: Barbaro, the Kentucky Derby winner, had shattered his right leg in three places.

"The leg was flailing in the breeze," said Palmer, chief surgeon at the New Jersey Equine Clinic, a 24-hour hospital for horses.

Palmer, however, doesn't recall any panic when the horse was taken off the track. Everyone, it seemed, was well prepared to handle the emergency.

A decade ago, it might have been different.

"Barbaro is an excellent example of how far we've come," said Liberty Getman of the New Bolton Center at the University of Pennsylvania, where Palmer referred Barbaro for surgery. "I hope the public realizes now that horses aren't put down just because they have a broken leg."

That Barbaro is still alive is evidence of how much horse care has advanced over the last decade -- and the growing impact of places like the New Jersey Equine Clinic.

As the horseracing world turns to New Jersey this weekend for the Hambletonian and the Haskell Stakes, the ability to save injured racehorses from being euthanized is stronger than ever. This has had an immense impact on an industry in which the real money is in the millions of dollars in stud fees that owners can reap long after a horse's racing days are over.

Palmer has a ready response whenever someone asks him to describe the hospital where he works.

"We're just like a human hospital -- only bigger," he tells them. "It doesn't mean the size of the building. We do the same things, but it's just bigger. The anesthesia machines are bigger. The operating tables are bigger."

Those things need to be bigger when your patients weigh 1,000 pounds.

Located on a 130-acre farm down a rural, twisty road in Millstone Township, the clinic has two operating rooms, a padded recovery room, a giant X-ray machine and 41 barn stalls.

The clinic moved to that spot in 1997 from a barn in the backyard of co-founder Fred Adams' home. It now treats about 3,000 horses a year. Most of his business is referral work -- appointment cases such as removing chip fractures or tumors, treating respiratory problems, or fixing hernias. But the clinic also treats at least a few emergency cases a week.

About 90 percent of those injuries are sports-related -- with most affecting Thoroughbred or Standardbred racehorses.

"Equine surgery is an athletic event," Palmer said. "Not even four or five people can lift a 1,000-pound horse."

When a horse is ready for surgery, it's taken into a large area called the induction room, where the animal is placed against the wall, given drugs to knock it out, and held in place by a wooden door called a swing gate.

Then, with its legs tied together by a harness, the horse is turned upside down and lifted hydraulically on a moving chain to the operating table. Most surgery lasts about 30 minutes on average.

When the surgery is over, the horse is taken to a recovery room with padded walls and a soft floor.

"That's a very, very dangerous part of the surgery -- when the horse wakes up -- because they're groggy, frightened and disoriented," Palmer said.

Recovery was a big reason why Palmer referred Barbaro to New Bolton instead of his own clinic.

The horse's trainer, Michael Matz, grew up with Palmer outside Reading, Pa., and invited him to the Preakness to watch Barbaro race. When the horse suffered his injury, Matz immediately asked Palmer to evaluate Barbaro's condition.

Palmer helped splint the horse and decided its best chance for survival would be at New Bolton -- with its special equipment, like the much-talked about recovery pool, and state-of-the-art procedures.

"Once he's in the intensive care unit, they can just put him in a sling and move him to the surgery without him having to walk at all," Palmer said.

It's 8 a.m. and the crew at John Servis' barn at Philadelphia Race Park is in full work mode. Assistants are washing down horses and riding them gingerly around the stalls. And Servis, the trainer who brought champion thoroughbred Smarty Jones to national prominence two years ago, is reading a racing newspaper in his tiny office at the back of the barn.

Smarty's success came just a few months after the horse fractured its skull on one of the starting gates at the Philadelphia Park, causing blood to gush from its nostrils and tissue to push out of its eye socket. The horse was shipped to the New Jersey Equine Clinic, where staff surgeon Patricia Hogan treated it, saving the horse's eye.

Less than a year later, Smarty had won both the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness.

Asked if he feels for Barbaro, knowing what he went through with Smarty Jones, Servis waved his hand in the air.

"Forget Smarty -- you feel for a horse like Barbaro just because of what he's going through," Servis said. "He's still got a long road ahead of him."

Servis' practicing veterinarian, Roger Clymans, knows how much things have changed since he was starting out in the early 1970s.

"When I first went to vet school, maybe 10 years before that, they didn't do joint surgery on horses," he said. "Now, they're starting to get into MRI. It's just beginning.

"A lot of the things they're using in human medicine filter down," he said, adding many doctors are using digital X-rays on horses -- something the New Jersey Equine Clinic utilizes.

The question now is whether owners can afford this much-improved medical care.

"For a lot of people, it comes down to: 'Do I save this horse, or do I send my daughter to college?'" Servis said.

Granted, treating a horse is "ridiculously cheap," Palmer said, in comparison to the cost of human treatment.

"An equine fracture might be $5,000 to treat," he said. "Whereas, if you went into a human hospital, it would be 10 times that to have the same thing done."

Still, getting the same kind of treatment given to Barbaro -- a horse worth millions because of his talent and prospective stud fees-- is costly.

"The owner has to be willing to make the financial commitment and the emotional commitment to consent to this treatment process," Palmer said.

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