The dissected horse in the picture is Arcano, formerly trained by disqualified harness participant Mitchell Kerr. The disfiguration of the horses internal system was caused by nebulising it with Xenon or refrigeration gas to improve its performance.
The author of the article below is Becks Nairn, the harness racing insider turned animal activist who featured in the video in our previous story. This post was made on Nairn’s Facebook page
Social justice is sometimes the only justice.
Having a platform to speak from here is a privilege and I don’t make these posts lightly. I have been rehoming ex race horses since I was 18 but when we started a registered charity I’d hoped it would give us more clout to make meaningful changes. Instead I was muzzled by contracts, pressure to not speak up and jeopardise our funding. This put me in a terrible position and one I will never compromise on again. I remember one board meeting very clearly where we were told there was a grey gelding coming into the charity but he was well known for having been fridge gassed. Fridge gassed was a new term of horror to me, they run argon gas through a nebuliser to force the horse to breathe it in. This gas has an effect on red blood cells, it stops the horse from fatigue and they are at a high risk of heart attack or pulmonary embolism. Arcano at 10 years old had been a good race horse but age was catching up with him and he was placed with a trainer who was placing bets on his horses and was later charged for fraud in unrelated matters. In the third to last race of his career he was fridge gassed, he was paying well because of his previous lacklustre performances and he flew home for a win that made him look like he was 4 years old again. The trainer got greedy and repeated this performance but this time arcanos heart didn’t cope and he went in to heart fibrillation. Fibrillation is where the upper chamber and the lower chamber beat out of rhythm causing a lack of blood flow. He tried to race him once more and he was retired.
Arcano luckily found an exceptional home where he lived on medications to help his breathing untill those banaids just couldn’t cope with the level of damage. His owner reported he’d become grumpy and felt it was his time. I performed a dissection to complete his story, the lungs were a mess and had been so over inflated, the rib cage had left marks where they had been pushed into the intercostal muscles between the ribs. He had damage to multiple areas along his airways and the valves of his heart were covered in thick fibrin. Following the horror of this dissection I sent all the information plus the text messages to the acting CEO of HRNZ at the time…….crickets, silence, nothing. So in the early days of this pag
I made a post, similar to this one…..they worked hard to report the post and get it removed for being un factual. In the original news report STS released with HRNZ they quoted two elite race horses Eamon Maguire and REDACTED. Great things happen then quickly removed their names, why? Because always keep the receipts! Eamon arrived with feet that hadn’t been done since he left racing and great things happen was put down years ago when he became aggressive to catch and was riddled with arthritis.