FAMOUS GASES OF HORSEDOPING.

Dunstan Times, Issue 3127, 24 July 1922, Page 2

FAMOUS GASES OF HORSEDOPING.

(By “Vet.”) Buie 17G (I) of the Jockey Club reads as follows: —“If any persons shall administer or cause to he administered. for the purpose of affecting ihe speed of a horse, drugs or stimulants internally, by hypodermic or other methods . . . every person so offending shall be warned off Newmarket death and other places where these uiles are in force.” There is a general impression among the public who arc not intimately concerned wit hi horse racing that animals have been often “treated” in order to retard their speed. Alter all. they say, since so much' money depends on these big races, it is only natural that criminals should devote their attention to so obviously profitable a fraud. In point, of fact, there have been been very few eases of “doping.” In 1811 the notorious Daniel Dawsun was executed for putting corrosive sublimate into a trough at Doncaster, which caused the death of Eagle, Inning previously failed to poison a horse called Pnhen, which recovered from its dose sufficiently to win the race it was supposed, to die in. Dawson, we are told, behaved during his trial “with coarse levity, frequently making use of horrid imprecations.” A crowd ol 10.000 people watched him on the scaffold, from which place ho announcedi that he “would ascend to heaven from the drop.” ( oeaine. arsenic, .strychnine, heroin, and ((in'iiine have all been used to stimulate a horse temporarily when it has been fagged' out, and to condition 0 so that it becomes all the harder to detect malpractices, but it may safely be said that a, more common fraud than monkeying with a horse’s health it 11 drugs (except in fiction) is the 1 rand of passing one horse off as another. I here was the famous Running Rein, which won the Derby in 1844. and was liien discovered to he the fonr-vear-old -Maccabeus rechristened. When the ease '■aine up for trial it was found that the horse had disappeared, and the race was awarded to Orlando. Less than two years ago Peter Christian Barrie was sent to penal servitude icr three years for substituting Jazz a three-year-cld, for Coat of '.Mail, a, two-year-old. in the Facehy Plate at .">1 nekton, and disguising a hay called Sinning 3lore as Shining Bad"c a chestnut, obliterating the blaze on its forehead and its white hind fetlock. To get it hack to its original color tie had it washed with petrol and peroxide. A famous crime was Die outrage perpetrated just before the Two Thousand Cnmeas 1 m 1892 on Ormc. As Die result ol mercurial poisoning this unfortunate animal began to lose the hair of lbs coat, was unable to swallow liouid or solid lood. and for several daws hovered between life and death— and yet three months after this it won the Eclipse Slakes at Sundown. The criminal in Du’s case was never brought to book. Rumors, of course, have alwavs been nlc. Owing jo Die persistence' of one ol llioso, \ irntzo, who won tho One 1 nonsaml (lumens, had watchers bv her all day and all night- and eventually was run into by a trap, which damaged one nt her hind legs. One ol the grimmest (ricks ever play'd in connection with the Turf occurred during the Oaks of the year in winch Running Rein won the Derby. ( rockford. Die owner of a horse called •'bander, which had been kicked by Running Rein, died a few hours before the Oaks was run off. His filly won Die face, and he had been seen propped up in an armchair at one of the windows of his house during the afternoon. Had it then been known Dial be was actually dead (as lie was) bis horse would have been disqualified and all luff s void. One of the hackers of Die horse had propped the owner up in the window to prove that he was alive at Die time that the race was run.