23.02.12

Soon after leaving the service in the mid-1940s, Mel Stute went to work as a groom for trainer Yorkie McLeod at the old Tanforan Racetrack near San Francisco. McLeod had a funny way of trying to prevent his horses from the age-old problem of bleeding. He would ask his young groom to wrap copper wire around the base of a horse’s tail before a race − thin, eight-inch strips of the sort you would find in hardware stores.

“I’d put it on as late as I could before going to the receiving barn, which was an hour before the race then,” said Stute, 84, who has been training in California for more than six decades. “You’d tighten it tight enough so they could feel it.”

The teenager did what he was told, however strange it sounded. Stute laughs now thinking about it.

“I don’t think it really helped, but it helped you mentally,” he said.

The copper wire was ostensibly meant to be a tourniquet, as if the tail was a gateway to the lungs and held magical powers of coagulation. Pricking a horse’s ears would’ve been as effective, which is to say not at all. And McLeod wasn’t a slouch. He trained outstanding fillies Levee and Marshua and won the 1956 Travers. But it goes to show what horsemen might try to prevent bleeding in the lungs, what veterinarians now call Exercise-Induced Pulmonary Hemorrhaging (EIPH).

Source: Daily Racing Form

Amazon.com: Science Experiments You Can Eat: Revised Edition ...
Amazon.com: Science Experiments You Can Eat: Revised Edition (9780064460026): Vicki Cobb, David Cain: Books

Science Experiments You Can Eat: Revised Edition by Vicki ...
Science Experiments You Can Eat has 13 ratings and 4 reviews. Charlene said: A fun book full of science experiments that use food to prove their points and...