Arrogate has passed away...

[Kurenai]

They said they noticed he was acting like he had a sore neck a week before so they stopped breeding him. He could have fell hard in his paddock. Does it take a week for symptoms to present to a point he couldn't stand? Or did he maybe get unsteady on his legs and fall in his stall? They did say he went down in his stall and never got up again. Did that fall possibly cause the rest of the damage? I mean we'll never know its just speculation.

If he had a cracked vertebrae or something that can go undetected apart from soreness (unless you get an x-ray), til he makes one move that squishes the spinal cord. Other cause could be arthritic changes so the space where the cord is is small, then you get whiplash or something.... you squish it and that leads to swelling, bleeding etc. (I'm not a doc, just know a lot about those type of injuries because of my accident.) Can happen even without outwards signs.

The way it was described was that he shook himself a few times in his stall and then went down. Most likely he went down because he was paralyzed already. Could be that he reared in his paddock few days earlier and fell backwards, immediately got up again and nobody noticed... lots of possibilities there. If it was a tumor or something they would have found cells, so my best guess is that it was a freak accident.

Horses just find a way to hurt themselves...

[Diver52]

It's just very sad whatever was the cause. I hate to think of him lying paralyzed in the clinic for days but I hope they were giving him happy juice so he was more or less oblivious.

I had a co-worker who fell and broke her wrist into a gazillion pieces and was hospitalized overnight before surgery. She was in a room with 2 or 3 other women and they were all moaning and complaining while my friend just wished they would shut up--she felt just fine despite a wrist in fragments! She later realized that her good spirits had a LOT to do with the morphine drip! Somewhat the same for me when I broke my hip--whenever I moved my leg or a muscle clenched, I screamed. But in between, I was weirdly cheerful. Reminds me of the song we all thought was funny in the 1970's "Cocaine.. . run all 'round my brain." And the one with "my mucous membranes are just a memory. . . "

Just a very sad ending for a great talent. Deciding when to pull the plug is hard with a young animal who might recover. Crap, it's hard with an old animal like my Dooley, older than dirt but now finding it harder and harder to get up at all.

[CorridorZ75]

Once saw a horse walk in to the hospital with a complete fracture of the cervical spinal column which was diagnosed with radiographs, as in the cranial and caudal halves were on two different planes, but the spinal cord had not snapped yet. I think these farms have video cameras of the paddocks as well so they should be able to go back and see whether there was a freak accident- although I guess the video might overwrite itself periodically. However, it seems strange to me that there would trauma of the spinal cord with no signs of trauma in surrounding tissue or bone detectable in the necropsy. The spinal cord is buried deep and surrounded by alot except for right at A0 and AA joints.

I also had a colleague who had been thrown up against the wall of a trailer by a colicking horse once that kept having shooting pains in one arm for weeks afterward. She had had a scan done just after the incident, and when she finally went back to see what might be causing the continued pain in the arm, they looked back at that initial scan and realized they had missed a complete fracture of the C2 vertebra. She was walking around and working with this for weeks! They ended up having to surgically fuse her upper vertebrae.

[Squeaky]

Very sad ending for one of my favorite horses. I just can’t help wondering if some subtle neck or back injury was responsible for his dramatic loss of form after Dubai. One never seems to read about Baffert horses being checked by experts like Bramlage so who knows.

[Squeaky]

What could have happened too is that he cracked his vertebrae or injured himself much earlier. Then when he shook, something got lose, shifted... and he compressed his spinal cord. There's been people who run around with broken necks too.

I'm just really, really wondering how they couldn't detect this while he was at the clinic. No MRI? I'm actually wondering how he didn't get into shock and everything that's related to a SCI. They kept him alive for 4 days with that? Holy... Only reason I can think of is that the cord wasn't completely severed, so they were hoping for the swelling to go down and that he can use his limbs again?

Don't get me wrong - I am SURE there were plenty of reasons why things happened the way they did. I have no doubt they did everything right. The simple explanation just made me wonder, but that was probably so people can understand it easily.

When he was euthanized in June, the article made it seem like they had exhausted all testing to try and find the cause and honestly had no idea what was making him unable to stand.

They said they noticed he was acting like he had a sore neck a week before so they stopped breeding him. He could have fell hard in his paddock. Does it take a week for symptoms to present to a point he couldn't stand? Or did he maybe get unsteady on his legs and fall in his stall? They did say he went down in his stall and never got up again. Did that fall possibly cause the rest of the damage? I mean we'll never know its just speculation.

I wonder if some type of insurance assessment was part of it. I once saw a poor older broodmare with a horrendous compound shoulder fracture kept alive in a raft in a pool at a major vet hospital for weeks while the insurance company bickered with the owners and vets before they finally and mercifully euthanized her.

[Squeaky]

Local Lexington channel said Bob Baffert was brought to tears when told about Arrogates passing.

I know many think BB is a heartless abuser, but I remember years ago his 2yo What a Song (owned by the Lewises) broke down in the a.m. and was euthanized. TVG interviewed him in the afternoon about a horse he had running and the interviewer expressed condolences about the colt. Baffert teared up, mumbled "I'm sorry, I can't talk about it" and walked away.

I remember What a Song just a beautiful horse. I sent Bob a sympathy card because I really felt so bad for what happened.

[Mylute]

A "spinal cord core lesion" is something I've never heard of.

This is especially unfortunate because it sounds like nobody knew anything was wrong until it was too late, either because Arrogate did what horses do and hide the pain or he really didn't feel anything for a while. He could've gotten the horse zoomies in his paature and hurt himself without anyone seeing.

[Diver52]

When I was working in the court system I came across a workers' compensation case in which the worker had pushed her rolling chair away from her desl and severed her spinal cord. Bizarrely awful things do happen.

[CorridorZ75]

A "spinal cord core lesion" is something I've never heard of.

This is just a generic way of saying a focal abnormality. If you look at a spinal cord on necropsy, it is a white tube. "Lesions" are usually red or red-brownish or black, if visual. They can be gray as well, especially with something like malacia, or degeneration of the normal tissue.

[Northport]

Very sad ending for one of my favorite horses. I just can’t help wondering if some subtle neck or back injury was responsible for his dramatic loss of form after Dubai. One never seems to read about Baffert horses being checked by experts like Bramlage so who knows.

I'm not a doctor but I would be stunned if this was something that occurred while he was racing and he was able to live with for three years of running, bucking, covering mares, etc.