When someone buys a horse, it's standard procedure for the potential buyer to pay for a vet to examine the animal-it's called "vetting out". The vet examines the horse for soundness, disease, and takes a good look at certain features that determine the horse's age and how well it was cared for. If the horse does not vet out there is no sale. Now it looks like they have since included toxicological drug tests as well on these animals as well
Drug Testing for horses? Well, it's not exactly new. Some time ago in horse racing, young mare race horses were often given injections of male hormones like testosterone to build their muscle and make them more aggressive. If the horse didn't win the next stop was the dog food factory, plain and simple. Trainers would also take part is something called "pin firing". A heated needle would be used to make a series of pin hole like burns on specific areas on the horses legs. Quite painful for the horse. The object was that these "wounds" would cause the blood flow in the area to increase substantially as to heal the horse's wounds not only to the pin burns but to the leg bones as well to heal them faster than normal. Race horses are very young and their bones have not reached their full strength and racing such young animals often causes premature lameness. Pin firing was looked at as a way around this and was often performed on the horses more than once. For all I know this procedure may still be done.
Most of the drugs listed are sedatives or pain killers. It would not be a surprise to me that this horse had similar problems although maybe not from racing but from other types of equestrian events which can be equally hard on the animal.
I would doubt some people here would remember but back in the late 80s and early 90s a number of people in these clubby equestrian circles were busted by the FBI for insurance fraud. These people bought high-end insurance policies on horses they had purchased. These horses were supposed to be of excellent bloodlines and very expensive, it was expected that these horses would win to make money for the owners. When they didn't, the owners looked for a way to recoup the money the put into the animals purchase, care, and keep. The only option was to collect on the insurance that had been taken out on the animals should the animals die or be killed in some way. A conspiracy ring formed to do just that, kill the horses for the insurance money and leave no discernible evidence of foul play such as poisoning or obvious physical wounds. This was done by electrocution. I don't know who alerted the FBI that something was going down, maybe it was the insurance companies themselves who saw a rash of high quality horse flesh die without warning or explanation and strongly suspected criminal activity.
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