 Horse at the Calgary Stampede was euthanized last night. It happened during the last heat of the chuck wagon races. The stampede says an outriding horse was injured during the event a veterinarian found the horse had fractured its lower front leg and it was put down. Now horses that take part in the nightly chuck wagon races are usually in peak fitness. There are veterinarians on hand to monitor the animal's health and now the stampede is using a new device to test the anaerobic performance of the horses. To tell us more about this is Dr. Renault Leguiette. He's the chair in equine sports medicine at the University of Calgary. Thanks for doing this. Thank you Andrew. So for those who don't know as much about horses and the stampede, in the case of the horse last night why would a horse that broke its leg be put down? Yeah horses are heavy animals and there are athletes running very fast so because of the weight mainly and because we don't have really the plates and screws that can support that kind of weight for horses really most of those leg fractures are unfortunately almost impossible to fix. The weight will break the implants and the horses have just skin on the bones on those legs so any kind of support material will very quickly induce some wounds and tissue that will swell and bleed and so unfortunately we don't have really good options for horses with a fractured leg like that. All right. Thank you for that. So let's talk about this new technology. Trackside is then? Yes. Yes. How does it work? So with the University of Calgary my program is very interested in exercise physiology and performance and how to help you know training these horses and get them as you said to the peak of the performance for these competitions and so we have we're validating handheld analyzer blood analyzer that's been designed to test ammonia usually in humans and we are interested in ammonia because it's a very very good indicator of anaerobic energy so the energy that your metabolism can give you to move without oxygen so when you run you get out of breath you know you're burning oxygen but you can even go faster or longer than that off the oxygen for a little bit and that top up of energy without oxygen is what really will get you even faster and ahead of the game and so ammonia is released when you're running without this kind of oxygen and is really tightly correlated to your anaerobic top up or performance of energy and so we have this analyzer that's a small portable design for humans and we're very interested in ammonia and wanted to validate it so does it you know does it work in horses and also we wanted to see now what kind of numbers do we get on horses running fast like horses at the stampede so once you have this information what do you actually do with it yeah so we're still in that step of validating and measuring but what you can do with that is two things one is you can look at the potential the athletic potential of a horse so the dream situation would be well eventually I can say I'll do that test and say that horse is better than that horse eventually we're not there yet it's not that simple unfortunately but it's going to help to make these kind of decisions and on the other hand too that's going to help mainly to before the events get your horse prepared and be at the peak of their condition for those important competitions as you probably know you know the athletes train let's say for the olympic games and they are at the top during the olympic games but they're a little bit less before and over train or lower after so you want time a little bit your training so that you're at the peak of your performance at the right time and these kind of tests I mean that test alone wouldn't do all of that but combined with all of the other things we do for fitness testing that definitely can help people train their horses and say oh I have more more room to improve or no you know I'm going to over train now so I should just talk where I am well Dr. Leguiette thanks so much for your insight on this thank you Andrew