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[johnhannibalsmith]

Just to play with Mr. Dahlman's post a bit - looking at the thoroughbredrulings.com site, I can't find a ruling for Bassett before the May demorphin rulings. I looked at a few others and they obviously go back a while and Bassett isn't exactly a fresh face on the scene. To be honest, he lives down the way from me and has had some of our young horses to get ready. One of those was fairly detestable to be around and as a reward/punishment, he ended up training him (actually a TB) for a while at RUI where he broke his maiden. Nothing indicated at the time that John was using anything illegal and I don't believe that he was. So, with no information available to suggest that he was inclined, and past experiences that suggested otherwise - what would my punishment have been had he trained something for us that suddenly popped with one of these positives?

I'm not naive and have a pretty solid grasp on how veterinary billing can work with this sort of stuff. I think that is where the line needs to be drawn if you are going to head down this path - if you really want to hold accountable an owner, you need to be able to demonstrate that the owner was aware of the treatment and then codify an "owner's responsibility" rule much like the one that applies to trainers that specifies that they bear the burden of inquiring what some obscure charge on the bill is with a misleading description. Then you are going to need some evidence, or a reasonable belief, that the owner knew that the charge for 177291d 9/5/12 P/R Vit. Boost was in fact something illegal. It just seems like a tough road to head down in all but the most clear-cut cases or when it becomes a pattern for the owner over a span of several or more different trainers.

For the record, I think Bassett should get every bit of this punishment and probably more. But, having been on the owner and trainer end of it, I'm just not convinced that cracking down on owners is viable without a mountain of evidence. And considering that the thread begins with the case of Bassett, who is basically unknown to anyone outside of AZ/NM/LosAl and hasn't had any public violations or any discernible rulings on the public record, it really seems like an implausible proposition in this context.