Half A Century Holding Your Horses

[Wandering Eyes]

No doubt about it, the folks at Hagyards seem to have found themselves a promising intern. Still early days, mind. Richard Holder has only been there 53 years.

In fact, Dr. Holder believes himself the first beneficiary of an official internship at the storied Lexington firm, founded in 1876, albeit Dr. William McGee himself was evidently granted a similar opening, less formally, by Dr. Charles Hagyard in 1940. (By 1953 the firm was renamed Hagyard-Davidson-McGee Associates.) In either case, safe to say that the internship model started pretty well.

Holder had introduced himself, his first year at vet school, when a friend back in Corpus Christi sent him with an introduction to Craig Franks. Hoping to strengthen that connection, Holder returned as a junior–only to discover that Dr. Franks had left the practice.

“So I'm walking out, wondering what to do now, when [Dr.] Jim Smith drives into the barn,” Holder recalls. “I explained what I was doing there, and he said, 'Well, why don't you hop in and ride with me.' We got to be good friends and the next year, 1972, I got the internship.”

A vocation for horses had always been there, growing up in South Texas: working on ranches, rounding up cattle, playing cowboy. After the University of Texas, he proceeded to vet school at A&M–and his timing, in terms of the horse business, could not have been better. The old-school sporting programs were suddenly being supplemented by people trying to make money, big money, from breeding. An era was dawning when veterinary input could influence huge business decisions.

“When I arrived, the July Sale average was $37,000,” Holder recalls. “The next year, the Japanese started coming in and it went to $55,000. And over the next 15 years it went to $700,000. The business just exploded. There were tons of horses, people buying farms, people bringing in mares. Hagyards was swamped. They probably only had 10 veterinarians, now there are probably 70-something. So I got hired on. And the theory then was to be good to kids: if they worked hard, give them a chance. So if everything worked out, you could become a partner in eight years. And it did work out.”

His professional longevity qualifies Holder as one of the last links to names that still cast a benign shade over the Bluegrass, from a time when everything was done by palpation. “Dr. Charlie” retired the year Holder joined, but would regularly call by the office after a dove shoot, to take a drink and make the secretary blush with his teasing.

Jane Lyon with Dr. Richard Holder | Keeneland

“Dr. Davidson loved shooting, too,” Holder recalls. “As the only intern, I'd hang out with him at the racetrack and see what he'd do with the horses in training. But it was Dr. McGee who was my savior. He was trying to let up, so I hit at the right time. I got along well with Charles Nuckols–we were same age–so was able to take over Hurstland from Dr. McGee. Darby Dan, too, he kind of took me under his wing there. So just with those two, that was 300 mares off his list.”

McGee's need was Holder's opportunity.

“But he was also doing what I was most interested in, the 'ob-gyn' [obstetric-gynecological] stuff,” he says. “And he was extremely patient and supportive. His clients loved him: if he said I was okay, I was okay with them.”

Dr. Charlie's nephew Ed Fallon (“a studious, exacting guy who took great pains with me”) maintained the dynastic core of the firm, while closer in age. Mind you, science was moving so fast that the old timers were also having to learn as they went along. And Holder would himself become associated with a breakthrough meanwhile taken for granted as a decision-making tool by farms of every size.

In 1989, having expanded his clientele to include Waterford Farm and a burgeoning Lane's End account, Holder visited the man he considered the world's premier equine researcher, Dr. Oliver Ginther at the University of Wisconsin.

They spoke of this and that, caught up on advances–ultrasound had just entered widespread use–until it was time to head back to the airport. Waiting for the taxi, Holder happened to make a wistful aside about embryos: “Boy, it'd be cool if we could figure out a way to tell what sex they are.”

“You think people would really be interested?” said Ginther.

“I know my clients would. 'Wish we knew what she's carrying.' Hell, people have been saying that ever since I got down there.”

A few months later, Ginther telephoned. Thanks to ultrasound, they were learning their way round embryonic physiology, identifying nascent organs and tracking minute changes. And they had identified a barely perceptible, gender specific structure. “Two millimeters, kind of an 'equals' sign,” Ginther explained. “But if you can locate it, that genital tubercle might let you determine sex.”

This examination of fetal tissue in Ginther's lab had been conducted by Sandra Curran, who came down to show Holder what to look for. All he needed now was a small, obliging program that might let him experiment on its mares. There was an obvious candidate.

“Yeah, I had a little farm with a partner,” Holder recalls. “Fifteen mares. So I was my own first client for this. People don't like you just banging around in there without good reason. Then a couple for Dave Mowat at Fawn Leap. The first year, I did 25. All correct. So Dave said, 'Come on then, I'll let you charge for it.' Next year I did about 45. The year after, 80. Still all correct.”

It spread like wildfire: first to Holder's clients, then the superpowers, soon even their sister farms in Europe. At first, volume was confined by assessment being restricted to the first 80 days of pregnancy. But then Holder discovered that this narrow window could be prised back open just a couple of weeks later.

“At 80 days it goes out of reach but at 95, damn, there it is again,” he says. “It's a developed fetus, maybe the size of a rat, and the tubercle is no more: by now you're looking at external genitalia.”

A.P. Indy | Sarah Andrew

He returned to mares already sexed that year and cross-checked the later test against his original findings. Everything tallied. So now the testing spectrum had expanded radically. At one point Holder was scanning 2,000 mares a year, from Japan to Dubai.

“I carted that 25lbs Aloka machine through airports for 15 years!” Holder says. “Wasn't always fun, if you were late for a flight…”

Of maybe 50,000 tests across his career, no more than eight have proved wrong. So here was another transformative tool: science assisting business, but also business driving science. As the industry grew, ancillary specialisms flourished. In Holder's case, sexing fetuses ended up as 60 percent of his practice.

But ultrasound was game-changing in so many other ways. Holder remembers the theatricality surrounding the firm's first machine, each farm booking its day and moving all its mares to one barn to take their turn almost ceremonially. Improved detection even prompted some of the older help to mutter that the machine “caused” twins.

“I remember, one of the first mares I looked at, seeing three vesicles in there,” Holder recalls. “I thought she was full of cysts. Then next time you looked, damn, they were pregnancy vesicles. Triplets! Nobody really knew we had them. I've had as many as four or five pregnancies in a mare, but you'd never have known before.”

His specialism could make heavy demands. In springtime, long days ran into long nights, as draining emotionally as physically: if you need a vet for the business end of a pregnancy, something is going wrong. The other big test of vocation comes when your arm is fully committed to that portion of an indignant mare with two lethal hoofs attached. One colleague lost a lung, ultimately with tragic consequences, attempting no more than a worming. Mostly, however, Holder has felt able to trust both his own instincts and those handling his patient.

But while timeless crises abide, Holder could not have had a more dynamic environment for his long journey from intern to veteran. Now he, in turn, is fascinated by breakthroughs entering daily use among the next generation. Plenty of these, equally, have simply shown how well the old timers managed in the half-light of science.

Holder has been privileged by intimate insights into the systems that produced A.P. Indy and Genuine Risk, among others. And while he takes it a little easier now, confining himself to sexing “only” around 600 a year, the professional ardor still burns.

“I got here in '72, and I'm still practicing,” he says. “I think I'll have the record at Hagyards, in all the time they've been going. A lot of it's been pretty labor-intensive. But it's fun to get good results. Pregnant or not, that's different. Sexing, there's already good news: she's pregnant. Nobody blames you if it's the 'wrong' sex. But someone really wants a filly? And, yep, it's a filly–well, they go crazy. I've had such fantastic clients, over the years. So it's all been kind of nice to be part of.”

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