What are the details available about the polo ponies death?”
Top veterinarian pathologists expect to find that some sort of toxin caused the deaths of 21 polo horses in Wellington Sunday, but exactly what the poison was and how it was delivered may not be known for several days. “Was it hay, feed, bedding, water? There are a lot of unanswered questions,” said Mark Fagan, spokesman for the Florida Department of Agriculture. “Horses may be big, but they are delicate animals.”Six of the horses from the Lechuza Caracaus polo team have been delivered to the department’s Animal Disease Diagnostic Lab in Kissimmee and 15 others arrived at the University of Florida College of Veterinary Medicine in Gainesville this morning. Fagan said necropsies will be performed on all 21, but UF spokeswoman Sarah Carey said UF would perform necropsies only on eight of the 15 there because only eight have insurance. In any case, it could take days, even weeks, before officials have answers, Carey said. “These things can take time,” Fagan said. “We have absolutely no id
The 21 polo ponies that collapsed and died before a Florida competition this month were given a fatal overdose of the mineral selenium in a vitamin supplement, the state veterinarian said on Tuesday. A Florida pharmacy acknowledged last week it incorrectly mixed a vitamin and mineral supplement given to the horses belonging to the Venezuelan Lechuza Caracas polo team, but state officials had been awaiting toxicology tests to determine the exact cause of death. Those tests showed “significantly increased” levels of selenium, a trace mineral essential for normal cell function but fatal in large doses, Florida State Veterinarian Thomas Holt said in his report. “Signs exhibited by the horses and their rapid deaths were consistent with toxic doses of selenium,” Holt said. The horses collapsed at the U.S. Open Polo Championship in Wellington, Florida, on April 19. The Lechuza team said last week its veterinarian wrote a prescription for a supplement containing vitamin B, potassium, magnesium
