High intensity, short duration pulling in heavy horses: physiological effects of competition and rapid weight change
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The Heavy Horse Pull is a competition where teams of two horses pull an increasingly heavy sled for a short distance. Similar to human wrestlers, some horses may undergo rapid weight change in order to enter a lower weight category. The objectives were to study the physiological effects of this practice as well as of the pulling competition in draft horses. RESULTS: Fifty horses were divided into light-, middle- and heavyweight categories based on their arrival weights and competed 1-3 days after. Body weight was measured upon arrival and pre-competition. Blood was sampled for chemistry and high sensitivity cardiac troponin T (hscTnT) at arrival, pre- and post-competition in 34, 26 and 20 horses, respectively. Body weight increased significantly between arrival and pre-competition for light (7.2% (Median: 62.8Kg (41.7-77.0)) and middle (8.6% (Median: 80.5Kg (62.7-90.9)) weight categories. Change in body weight was correlated (r = 0.69, p = 0.002) with competition ranking for middleweights. The ratios of weight pulled to team body weight were 2.7 (1.9-2.8), 2.6 (2.5-2.6) and 2.4 (2.2-2.5) for the lightweights, middleweights and heavyweights, respectively. Blood chemistry indicated hemoconcentration on arrival in the middleweight and lightweight horses. Hemoconcentration was not seen on arrival in some horses with marked rapid weight change. Overall, no chemistry parameter changed between pre- and post-competition. The hscTnT stayed within normal range post-competition. CONCLUSIONS: While horses arrived to the event with indications of hemoconcentration, they appeared to have sufficient time to rehydrate prior to competition, and the effects of the competition were reversible within 3 h.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".