Surgeon: Horse knew it was time

After all the surgeries and cast replacements and pool recoveries, all the prayer vigils and long-distance healers - Barbaro let everyone know that it was time.

Sunday night, the horse couldn't get comfortable, in his sling or out of it. He wouldn't lie down. It turned out laminitis, already in Barbaro's left hind foot, was afflicting his two front feet.

"Bottom line - he was a completely different horse," said his surgeon, Dean Richardson. "You could see he was upset."

Yesterday, Richardson taught a morning class at the University of Pennsylvania's New Bolton Center and performed surgery on a stallion. In between, though, he went to the intensive-care unit with Barbaro's owners, Roy and Gretchen Jackson, and an intern.

At that time, Barbaro was given a heavy dose of a tranquilizer, then a heavy dose of an anesthetic, "an overdose," Richardson said. He was euthanized at 10:30 a.m.

Richardson described all this at a news conference yesterday afternoon. He got emotional several times, cutting his answers short. He said that he knew people would ask why they had gone to all that trouble over the last eight-plus months when it didn't save Barbaro in the end.

Richardson said he had waited too long in the past with other animals, but "I don't think that's the case here," the surgeon said. "One thing I can tell you - Barbaro had many, many good days."

Asked what he had learned, Richardson said there were many things, but the answers would be too technical to interest most people.

"I honestly believe I would have a better chance to save his life, because I would probably not make the same mistakes," Richardson said. "I'm sure I made mistakes. Everybody makes mistakes, or know of things you could have done better."

Asked whether they knew where Barbaro's final resting place would be, Gretchen Jackson simply said, "No."

Asked to estimate the cost of Barbaro's medical care, Richardson said he would not. He had said recently that other animals had been in his care for as long a time. However, Barbaro underwent numerous surgical procedures, including all the cast replacements under general anesthesia.

Had it not been for laminitis - the hoof disease caused by uneven weight distribution in the limbs - Barbaro likely would have pulled through.

"This was a very near thing," Rick Arthur, the equine medical director for the California Horse Racing Board, told the Associated Press. "If it hadn't been for the last cascade of complications I think this could have been successful. The key thing is the fracture healed. It was laminitis to the left hind that started the sequence of events that led to his demise."

As he had over the weekend, Richardson described the problems lately as "a house of cards." Inserting an "external skeletal fixation device" Saturday to keep weight off his right hind foot was a last-ditch effort.

"If it doesn't work, we'll quit," Richardson had said on Sunday.

Throughout the last eight months, Richardson had warned that Barbaro was never out of the woods, even when he was about to leave for a horse farm in Kentucky. But if he didn't believe that Barbaro could make it out of New Bolton alive, "it would be hard to get up and go to work," Richardson said.

On Sunday, the surgeon had said he feared the laminitis would end up in Barbaro's front feet. When it happened . . . "that left him without a good leg to stand on," Richardson said.