Hagyard Davidson McGee

Among the dogs noisily bounding to inquire after your business at Dundrum Farm, one is really something special. Gordon, a big black schnauzer, lost his sight to blastomycosis a couple of years ago, but you would never know it: he scampers confidently along corridors, through doorways, even joins the reception committee outside. "Until he gets on the grass," Lesley Campion explains. "Then he knows that he only has one stride, and has to stop. But no, he's a genius, that dog." Certainly he couldn't exhibit a more certain sense of...

Renowned equine reproduction specialist Dr. Walter W. Zent, D.V.M. passed away June 29 in Lexington, Kentucky. He was 84 years old. A New York native, Zent began his love affair with horses as a young child when visiting family in Kentucky. He graduated from Cornell University's School of Veterinary Medicine in 1963, interned at Purdue University, then spent two years investigating infectious disease outbreaks and pathology at the University of Kentucky's Department of Veterinary Science. He began practicing at Hagyard-Davidson-McGee, now Hagyard Equine Medical Institute, in 1966 and was synonymous...

   TDN is proud to partner with the Keeneland Library and the Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky Libraries in a very special collaboration: the Keeneland 'Life's Work' Oral History Project, a series of filmed interviews by TDN columnist Chris McGrath with significant figures in the Thoroughbred industry. An excerpt from current installment, with Dr. Gary Lavin, appears here. As Will Rogers said, the best doctors in the world are the veterinarians--because their patients can't talk. "And that's true," says Gary Lavin. "But at the same...

A report in the Feb. 20 Lexington Herald-Leader, claims that Midwest trainer Tom Swearingen, who filed a class-action lawsuit in February 2019 alleging that Hagyard Davidson McGee Associates had been falsifying dates on radiographs for over a decade, admitted in a deposition that he never viewed or relied on X-rays during the years in question, nor did he have a veterinarian examine X-rays. "That is the foundation of his claim, and removing that foundation causes that whole complaint to collapse," Tom Miller, the attorney representing Dr. Robert Hunt, one of...