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The AAEP

By Arnold Kirkpatrick
First Published: 08 April 2009 - Issue Number: 12

In fact, if I had paid a little more attention in school to books than to football, girls and liquor (not necessarily in that order), I may have gone on to become a equine vet, my own self.
I was a public relations consultant for the AAEP for a while back in the ’80s, and I have to admit that I’m more than a little bit proud that I conceived the AAEP “On Call” Program back in those days, even though I wasn’t able get them to implement it when I first proposed it. Several years later, though, my friend Sandra White, who was by then the official public relations person for AAEP, found the outline in an old file, resuscitated it, took it to Gary Carpenter – the very progressive executive director of AAEP at the time – and together they put it to work.
The idea was to train a group of veterinarians so there would be an articulate, well-trained spokesman on hand for every major race on television to provide a sane, levelheaded, rational and knowledgeable explanation of what was going on whenever a horse breaks down in a race like that, which is, a...

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