Colorado’s Horse Surgeon

New Zealand-born veterinarian and world authority on equine joints, Dr Wayne McIlwraith is the director of Colorado State University’s Equine Orthopaedic Research Center, each year performing as many as 500 surgeries on racing thoroughbreds. In his role at the EORC – the most prominent and largest of the handful of such facilities in the United States – McIlwraith conducts and oversees research in the quest to make horseracing safer. This is done primarily in two ways: firstly, coming up with and refining testing procedures that can detect bone problems in racehorses that can make them prone to breakdowns and secondly, researching racing surfaces, whether dirt or synthetic. “In a perfect world, and I don’t think this is unreasonable, I feel that if an owner buys a yearling, he is just as responsible for that horse’s well-being as if they had a kid,” McIlwraith says. McIlwraith qualified as a veterinarian from Massey University in 1970 and then completed his surgical residency and PhD at Purdue University, in Indiana. He was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Science from Massey University in 2003, the first veterinary graduate to receive such an honour.