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Understanding Injuries and Insurance

Original article written by Regina Moore posted 4 years 4 weeks ago

Players can find the subject of injuries rather confusing. This article is an attempt to help players understand the difference between the various ways a horse can get injured and what, if anything, they can do to prevent it.

Injuries can be broken down into two broad categories.


TRAINER ERROR
The FAQ on injuries refers to these as “Race and Workout Injuries”, with “workout” meaning any type of exercise. In other words, you might ship a horse excessively (multiple long ships within a week, for example), which exhausts the horse. I’ve never known a horse to be injured from a ship, but then if you merely walk that horse, it might get injured, because the walk was the “last straw” so to speak, for that horse’s degree of tiredness.

Trainer error injuries happen because the horse got too tired — whether from too much racing, too much exercise (workouts, etc), too much shipping — or a combination of those activities. The veterinarian is your primary tool for knowing how rested or tired your horse is. Jogging also gives an indication of tiredness. A reminder that horses rest better at farms between races.

Soundness is a factor in how much racing or exercise a horse can have before it gets injured. Since there are four different levels of soundness, you’ll likely end up with horses with varying degrees of tiredness even when you race and exercise them all exactly the same way.

When your horse gets injured, you’ll get a private message telling you such, and on the horse’s page, beneath his name, will be a notation in red that he’s injured and give a date that he’ll be recovered. Injuries can cost as little as $1000, with the horse being laid up for only a couple of weeks, up to $20,000 for a bowed tendon, which forces the horse to be retired.

Sometimes a horse gets injured and the player can't find a reason why such happened — in other words, the horse wasn’t over-raced, or over-worked, or shipped excessively. Yet, whenever a player asks the Steward why the injury happened, she always has a reason, which indicates that the injury could have been prevented with more careful management. In my experience, these puzzling injuries often happen after a break between game years — ie, players forget what all the horse did Week 16 of the prior game year, and now they’re doing too much with it in the new game year. Often, the absence of farm rest is part of the Steward’s explanation about why a puzzling injury happened.

While injuries cost money and cost time off (which can cause a loss of fitness), the good news is that injuries don’t have lasting effects (except for a bowed tendon, which causes retirement), once the horse is recovered. So, you need not be concerned about treating the horse more delicately after it recovers from an injury.

Insurance will not prevent injuries that are due to trainer error.


RANDOM INJURIES
There are injuries that happen randomly and therefore aren’t the player’s fault. All random injuries can be prevented via insuring the horse. If the injury your horse receives doesn’t fall under this section, then it’s a trainer error injury.

Random injuries have two categories.

Break Injuries — called such because they happen during break; ie, at the transition from one game year to the next. A small percent of horses from three different pools of horses are affected by break injuries as soon as a new year starts:

— 100 2yos are randomly chosen to get bucked shins, which costs $5000 and lays them up for five or six weeks. (Note that if your 2yo is a miler or router, then this won’t hurt his racing career, since those youngsters don’t start racing until mid year, anyway.) The owner of each receives a private message that their youngster has been injured.

— 250 broodmares are randomly chosen to be barren (sterile) for the length of the game year. Players aren’t notified of such — instead, a mare shows “bred”, even though she hasn’t been bred. The next game year, the mare will be fertile again, unless she has the unlikely misfortune of being randomly chosen to be barren another year.

— 20 stallions are chosen to be infertile for the length of the game year. Players aren’t notified if their stallion is chosen, but The Steward always does a post on the forum listing out the 20 stallions.

Permanent Injuries — This is the most dreaded injury by players, because the horse loses its usefulness and is retired or pensioned. If a foal or yearling is permanently injured, it is retired and can’t ever race; though, if it’s a filly, she can be used for breeding once reaching the age of two. If a racehorse is permanently injured, it can no longer race. Geldings are automatically pensioned, and uncut colts (that have won at least one race) and fillies can be used for breeding. If a stallion or broodmare is permanently injured, it is automatically pensioned and can no longer be used for breeding.

New players aren’t subject to permanent injuries, and no player can receive more than two in a game year. If one looks at their Notes page (under the Profile menu of their home office), it’ll show at the top how many injuries, out of two possible, the player has received in the current game year. It is only permanent injuries that count toward this two-injury limit. Break injuries don’t count, and trainer error injuries don’t count.

Permanent Injuries always happen because the horse was “permanently injured in a stall [or stable] accident”. If your horse has any other description of an injury, then the injury is NOT a permanent injury, and therefore doesn’t count toward your two-injury limit.


INSURANCE
A horse can be insured at any age. Yearlings are the most expensive to insure, and 4yo+ horses the least expensive. The cost also varies by breed, but in all cases, I think most would consider insurance to be expensive. Therefore, it’s something of a luxury purchase that most players reserve for their best racehorses, best breeding stock, and most promising youngsters.

In real life, the way insurance works is that a bad thing happens, and the owner files a claim, so they get paid money by the insurance company to make up for the bad thing. In SIM, insurance prevents the bad thing from happening in the first place. So, rather than receiving an insurance payout, the player receives a message that their horse was “almost injured”, but was saved by the wise choice of purchasing insurance.

Once insurance is purchased for a horse, that horse is insured for life, regardless of ownership changes. If a horse is insured, it’ll say “Insured” on its page, at the bottom of the box that list its owner, breeder, and current location.

Less than 200 horses are hit with permanent injuries during a game year, so the chances of any particular horse getting hit are very slim. However, under the heading of “you never know”, I once got the following message in my Inbox about one of my horses that was later named All Weather Horse of the Year:

**Good news! Your horse, Curse of the Sun, was nearly injured, but because you thought ahead and purchased insurance, he is perfectly fine now. **

So, it can happen to the very best. Curse of the Sun is a Steward-bred, and all Steward-breds are insured before being put up for auction.

Once again, insurance does not prevent any injuries that aren’t random. Insurance will not prevent an injury that falls under trainer error.


AGING AND DEATH
Please note that injuries, as discussed in this article, are different from the natural results of aging. Regardless of being insured, mares can still die from foaling once reaching the age of 12, and stallions can still become permanently sterile at any time upon reaching the age of 14.

The FAQ on Injuries: https://www.simhorseracing.com//simforum/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=11277
The FAQ on Insurance: https://www.simhorseracing.com//simforum/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=19212
The FAQ on Soundness: https://www.simhorseracing.com/simforum/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=38594


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