Every show trainer has been handed a number. "Bute is 72 hours." "Dex is 24." The number is usually right, and it is usually not the answer to the question that was asked. Here is what the governing bodies actually publish, and what has to be added before it is safe to rely on.
What a detection time is
A detection time comes from a study: a small group of healthy horses, one product, one dose, one route, and a laboratory that measured how long the drug could be found afterwards. It is the time after which that lab, in those horses, no longer detected that dose. The governing bodies say plainly that it is not a withdrawal time and that their tables are no defence against a positive test.
What it leaves out
- Your dose. A horse given more than the studied dose will take longer to clear it. ShowSafe Pro adds time from the published half-life when the dose is above the one studied, and marks the result as a low-confidence estimate. With no published half-life, it says ask your vet rather than guessing.
- Your route. Oral and intravenous are different studies. A route that was never studied is Unknown, not Clear.
- Repeated doses. Five days of bute is not one dose of bute.
- The horse. Age, hydration, kidney function and the product itself all move the number.
What has to be added
A withdrawal time is a detection time plus a safety margin that your veterinarian chooses for your horse. In ShowSafe Pro the vet sets that margin once, as a percentage, a number of hours or both, and it is saved under their name and added to every result. That is the record if a result is ever questioned.
The rules that are not in the drug table
A single drug's clearance is only part of the answer. The rulebook has body-wide rules that sit on top:
- USEF: one permitted NSAID in the 72 hours before the ring, and seven days for a non-permitted one; no injections within 12 hours; no joint injections within four days; and Medication Report Form reminders, including corticosteroid look-backs.
- NRHA: one NSAID within 72 hours.
- FEI: the Prohibited Substances List, where a substance is Banned or Controlled regardless of timing, and the 2027 list already loaded to apply to shows from 1 January.
ShowSafe Pro applies these after the drug table and cites each one, so the answer for a horse on two NSAIDs is Not clear even when both drugs are individually past their time.
Reading the four answers
- Clear: past the published time plus your vet's margin, for the dose and route recorded. It never says safe.
- Not clear: inside a published time or a rulebook window, with the time the horse comes into line.
- Unknown: not listed, or the route or dose was not studied. Ask your vet and consider an elective test.
- Prohibited: banned by that body. Talk to your vet before anything else.
The conversation with your vet
The point of all this is not to replace the call to your veterinarian. It is to start that call with the right numbers and the source in hand: the document, the page and the quoted line, one tap from the governing body's own PDF. Every value in ShowSafe Pro shows its review status, and a row that no veterinarian has signed off yet says so on the result.
The show rulebooks are in every StallWise plan, and ShowSafe Pro is sold on its own from $9.99 a month on iPhone and the web. See how it works or read how a clearance check is worked out.