Saving Baby (32 page)

“It's alright, Pat,” I called out to her. “Mommy's coming.” By the time I grabbed a lead line and reached her, she was trembling, very aware that she was on unsafe footing. Footing is extremely important to horses. They do not want to go down accidentally. It's why they don't like to go from grass to asphalt, from asphalt to dirt, from dirt onto a ramp that will lead them into a trailer. It's why I had spent so much time teaching Baby and Scarlett how to walk across planks of wood and up the patio steps and other unusual surfaces. I wanted them to build confidence in their ability to step from one material onto another.

I made my way onto the ice with my rubber muck boots and was slipping and sliding every which way. Finally, I was able to attach the line to Pat and lead her—slowly, very slowly—off the large ice patch.

I locked that pasture shut after that, but it was clear that Pat, now twenty-one, had become a danger to herself and wasn't going to be able to handle being blind. So a few weeks later, after deliberating over and over, I said my final good-bye, and she went peacefully, as Pumpkin had, via injection, with me regretting that I was so busy I barely spent any time with the beloved, gentle mother of Baby in her last days. Making it feel all the sadder was that euthanization was no longer novel. I had to euthanize so many track horses that Dr. Stick, after careful evaluation, would tell me were unsalvageable and could not be helped with surgery.

After Pat was cremated, I spread some of her ashes in the pasture and put some more in the stein with Baby's and Pumpkin's. More of my herd was now in a vessel in our great room than cavorting behind our house.

Only Beauty and Sissy were left. Scarlett was traveling the country, winning more and more eventing awards at ever higher levels of competition. Many times she competed at the beautiful Kentucky Horse Park in Lexington, and she also went to strut her stuff at competitions as far away as Florida and North Carolina. To this day, her trainer, Jennifer, recalls Scarlett as the horse with whom she received her best eventing dressage scores ever—a 27 in the Kentucky Classic and a 29 at the Long Leaf Competition in North Carolina. The numbers don't mean anything if you're not an eventer, but they are proof of amazing feats.

Year after year, the rhythm of the racing season would repeat itself, with things kind of slow in the spring, when trainers still believed all of their horses had big wins in them, and then picking up in the summer and becoming extremely busy in the fall, when they wanted to unload all their failed charges as quickly as possible as they moved on to race tracks in warmer climates for the winter. Often, come October, I had to play musical chairs with trailer space. A trainer or jockey's agent or groom or even the track vet would come up to me and ask whether I had such-and-such a horse on the trailer because it broke down and needed help right away. Such horses, the most unsound of all, took precedence. They were a financial liability to everyone who stood to earn money at the track and needed to be vacated so a horse able to race and be wagered on could take its place. If they weren't removed as quickly as possible by me, they'd go to the slaughterhouse to free up lucrative space in a shedrow. Often, they were in terrible pain, another more pressing reason that they needed to be examined and tended to without delay.

Scarlett eventing with her trainer, Jennifer Merrick-Brooks.

In such cases, if a trailer was already full, I unloaded the soundest horse and brought it back to its trainer, having explained that I had another horse who couldn't wait. “I know you,” I'd say. “I can trust you to hold onto the horse for me,” never having a clue whether that was actually the case. But as luck would have it, each trainer always complied, having my assurances that I'd send another trailer for his horse within a week.

Once the season ended, I had a little time, as always, to catch my breath. But after the 2001 season, my efforts to stop the atrocities of racing were about to ramp up. In February of 2002, right around my birthday, I received a letter from a newly formed organization called Blue Horse Charities. It had been founded by John Hettinger, a very well-known name in the racing industry. John was at that point the owner of one of the largest auction houses in Lexington, Fasig-Tipton, where sheiks and others with unfathomable amounts of money come to buy the fastest, most well-bred horses in the world. I was told Fasig-Tipton was second only to Keeneland, the premier auction for top Thoroughbreds.

John was proracing but decidedly antislaughter, in favor of the welfare of a horse above all else. When a Thoroughbred was done performing at its best, he wanted to see it not drop into lower-level claiming races where it would be run to death, literally, but move on to a new career.

His charity was new, the letter said, but he was writing because he felt CANTER would qualify to receive funding from it since so much of what we did was find Thoroughbreds new disciplines at which to excel when their racing days were behind them. The letter instructed me to fill out the forms enclosed, and for every horse I had adopted out the previous year, Blue Horse Charities would send CANTER a check. The money came from his persuading sellers of horses to donate a percentage of their profits, with his matching the amount in every single case from his own coffers.

I couldn't believe our good fortune. Even with our budget increasing by leaps and bounds every single year, we were always barely squeaking by, and that was with everyone on the board who could afford to putting in some of their own personal money and all the volunteers fostering horses, feeding them at their farms, trailering them, walking the shedrows, for free.

I shot off a letter that I couldn't have received a better birthday gift, and he must have liked what I said because he quoted from it in Blue Horse Charities' national brochure. It leant CANTER a great deal of credibility to be recognized by someone so well respected in racing himself. The very first year, Blue Horse Charities sent us a check for $11,000.

Although John loved racing, he so put the horses' welfare first that I even convinced him to send money to euthanize horses who were too broken down and in too much irreversible pain to go on living, let alone switch to a new discipline. It was a wonderful understanding between us, that a euthanized horse, too, is a saved horse because it gets to die a peaceful death rather than be sent to an awful slaughter.

It meant so much to me because the horses who needed to be put down, more than any others, were Baby. Had I not been an involved owner, Baby would have been forced to limp onto a trailer and withstand a trip of many hours, his head bent low on a double-decker trailer meant for cows and pigs, to meet a scary, painful end with a bolt gun and a knife. And that would likely have been
after
an auction and time in a holding pen, probably without food or water but with aggressive horses to take him down.

For all it meant to me that John Hettinger understood my point of view, however, the most felicitous aspect of my coming to know him was that he brought me into a circle of people with whom I otherwise never would have had entrée. Through John, I met Staci Hancock, the wife of Arthur Hancock, who co-owned two Kentucky Derby winners and was also very antislaughter. In addition, I met Kentucky Congressman Ed Whitfield, antislaughter as well. I became part of a select group of people who would meet to strategize about a bill of Whitfield's called the American Horse Slaughter Prevention Act. If the bill went into law, it would ban slaughter in the U.S. and prohibit the transport of horses to slaughterhouses in Canada or Mexico. At that time, the majority of the 100,000 or so horses put to death every year went to slaughterhouses operating in Texas and Illinois, but there were still thousands going to Canada and Mexico every year. About one in five of them were Thoroughbreds.

As much as I had to learn about the inner workings of government from these luminaries, they had questions for me. Removed in their daily lives from the goings-on at lower-level tracks like Great Lakes Downs, they wanted to know how things worked. “What happens when a horse comes in? How does it end up going to slaughter? How does it get taken from the track? Had I actually
seen
horses removed by kill buyers?” They literally didn't know how the backstretch of a cheap track operated. Why would they?

I was glad for the progress I was making in talking with people who were in a position to choke the slaughter pipeline at its root, rather than at its end, as I was working to do in a manner that was much less efficient. But I was also reaching my breaking point. I had been working for twenty-four years at a high-stress job as a court reporter, taking down everything verbatim, never missing a single word, and continuously meeting strict deadlines. Concurrently, at any one time, I had thirty to forty horses boarded at farms all over the state, visiting them to check their injuries, to meet with veterinarians that CANTER would pay to take X-rays and examine them before it was decided whether they should be sent to Michigan State for further evaluation. Often, at Michigan State, I spent time signing euthanization paperwork for horses beyond help, a particularly draining task. During the season, I was running out to Great Lakes Downs virtually every Saturday.

My own barn was a revolving infirmary, with up to six or seven visitors at a time, some having to stay in the barn aisle because I had run out of stalls. Most horses came there
after
surgery, so I'd take care of them through weeks or months of stall rest, hand-walking them in larger and larger areas as they healed, giving them medications when necessary, hosing off injuries to keep down swelling. The only other person who took postsurgery horses in volume was a volunteer named Martha Denver, who lived northeast of me in what is known as Michigan's thumb; the state is shaped like a mitten. Not only did she have a larger facility than I did, she also had experience treating equine injuries. Between the two of us, we were kept extremely busy helping horses recuperate.

Through all of this, I had to keep placating the racing industry by continually telling the media only good, happy-ending stories. I had to answer the phone at 1
A.M.
and remain pleasant when a prospective adopter from California would call without regard for time zones because she couldn't tell from the picture on the Web site whether a horse's tail was very bushy and exactly how many inches from the ground it was. I had to continually write new grant proposals and meet with Michigan State's people to brainstorm about new ways to drum up money. I felt so squeezed I developed painful stomach ulcers. I had more trouble sleeping than ever.

Things came to a head during the fall rush of 2002. One Saturday morning I expected to have as many as six horses to remove from the track. Joy was there with her trailer, as were a couple of others with theirs, but I also arranged for a large rig. Nearby foster homes were nearly full, so I knew I needed to be prepared to have some horses hauled across the state to the more populous eastern side, where I had more foster families who could take on any overflow.

The day turned out much more hectic than I ever could have anticipated. Trainers were chasing me down the shedrows, paging me over the loudspeaker system. At the end of the afternoon, we had not six but twelve horses that needed quick removal. It took me more than a half hour with a pen and notebook just to organize the logistics of an exodus of twelve horses on four trailers to twelve different foster homes. Each horse needed to be matched with each foster home's requirement for accepting a horse. One farm might take stallions, while another had to have a quiet horse, and yet another still might not take an injured horse.

When I left the track following the large rig with six of the twelve horses, I still didn't know where they'd all be going. I just told the driver to head east and got on the cell phone, frantically calling people and asking them to take a horse for at least a few days. “I'm driving toward your house now,” I'd say to each. “Can you do this?”

The last of the twelve was delivered a few minutes before midnight, with the final farm even farther east than my own. I had left my house at five that morning, having woken well before that to feed Beauty and Sissy and take care of all the foster horses in my care. I was happy—none of the horses had been sold to a kill buyer—but spent, and the stress and exhaustion played themselves out on my body, not just that day but every day.

My ulcers were acting up with such ferocity that I would become nauseated within thirty minutes of eating. I'd go without food in order not to feel sick. When I did finally eat, toward evening, I'd go into abdominal spasms.

Finally, John put his foot down. “You're quitting your job,” he said. It was on a day that I had to drive an hour and twenty minutes to Michigan State in order to bring in a horse for surgery. I barely had enough time to get there as it was, but he insisted I stay put for a discussion.

“How can I quit work?” I asked him. “Some of the money goes to CANTER.” The gas alone crisscrossing the state cost a lot.