Saving Baby Read online

  That was Happy’s fate. By the time Peg got him, thirteen days after his ordeal began, he had been bitten up and had gouges across his entire body, with a large, festering, pus-oozing wound on his head, just above his right eye. Peg said both his eyes were expressionless, lifeless. He stood with his legs splayed, like he was ready to collapse at any time. He was extremely dehydrated.

  Happy when he was first rescued. You can see the wound above his eye.

  But gradually, he came back to himself, strong enough to finish recuperating at my farm. By the time he got to me, he was no longer the horse at death’s door that Peg had picked up. I was so grateful that my mistake in allowing him to be adopted by the wrong person hadn’t ended in the worst way possible. I was so glad he now had green grass to munch on and somebody to say his name every time she saw him. “Hap-py!” I would call out, and up would come his head in response, not with a whinny but with a nicker, a quieter response—content rather than exuberant. He had already seen too much.

  Sissy adored him, and he enjoyed her company as well. He didn’t have that fear of being turned out with another horse that River Wolf had had. He was at home in the pasture, where he stayed until midsummer, when he was adopted by a woman named Mary Hejna who treated him wonderfully and went on to successfully compete with him in eventing competitions from Michigan to Florida, Kentucky, throughout the Midwest, and even into Canada. Not only did he get to become a pet, life once he was saved became rewarding, illustrious even.

  Happy with Mary Hejna in his new life, after recuperation.

  I had been lucky with Peg in Happy’s case, and also with the meat buyer. A lot of people in racing wouldn’t hand over a horse even for money. At auctions, the auctioneers often wouldn’t acknowledge our bids, even if they were higher than the kill buyers’. We were taunted in the shedrows, too.

  But it was not unusual to find CANTER adopters themselves who, like Peg, tried in various ways to help the cause. Early in 2001, a woman from Grand Rapids named Cheryl Johnson who had taken a horse that would have otherwise gone to slaughter called me to say that she made her living as a nonprofit consultant and wanted to offer her services to me pro bono. “I can help you build your program,” she told me, “and my husband is a university professor who knows how to write grant proposals.”

  One of Cheryl’s most helpful suggestions was to broaden our board of directors. At that point, our board consisted of six people, all women, all of whom, except for Robbie (who was invaluable for getting us TV coverage), were hands-on, either buying up horses at the track, trailering them away, or fostering them on their farms.

  One of the board members was Judy, my very first volunteer, who with her model-worthy good looks, tall stature, and long reddish hair, proved a real asset in getting the attention of trainers on the backstretch. Their eyes would light up when they saw her. When she was with me, in fact, I had no difficulty getting them to stop what they were doing and talk CANTER. More than that, she gave CANTER her all. Living just five miles from Great Lakes Downs and within a mile of the track’s annex barn, she had trainers dropping off unwanted horses at all hours, showing up in her driveway at ten o’clock at night without any notice. Even with three small children, two of them not yet in school, she’d take in the horses and sweet talk the men, letting them know that CANTER was good for the money.

  Another member of the board was Joy Aten, who was with me the day I bought Twoey. An oncology nurse about my age, she dealt with suffering and death on the job, which toughened her to the goings-on at the track. She also had owned horses herself for many years and understood that sometimes the kindest thing you can do for a horse is euthanize it rather than make it continue on in pain.

  Like Judy, Joy was very pretty and had a good rapport with the trainers, always smiling and, when negotiating over a pitiful horse that might be standing right next to her in horrific pain, not acting accusatory or demanding but, instead simply using all of the skills she must have learned in dealing with death as part of her work. She was very deft at saying the right thing to the right person to get things to go her way, and this made her invaluable at extracting spent horses from trainers’ hands. She was able to make a lot of time for CANTER as well. As a night nurse who was divorced with four grown children, she could pretty much decide her own hours. I admired her strength, her ability to raise two boys and two girls by herself, picking up and doing what she had to do to make life work.

  Joy and I also mirrored each other in certain ways. She, too, had lost horses in a tragic accident. Three of hers managed to escape through the gate one day from one of the pastures at her ex-husband’s place, where she was boarding them. All were hit by a car on the highway, dying on the spot. Like me, she knew about being driven by guilt, about taking that extra ten minutes, that extra hour, that fourteenth phone call—whatever it took—to never give up in order to save a horse. And like me, while she could act nonchalant on the backstretch, pretending to take it all in stride and hold it together, she’d start crying in her pickup and weep all the way home, sometimes with a horse in tow that she knew nothing could be done to help. She’d call me on the cell phone, and I could hear her voice, at first cracking, then breaking into sobs. It made me feel less alone, made me wonder less what was wrong with me.

  With time, that closeness naturally spilled over into other areas. To this day, Joy and I talk at least three times a week on the phone and hardly ever pass a day without texting or e-mailing each other. She has even flown halfway across the country with me to squeeze my hand before I went up to the podium to give an important speech in Washington, to be there for me when I felt wobbly.

  Invaluable as Joy and Judy and the other women on the board were, however, Cheryl told me it was very unusual to have a board whose great majority of members were boots-on-the-ground. Most nonprofits, she explained, especially when they reach the point at which their budgets are into the six figures, are made up mostly of people not in the trenches, people who bring renown to the organization and with it, more funds.

  The reality, she said, is that if, say, a foundation is considering where to donate money, its managers are going to look at a non-profit’s board and ask themselves, “Do we really want to give six women thousands of dollars? Are they going to go shopping with it?” None of us even had letters after our name, she added. In addition to people working directly with the horses, we needed to have a variety of professionals, men included.

  It was then that I invited to join the board a couple of veterinarians, a CPA, and Cheryl’s husband. Later on, I brought on an insurance broker and an attorney. All of them were men. These additions paid off, as Cheryl said they would. Broadening our inner circle translated into a broadening of our outer circle—more people who knew about us, entry into various echelons of society other than horse lovers, more publicity, and more checks. That was critical. As exponentially as our budget grew every year, we were always in need of more funding. The money Michigan State’s development department managed to garner for us for surgeries was never enough. We were now the university’s largest equine client at its hospital for large animals, and when its CANTER funds ran dry, we had to kick in the shortfall. It sometimes took a while; the university would let us get thousands of dollars into the hole. But we were always good for it. Adding to our expenses was that trainers became less and less inhibited about giving us broken horses whose medical needs meant skyrocketing veterinary bills. Thank goodness for all of our volunteers, none of whom ever took a cent.

  Between expanding our board of directors, getting horses off the track, taking care of them at home, and doing what I could to raise funds, I hardly had any time for my own horses.

  I paid a high emotional price for my neglect when, in the winter of 2001, something happened to one of my own that couldn’t be put on hold. Pat, the mother of Baby and Scarlett, my children, began having vision problems. It had actually started the year before. She wouldn’t notice me approaching and would jump, spooked, when she re
alized I was near her. She would also act a little lost when she wanted to come into the barn. She’d pause before making her way into the run-in. At first I thought it was because the barn, including the run-in, was often crowded with CANTER horses, but she wasn’t bothered by the other horses. She, Beauty, and Sissy always enjoyed the hullabaloo of horses coming and going, in fact, never failing to whinny as yet another horse-bearing trailer drove up. No, it was that she was having difficulty finding the doorway.

  I had had my farm vet out, and he told me that Pat had cataracts, and that they would get worse. He also told me that there’s cataract surgery for horses, but that it cost thousands of dollars. I needed to be realistic, however. Pat was twenty. Her bad knee was now restricting her freedom of movement considerably more than in her younger years.

  The vet assured me that there were many horses that did very well even totally blind, usually by hooking up with a companion horse, who I knew could be Sissy, if need be. If Pat went blind gradually, the vet said, she had a particularly good chance of being okay. “Don’t change her stall,” he advised. “Don’t go moving the water trough. Don’t rotate her from one pasture to another; keep her routine the same.”

  I followed his advice to the letter, but after that first year in which I noticed the problem, Pat’s sight seemed to slip particularly quickly. She was never a dominant sort, but she would become frantic to get out of the way if she heard another horse approaching, not knowing where she was in relation to the other animal. She didn’t even know when it was Sissy, her own daughter, coming near. And if she got in Beauty’s way by accident, Beauty would snake her head forward and snap at her. Twice, when Pat hurried to avoid Beauty’s bite or some other threat, she smacked her nose into the edge of the barn doorway so hard that she cut it. Another time, missing the doorway for its framing, she incurred a large cut right on the side of her eye. That made her even more tense. She didn’t know where to stand, and she was afraid to make a move. Walking forward, she’d stop dead if she heard even a faint sound.

  I could no longer soothe her by talking to her, by breathing into her nose, putting my hand on her neck. Nothing I did could relax her. One incident proved especially frightening.

  We have an area of land near the back of our acreage that’s a little wetter than the rest of the pasture. And in the middle of February, we had a thaw/freeze. Snow had melted, but then freezing temperatures set in, and the low wet area where the melted snow had not seeped into the frozen ground became a sheet of ice. When I went down to the barn late one afternoon to give all the horses some hay, I saw Pat standing in the middle of that ice, stark still.

  “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.