Saving Baby Page 24

  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.

  “I’ll take care of the CANTER part,” he told me. But he reminded me that most of the money I earned went to Scarlett—boarding her and paying her trainer for a total of almost $1,000 a month, entering her in events, which could cost hundreds of dollars a pop, flying to different states to see her compete and having to get hotel rooms and meals on the road. I’d have to retire her, John said. That we’d no longer be able to afford. She’d have to come home.

  I felt truly awful. One reason was that at eventing competitions, when I looked through the programs, I’d sometimes see the names of horses who had been taken off the track by CANTER. Sometimes I even saw their names in eventing programs at Lexington’s Kentucky Horse Park. Horses that would have gone to slaughter instead ended up at one of the most prestigious eventing venues in the country. It was living proof that the operation was working, giving Thoroughbreds new lives.

  At one particular competition, upon reading the program I had shed a flood of tears. A horse named Fuel Efficient was listed. I knew him as far back as the days that Baby raced and followed him with fear for more than two years after Baby’s death. He was raced an unconscionable ninety-nine times, risking his life in cheap claiming races nearly every time, often on the dangerous track surface at the Detroit Race Course. When I was preparing for the lawsuit, I was always afraid to see the letters DNF, for Did Not Finish, next to his name on racing programs. But there he was, eventing with a loving owner, sound enough not only to do dressage but also to jump. The woman must have bought him on the backstretch without having gone through CANTER, which happened rather frequently. Someone would come to look at a horse they had seen on the Web site, but other trainers would entice them to come see their horses, even if they weren’t listed. That was fine with me—anything to take a horse off the track.

  I was going to miss moments like those—seeing a horse I had worried about over the years finally safe and, literally, sound.

  I was also going to miss watching Scarlett compete. She loved jumping and was so good at it—winning blue ribbon after blue ribbon. One eventer even offered me $40,000 for her, although there was no amount of money that could ever separate me from one of my own horses. She was family. But now she would never again have her name in a program, be presented with a ribbon, do a victory gallop. I arranged for her to come home in November, right after the end of the eventing season.

  Soon after she arrived, completely unfazed by all the convalescent horses I was taking care of, the two of us had a “talk” in the barn one night. I “explained” to her that she had to give up the glory of her eventing career for her brother and that I was sorry to be asking her to make the sacrifice. It was during my last check of the horses for the day, around 10 P.M., and I was scratching her neck under her mane.

  She responded by turning her head and grooming me in return, running her teeth along my back to give me a feel-good scratch. She had never done that before, and strictly speaking, it could hav
e been dangerous because sometimes when horses groom, they bite. But Scarlett didn’t. “Don’t cry,” I imagined her saying as she offered me that gesture of affection. “It’s alright. I love you, and I’m glad to be home.”

  Truth be told, Scarlett seemed no worse for having been pulled from her glory days, graciously accepting that from then on she would be the Secretariat snow globe in my backyard that an innocent lifetime earlier was all I had intended. But I had a hard time pulling myself out of the game. To my discredit, I even thought about racing Scarlett, along with Sissy. The track, like a busy airport, has a buzz of excitement, of things about to happen, and I struggled against my impulse to get in on that. Like crack cocaine, racing called to me, working to wear down my resolve with promises of an intoxicating ecstasy and in an instant throw away everything I stood for and had worked so hard to accomplish.

  Scarlett and Sissy were both mature, I rationalized to myself, not just two or three years old. Then, too, it was known that the fillies sired by Baby’s father did even better on the track than the colts. Maybe Sissy could do what her brother never was able to, I thought, telling myself that I wouldn’t make the same mistake with picking a trainer as I did with Baby’s first two. I’d be able to go straight to Pam.

  With my competitive nature itching to be unleashed, I started to make excuses: Sissy could prove that Baby would have been 100 times better than he was had he not gotten off to a rough start those first couple of years; the new track was owned by a man who had his own stable of racehorses rather than by a corporation, like the previous track, so he’d make sure the surface remained safe. Both Sissy and Scarlett would like some adventure.

  It was a long ride to and from the new track, and I had a lot of time to think.

  But I would catch myself, shake it off. Baby’s stall was empty. His honk was gone. Sissy could be gone; Scarlett, too. I was neglecting my husband, my daughters, as it was. And the track was the same as ever, with horsemen of every stripe all too willing to let horses go to their deaths if that would improve their bottom line. Going back to racing was clearly and irrevocably out of the question, a fleeting aberration in my thinking in which the very drive that had proved Baby’s undoing managed to tempt, but too weakly to prove a real risk. Like a drug addict or problem drinker who has licked her vice, I was able to call up the strength to squelch the impulse.

  I put my focus on settling in for the winter, not having to go out to the track between racing seasons and, for the first time, not having to run into Detroit for court reporting. I still had CANTER work—helping horses heal after surgery, finding adopters, writing grant applications—but I actually had time to let down a bit and enjoy my own horses again.

  It didn’t last. One February morning, when the sun had not yet climbed over the tree line at the back of our property, I was walking down to the barn to feed everyone when I saw Beauty splayed out on her side in the middle of the pasture. A horse would never choose to sleep there at night, especially not in winter. She’d want to sleep away from the wind.

  I ran over, and she picked up her head a bit as if looking to her stomach, her eyes glazed and her breathing labored. She was colicking and had been for who knew how many hours. She had been absolutely fine the night before, eating and relieving herself as necessary.

  I ran back to the house and grabbed my cell phone so I could be right by her once I phoned the vet. Before making the call, I pressed my finger to the gums above her teeth to see if her blood flow upon my letting go was okay. It was not. Her gums remained white too long before turning pink again, meaning her capillary refill time was slow.

  Beauty, more than any of my other horses, had borne the brunt of my neglect.

  Normally, she couldn’t wait for me to come home from my court reporting work and go for a ride. But I never had any time to take her out anymore. As soon as I arrived at the house, I’d either be responding to phone calls and e-mails or driving an hour or more away to one of CANTER’s many foster farms to see a horse and assess its injuries, determine whether it needed to be referred for possible surgery. I was torn—Beauty would see me step toward the car after spending a little while in the house and look at me as if to say, “Aren’t you coming over? Are we going out now?” Invariably, I had had to disappoint her. Sometimes, I wasn’t going anywhere but had the barn full with horses who had already undergone surgery. They needed their bandages changed; they needed to be checked for infections. They needed to be hand-walked rather than let out into the field by themselves so they wouldn’t tear their stitches, a procedure that took much more time than wrapping their wounds, at which I had become a pro. And that left no time for riding, let alone grooming, Beauty.

  Holding in my emotions in order not to upset her, I talked soothingly, going down on my knees by her head and breathing into her nose. “It’s okay, Beauty. I’m here.”

  I reached the vet’s answering service and had to wait for a call back. As soon as the phone rang and I heard the vet’s voice, I lost it. “Beauty’s dying, Beauty’s dying!” I screamed. “Please come as soon as you can. She’s down. I can’t get her up. She’s cold.”

  The vet knew who I was and said she was on her way. In the meantime, I was begging Beauty, pulling on her lead line, trying to get her up and out of the cold, but she would not respond. I even tried pushing her, although it is impossible to push 1,000 pounds into a standing position.

  Beauty was twenty-seven years old—and I knew that the older the horse, the higher the risk that a colic surgery would not be successful.

  Twenty minutes later, when the vet arrived, she injected Beauty with pain medication. She wanted to walk her into the barn—it was warmer in there, and it’s always better for a colicking horse to be standing rather than prone—but still, we couldn’t get her up. “We’ve really got to make this happen,” the vet insisted. “I don’t want to go to my car and get the cattle prod. It’ll hurt.”

  So we tried some more, and Beauty finally did rise and stagger inside. I put her in the large double stall where Baby had been born, and then Scarlett and Sissy, and she went down on her side immediately. But in her new position, the vet was able to listen to her gut sounds and her heart rate, which was exceedingly high, and gave her some more pain medication. She said she had two more emergencies but that she’d be back in a couple of hours and that I should continue to try to get Beauty standing, if I could.

  I couldn’t budge her. Beauty was breathing heavily, not responding to my urging at all. I wondered how many hours during the night she had been suffering, and didn’t want to put her through a few more while the vet made her rounds. So I called another vet, who arrived very quickly and who also tested capillary refill rate, heart rate, gut sounds.

  “Jo Anne,” she said, “we need to think about letting her go.”

  I started crying. “That’s why I called you,” I said. “I couldn’t bear to have her wait any longer.”

  “I wouldn’t do that,” she responded. “Her heart rate is so high, even with all the pain medication she has been given. We need to do this.” Then, as a vet will invariably do, she backed away to give me some time with my horse. I was shuddering hard as I cried, right by Beauty’s head. Her age was clearly showing. We had had almost twenty years together, and now she had a lot of white hairs on her face. She had been so young and vibrant when I first brought her home.

  The woman who sold her to me had said she would only let Beauty go to someone for whom she’d be their first horse. She didn’t want her to be somebody’s fifth horse.

  When I finally left Beauty’s side, I saw that the vet, too, was crying, for which she apologized, saying her behavior was unprofessional. “Please don’t apologize,” I told her. “That only makes me appreciate you more.”

  When I was ready, the vet injected the solution, and Beauty slipped quietly away. I was allowed to remain right by her head since she was already down and couldn’t fall on me.

  The vet then told me that to be able to get Beauty out of the
stall, it would be easier if we positioned her more tucked. Otherwise, once the rigor mortis set in, removing her would be a problem. John came down to the barn and took off the two bottom rows of wooden planks on the wall surrounding the door that faced the barn aisle, so it would be easier to slide her out. The doorway itself wouldn’t be wide enough. We curled up Beauty’s legs while it was still possible and turned in her head and neck as much as we could.

  Before cremating her, I had her necropsied because I wanted to know what, exactly, had gone wrong. Her diet hadn’t been changed at all, and she was drinking at last check the evening before she died.

  It turned out she had multiple fatty lipomas inside her abdomen that, like stalactites, grew in from above, at the top of the abdominal wall. The lipomas wrapped all the way around her intestine, strangling it in a number of areas. Their growth had finally hit a tipping point. The equine pathologist said they were the most common cause of death in a horse over the age of twelve. I was relieved I hadn’t done anything wrong and that there was nothing I could have done to save her. But I felt terrible that Beauty spent most of her last days disheartened at my not having time to ride her while I was making up for what I had done to Baby.

  It was not a good start to 2003 and to my new freedom from my work as a court reporter. It made me think not just about the time I took from Beauty but from my entire family. We used to travel frequently, taking long weekends to places like Niagara Falls, going white-water rafting on the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon, visiting Yellowstone. We had even been to Russia, where Rebecca performed in the International Dance Festival, both in Moscow and Minsk. All of that had pretty much come to a halt once CANTER got off the ground, yet I still didn’t feel fulfilled.