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Quick article from the NYTimes, and Ana will type something.
One on saving horses
Saving Horses, One Thoroughbred at a Time
By JOHN BRANCH
COOKSTOWN, N.J. — A thoroughbred named Tchaikovsky, a grandson of Secretariat, was having a tooth pulled in one stall. A horse in another was given a sponge bath. Out the stable door, about a dozen horses shared a sun-lit field.
Somewhere, far out of sight if not entirely out of mind, countless other former racehorses were on their way to being slaughtered.
“I struggle with it,” Diana Koebel said. She is the owner and trainer here at LumberJack Farm, one of hundreds of horse farms around the country helping rescue and rehabilitate thoroughbreds considered too slow or damaged to be worth anything more than horse meat. The rescuers cannot keep up.
“Are we really helping?” Koebel asked as she stood in a stable stall. “I know we are, and every one counts, but it’s overwhelming at points. Can we really fix this industry?”
LumberJack Farm works with a nonprofit organization called ReRun, which prepares discarded racehorses for a second career — as jumping show horses, maybe, or just as pets — and then makes them available for adoption. ReRun annually places about 40 thoroughbreds once destined for the slaughterhouse.
Similar organizations, some larger and some smaller, have the same goal: to save as many horses as possible. Combined, the groups resurrect a fraction of the roughly 100,000 horses that are expected to be shipped across the border to Mexico and Canada this year and ultimately fed to other animals or to humans who consider horse meat a delicacy.
About 15 percent of the American horses slaughtered, horse advocates said, are thoroughbreds. Many are only a few years old but considered too broken to race and, therefore, to live.
“But there is a lot of life left,” the ReRun president, Laurie Condurso-Lane, said. Horses can live to 30 years or longer. “They are young. So why not find them new jobs?”
The spotlight that shines on horse racing during the Triple Crown events each spring rarely illuminates the shadows. The sport is usually painted with bright, pastoral backdrops. Winners of the biggest races become royalty, revered by people and seemingly destined for a pampered life doing little but producing more runners like them.
But most racehorses run a far different route — downward, slipping from rung to rung in the sport’s hierarchy. Some are traded a dozen or more times as their earnings fade, until someone decides that the horse is no longer worth the time and money to keep it.
It even happened to Ferdinand, the 1986 Kentucky Derby winner, who reportedly was slaughtered in Japan for pet food a few years ago.
There are a couple of obvious options for the owners of such horses, besides the one increasingly urged: donating them to charity. They can spend money to euthanize the animal. Or they can sell the animal for a few hundred dollars, to someone who will gladly take the horse off their hands. They can tell themselves that the horse may live to see better days, but they know it is probably headed straight to a truck pointed toward the border.
Beverly Strauss, co-founder and executive director of MidAtlantic Horse Rescue in Chesapeake City, Md., often goes to the Monday horse auctions in New Holland, Pa. She will first look into the eyes of the horses, for a spark. Then she will look at their knees and ankles, for a warning.
MidAtlantic, which places about 75 horses a year for adoption, can care for about 15 at a time. If Strauss has room back at the farm for a horse or two, she will try to outbid the “kill buyers,” the people buying horses for up to $500 to take to slaughterhouses. Or she will approach them after the auction and offer a few dollars more than they paid. She has no disdain for these people, she said. They are just part of the system.
Sometimes she will lie awake, thinking of horses that she did not save. Sometimes she will call the buyer the next day and make an offer. Sometimes, as she did three weeks ago, she will call too late.
“He shipped on Monday night,” Strauss said. “Mr. Lucky Numbers. He still haunts me. We should have just found room for him.”
At LumberJack Farm, most of the horses were donated, a tax write-off for their owners. ReRun pays eight farms (two in New Jersey, two in New York and four in Kentucky) about $250 a month, per horse, to care for the animals. ReRun has 42 horses now. LumberJack has 12 of them.
Some are horses that barely raced, if ever, because of early injuries. Some ran for years, earning hundreds of thousands of dollars and a bit of fleeting fame. All are granted several weeks of “down time” upon arrival, Koebel said, “to let them be horses again.”
Many thoroughbreds arrive with steroids and other drugs in their systems, Koebel said. Some have more than usual because owners and trainers of deteriorating, bottom-rung horses make desperate attempts to squeeze another payday out of them.
It can turn Koebel’s seven-stall stable into a detox clinic. After a few days, old injuries flare. Some horses lose hair or drastically drop weight.
Koebel regulates their diet, assesses their behavioral idiosyncrasies, and slowly assimilates them into a herd, something that most thoroughbreds have not been part of since before they began racing. On occasion, Condurso-Lane said, a pair of horses standing in the field together will appear to nudge one another, then dart off together in a straight line, as if reliving their past.
Veterinarians donate their time and services. On Wednesday, Mike Mullin, a former rider and trainer who now works as a traveling dentist for horses, was doing pro bono work at LumberJack, examining and filing teeth and pulling baby teeth that were causing discomfort.
Some former racehorses prove to be strong jumpers or show horses. Others can handle light riding. A few cannot bear much weight and become companions.
The police department in Asbury Park, N.J., is interested in one of the horses. Officers came recently to see the horse and test it. They pulled the squad car near and turned on the sirens, blared the horn, even ran the wipers. The horse did not flinch.
Satisfaction comes in stages. First, when a horse is saved. Then when it is brought back to health and granted a new role. Mainly, when it is adopted.
“It’s definitely when I get the cards and letters from the adopters, saying how great the horse is doing,” Condurso-Lane said. “And I get the Christmas card, that they were the focus of — the picture Christmas card with the Santa Claus hat on their head. Those are the good days.”
And the bad?
“The bad days are when you get a call, and there’s a horse you just can’t help,” she said. Her eyes got glassy. “And then you wonder. You wonder a lot.”
Saving Horses, One Thoroughbred at a Time
By JOHN BRANCH
COOKSTOWN, N.J. — A thoroughbred named Tchaikovsky, a grandson of Secretariat, was having a tooth pulled in one stall. A horse in another was given a sponge bath. Out the stable door, about a dozen horses shared a sun-lit field.
Somewhere, far out of sight if not entirely out of mind, countless other former racehorses were on their way to being slaughtered.
“I struggle with it,” Diana Koebel said. She is the owner and trainer here at LumberJack Farm, one of hundreds of horse farms around the country helping rescue and rehabilitate thoroughbreds considered too slow or damaged to be worth anything more than horse meat. The rescuers cannot keep up.
“Are we really helping?” Koebel asked as she stood in a stable stall. “I know we are, and every one counts, but it’s overwhelming at points. Can we really fix this industry?”
LumberJack Farm works with a nonprofit organization called ReRun, which prepares discarded racehorses for a second career — as jumping show horses, maybe, or just as pets — and then makes them available for adoption. ReRun annually places about 40 thoroughbreds once destined for the slaughterhouse.
Similar organizations, some larger and some smaller, have the same goal: to save as many horses as possible. Combined, the groups resurrect a fraction of the roughly 100,000 horses that are expected to be shipped across the border to Mexico and Canada this year and ultimately fed to other animals or to humans who consider horse meat a delicacy.
About 15 percent of the American horses slaughtered, horse advocates said, are thoroughbreds. Many are only a few years old but considered too broken to race and, therefore, to live.
“But there is a lot of life left,” the ReRun president, Laurie Condurso-Lane, said. Horses can live to 30 years or longer. “They are young. So why not find them new jobs?”
The spotlight that shines on horse racing during the Triple Crown events each spring rarely illuminates the shadows. The sport is usually painted with bright, pastoral backdrops. Winners of the biggest races become royalty, revered by people and seemingly destined for a pampered life doing little but producing more runners like them.
But most racehorses run a far different route — downward, slipping from rung to rung in the sport’s hierarchy. Some are traded a dozen or more times as their earnings fade, until someone decides that the horse is no longer worth the time and money to keep it.
It even happened to Ferdinand, the 1986 Kentucky Derby winner, who reportedly was slaughtered in Japan for pet food a few years ago.
There are a couple of obvious options for the owners of such horses, besides the one increasingly urged: donating them to charity. They can spend money to euthanize the animal. Or they can sell the animal for a few hundred dollars, to someone who will gladly take the horse off their hands. They can tell themselves that the horse may live to see better days, but they know it is probably headed straight to a truck pointed toward the border.
Beverly Strauss, co-founder and executive director of MidAtlantic Horse Rescue in Chesapeake City, Md., often goes to the Monday horse auctions in New Holland, Pa. She will first look into the eyes of the horses, for a spark. Then she will look at their knees and ankles, for a warning.
MidAtlantic, which places about 75 horses a year for adoption, can care for about 15 at a time. If Strauss has room back at the farm for a horse or two, she will try to outbid the “kill buyers,” the people buying horses for up to $500 to take to slaughterhouses. Or she will approach them after the auction and offer a few dollars more than they paid. She has no disdain for these people, she said. They are just part of the system.
Sometimes she will lie awake, thinking of horses that she did not save. Sometimes she will call the buyer the next day and make an offer. Sometimes, as she did three weeks ago, she will call too late.
“He shipped on Monday night,” Strauss said. “Mr. Lucky Numbers. He still haunts me. We should have just found room for him.”
At LumberJack Farm, most of the horses were donated, a tax write-off for their owners. ReRun pays eight farms (two in New Jersey, two in New York and four in Kentucky) about $250 a month, per horse, to care for the animals. ReRun has 42 horses now. LumberJack has 12 of them.
Some are horses that barely raced, if ever, because of early injuries. Some ran for years, earning hundreds of thousands of dollars and a bit of fleeting fame. All are granted several weeks of “down time” upon arrival, Koebel said, “to let them be horses again.”
Many thoroughbreds arrive with steroids and other drugs in their systems, Koebel said. Some have more than usual because owners and trainers of deteriorating, bottom-rung horses make desperate attempts to squeeze another payday out of them.
It can turn Koebel’s seven-stall stable into a detox clinic. After a few days, old injuries flare. Some horses lose hair or drastically drop weight.
Koebel regulates their diet, assesses their behavioral idiosyncrasies, and slowly assimilates them into a herd, something that most thoroughbreds have not been part of since before they began racing. On occasion, Condurso-Lane said, a pair of horses standing in the field together will appear to nudge one another, then dart off together in a straight line, as if reliving their past.
Veterinarians donate their time and services. On Wednesday, Mike Mullin, a former rider and trainer who now works as a traveling dentist for horses, was doing pro bono work at LumberJack, examining and filing teeth and pulling baby teeth that were causing discomfort.
Some former racehorses prove to be strong jumpers or show horses. Others can handle light riding. A few cannot bear much weight and become companions.
The police department in Asbury Park, N.J., is interested in one of the horses. Officers came recently to see the horse and test it. They pulled the squad car near and turned on the sirens, blared the horn, even ran the wipers. The horse did not flinch.
Satisfaction comes in stages. First, when a horse is saved. Then when it is brought back to health and granted a new role. Mainly, when it is adopted.
“It’s definitely when I get the cards and letters from the adopters, saying how great the horse is doing,” Condurso-Lane said. “And I get the Christmas card, that they were the focus of — the picture Christmas card with the Santa Claus hat on their head. Those are the good days.”
And the bad?
“The bad days are when you get a call, and there’s a horse you just can’t help,” she said. Her eyes got glassy. “And then you wonder. You wonder a lot.”
no subject
I think that it is also high time to start slaughtering horses within the states. It is wasteful to either euthanise every horse that's born in due time, or to ship them off over long distances to their end. Horses are good food, and actually quite wholesome.
no subject
Oh, you'll never convince Americans of that. I don't think there's any market for horsemeat here.
no subject
If you ever get the chance to taste a horse, I urge you to do so, in particular if you are so fortunate that it is a foal or a youngster.
no subject
I think that it is also high time to start slaughtering horses within the states. It is wasteful to either euthanise every horse that's born in due time, or to ship them off over long distances to their end. Horses are good food, and actually quite wholesome.
no subject
Oh, you'll never convince Americans of that. I don't think there's any market for horsemeat here.
no subject
If you ever get the chance to taste a horse, I urge you to do so, in particular if you are so fortunate that it is a foal or a youngster.