Saving Baby
Page 1
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To my husband, John, and my daughters, Jessica and Rebecca, who gave up so much so I could do what I had to do.
You are, quite simply, the loves of my life.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Foreword
Chapter 1
Photograph of Pat
Photograph of the author with Secretariat
Photograph of the author with Baby
Chapter 2
Photograph of Baby not yet twenty-four hours old
Photograph of Baby giving Pat a kiss
Photograph of Jessica with Baby in his stall
Photograph of Baby making snow angels
Photograph of Scarlett just after her birth
Photograph of the author with Baby in her stall
Photograph of the author with Baby before he went off to train
Chapter 3
Photograph of Baby at his first training facility
Chapter 4
Photograph of Baby training at sunrise
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Photograph of Baby and Scarlett
Chapter 7
Photograph of Baby winning a race
Photograph of Baby losing his second race of 1995
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Photograph of Bill Mitchell
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Photograph of the author during Lookalike’s surgery
Chapter 12
Photograph of Twoey sharing grain with a goat
Photograph of Happy when he was first rescued
Photograph of Happy with Mary Hejna
Photograph of Scarlett and her trainer, Jennifer Merrick-Brooks
Chapter 13
Photograph of the author and John Hettinger
Photograph of the author with a horse
Chapter 14
Photograph of Scarlett and Sissy
Be Part of This Story
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
Copyright
FOREWORD
Many people remember the summer of 1973 as the summer of the Watergate hearings on television that marked the beginning of the end of Richard Nixon’s presidency. But horse lovers remember it as the summer a gorgeous chestnut stallion named Secretariat won the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness, and the Belmont Stakes to become the first Triple Crown winner in twenty-five years. Secretariat did for horse racing what Muhammad Ali did for boxing, what Nadia Comaneci did for gymnastics, and what Michael Jordan did for basketball. He recruited millions of new fans by an unprecedented combination of charisma and talent. And though she was completely unaware of it at the time, twenty-five years later, Secretariat’s stunning win would set Jo Anne Normile on a trajectory that would establish her as one of the great heroes of the Thoroughbred world.
Saving Baby is a book about what happens when you fall in love—first with horses, then with horse racing, then with one race horse in particular who by an unintended set of circumstances led Jo Anne deep into the heart of racing. Horse crazy since childhood, by her mid-forties Jo Anne’s backyard boasted two extraordinary athletes: one, Scarlett, the granddaughter of Secretariat; the other, Baby, Jo Anne’s equine soul mate and himself the descendant of a fine racing lineage.
Part of the great charm of this story is reading how Jo Anne hand reared these two superstars with unsurpassed tenderness and love. It is a joy to hang over the fence with her as we watch these two titans grow from fuzzy-furred babies frolicking in their pasture to self-possessed masters of their sport. But it was only as she gradually became an insider with an intimate knowledge of racing that Jo Anne began to see beneath the veneer of this seemingly glamorous sport, and when she did, it forced her to reexamine everything she thought she knew. In the process, Jo Anne embarked on the incredible journey that became her life’s work.
Saving Baby might be a love story, but it’s a love story in which the love gets redirected into something bigger and more powerful than anything Jo Anne or the horse racing industry itself had ever imagined.
It takes a lot of guts for a woman to make it in the horse racing world, but it takes a lot more for her to try to change it. Saving Baby is the story of how one woman’s love for a Thoroughbred propels her to fight a David-and-Goliath battle to save all Thoroughbreds from the cruel practices of the industry, a battle so stacked against its heroine the reader wonders again and again why she ever took it on in the first place and later, why she didn’t just quit. We would have understood if she had. It’s hard to imagine where Jo Anne found enough hours in the day to do all she did and to face the opposition she faced. The only possible explanation for why she didn’t drop dead from exhaustion is love. Only the deepest love could have kept someone going like that—an indomitable spirit fueled by the agony and beauty of her cause.
But Jo Anne Normile isn’t like most of us. Instead of running away, she converted the knowledge she gained into action, becoming an ex-racehorse owner turned Angel of Mercy who gets down to what is surely her life’s calling. If it isn’t, one wonders what else this remarkable woman has up her sleeve. What would happen for instance, if she was turned loose on world hunger or the nuclear arms race?
Fortunately for equines, Jo Anne seems firmly rooted in their camp. In Saving Baby, the reader is privileged to witness how one extraordinary individual can make a profound impact on a multi-billion dollar industry that has proved both inflexible and inviolate. Despite the odds, Jo Anne has managed to positively impact the lives of literally thousands of horses, not just in Michigan where her work began, but across the country as her efforts grew beyond her wildest dreams.
Jo Anne Normile was introduced to me via email by a third person who referred to her as one of the “great people of the world.” I assumed this was polite hyperbole based on the desire of someone for two strangers to like each other in order to form a working alliance. But in reading Saving Baby I discovered that wasn’t the case at all. It’s not hyperbole. Jo Anne Normile is one of the great people of the world. And though not a single equine can ever voice his or her side of this remarkable love story, if they could, it would surely be a chorus to fill the heavens.
Susan Richards,
author of Chosen by a Horse
CHAPTER ONE
It’s very quiet in the barn at night, but when a horse is about to have a baby, she’ll get restless and start to pace, and I wanted to be able to hear the rustling of the straw as Pat walked back and forth. That’s why I started sleeping with my head right next to the video monitor on the coffee table that streamed in the activity from Pat’s stall, the volume turned all the way up.
To catch a mare foaling is rare. Horses almost always give birth in the predawn hours, preferring to have their babies away from people, and even other horses. Some will tell you they can time their labors for privacy. But once their contractions begin, they can’t hold back. And I needed to be there, as a midwife for Pat as well as for myself.
The first couple of nights, Pat didn’t settle in but kept walking and biting at her sides—a sign of pain. She also swished her tail, yet another sign of discomfort.
Then, one night, some time before sunrise, she went down on her side, nipping at her flank. Her pain had increased significantly. She rose, circled several times, then went down again. Her body gave a heave. “This is it, everybody!” I cal
led out, jumping up from my perch on the family room couch and running to the bottom of the staircase. “Grab your stuff!”
We had very little time. A horse gives only three or four major pushes before birthing her foal. The four of us raced down to the barn. My husband, John, would be on duty with the video cam, while one daughter had a camera for still shots and the other would stand by the barn’s wall phone in case there was an improper presentation at birth and the vet needed to be called. Normally a foal is delivered with the front feet coming first, one several inches ahead of the other so that the shoulders, emerging at an angle, can fit through the pelvis. You see the hooves, one before the other, and then the nose laid down on top of the legs. Any other presentation can prove a life-or-death emergency for mare, foal, or both.
We were whooping excitedly, all smiles and eager chatter as we ran from the house, pulling on our coats. We had already seen the baby kick when Pat drank cold water. We loved watching Pat’s stomach sway like a pendulum in her last week before delivery. We had placed bets on whether the foal would look like its mother, with her dark coat, or whether it would have any markings. New life now just moments away, it was a giddy anticipation.
We had already seen the baby kick when Pat drank cold water.
When we reached the barn I had to tell everyone to lower their voices to a whisper. “No running,” I said. We needed to tiptoe, contain our excitement, so Pat wouldn’t be alarmed or disturbed. The baby’s front legs were already out. We could see its knees. We could see the bluish white sac, a filmy casing, enveloping the tiny foal.
By the book, you’re not supposed to go into the stall. Birthing is something horses are meant to do by themselves. But Pat and I were already too bonded. The day we met, she had blown out through her nostrils to greet me, as horses do. She let me touch my face to her muzzle and blow directly into her nose so she could become familiar with my scent. And while some Thoroughbreds are very fine boned, Pat was a big, broad-chested mare with a look more like that of a Quarter Horse, which I preferred. More than that, she was such a people horse. Her eyes beamed empathy, intelligence. So of course I couldn’t let her go through giving birth alone. I went in, knelt down, and stroked the side of her head as she lay there in labor, then moved closer to where the baby was emerging.
But Pat soon rose and started to walk around. The foal needed repositioning to be properly birthed, and Pat’s movement would make it happen. “It’s okay, Pat,” I whispered soothingly while stroking her some more. “I’m here. Everything’s okay.”
Pat shortly went down again, gave a sigh followed by another heave, and out came the foal’s knobby shoulders. They are the widest part of the birth, so we knew we were home free. One more heave, one more sigh, and whoosh, the baby was fully born. It took all of five or six minutes. Elated that we made it in time, we wanted to scream but just kept saying softly, “We have a baby. A baby!”
I was admiring the newborn foal in its sac, adoring its lashes, its tiny feet, when I suddenly realized that the water hadn’t broken. I had been so absorbed in what lay before me that I forgot the hooves are supposed to tear open the sac upon delivery. The baby was in danger of suffocating. A foal needs air once it is out of its mother’s body, just like a person.
“Oh my God!” I cried out, tearing at the sac with my fingernails. But the bluish-white shroud was like tough tire rubber. I was out of my mind with fright and desperation—and guilt. Not only had I wasted time looking at the baby through its sac, lost in awe over its beautifully closed eyes and its rounded forehead, like that of a human newborn. I had also forgotten to store a knife or other sharp instrument in the foaling kit even though I knew about the rare case in which parting the sac needs a human assist.
Finally, I did manage to break open the sac, and water gushed everywhere. I pulled out the foal’s head, but it didn’t start breathing. The newborn remained limp.
Frantic, I cleared the horse’s nose and mouth of mucus, then fastened my mouth on its nostrils and exhaled deeply, expressing air into its lungs. Still nothing. The girls were crying. John and I were, too. You can hear me on the videotape saying, “I think it’s dead.”
The moment, gone disastrously awry, had been more than a decade and a half in the making.
Eighteen years earlier, almost to the day, the legendary Secretariat won the Kentucky Derby. The great Thoroughbreds who run in that race are magnificent beings—powerful yet graceful, and beautiful. I always looked forward to watching the Derby. But my fever spiked in 1973, when Secretariat won not only that run but also the other two races in what is known as the Triple Crown: the Preakness, held in Maryland, and the Belmont Stakes in New York. Two other horses won all three races in the Triple Crown after Secretariat, but it didn’t matter. He was the superhorse; his record times still stand today.
I soon began collecting Secretariat memorabilia—Christmas ornaments, a program from the ’73 Derby, numbered collector plates signed by his jockey. In 1988, we were even able to meet the great stallion. We were driving to Disney World, and our route from our home in Michigan went right through Kentucky, only twenty miles from the farm where Secretariat was living out his life as a stud horse. We took a detour in hopes of catching a glimpse of the magnificent steed.
But when we reached the farm, a groom actually led me right to him. He brought Secretariat out of the barn for me, and I lay my head on his strong shoulder. Surprised by how moved I was, I cried while John and the girls took pictures. I then scratched his mane, as horses will do for each other with their teeth. He was exceptionally well behaved—and massive. “Locomotive” was the word that came to mind, and I thought, “here is the most powerful horse I’ve ever seen.”
My meet-and-greet with Secretariat. I was shocked that a groom led me right to him.
Just one year later, Secretariat was euthanized at the relatively young age of nineteen. He suffered from a disease, laminitis, that causes swelling inside the wall of the hoof, increasing pressure on it and making it excruciatingly painful even to stand, let alone walk or run. I’ll never forget the day I heard the news on the car radio.
It was around that time that Secretariat’s owner, Penny Chenery, gave a speech at the Michigan Horse Council’s Annual Stallion Expo, and I learned that one of Secretariat’s sons, a stud horse, lived only a two-hour drive from us. I thought, what better memorabilia could I have than to look out every day and see a grandchild of Secretariat sired by that stallion? I’d have a piece of Secretariat in my own backyard.
By that point we had owned horses of our own for only five years. I had been one of those girls who grew up crazy about horses but never could have one. The feeling never dissipated, and when I turned thirty-six, I convinced my husband to move from our bustling suburb to a home in the country with a barn and pastures. We were not wealthy people—John worked for Michigan Bell and I was a freelance court reporter—but we sold our house at just the right time, for two and a half times what we paid for it, to be able to afford the new one, and then bought two lovely horses in short order. The first was a black Quarter Horse I renamed Black Beauty, giving into a childhood urge. The second we named Pumpkin because of the orange highlights in her coat.
It was an idyllic life, one that should have been enough. From almost every window, beautiful pastureland spread to the tree lines. I could work on my court transcripts, look outside, and take in a view of the horses. I could stop working at my computer at any time and go pet them, or hop on without a saddle and take a short ride to clear my mind. I could finish my work at midnight. It didn’t matter, as long as I met my deadlines.
But the idea kept tugging at me to increase our “herd” with a grandchild of Secretariat. I couldn’t get it out of my head.
Pumpkin was too old to bear a foal by that point, but not Beauty. So I sent her up to be bred to Secretariat’s son. But Beauty miscarried—twice. And each time was an expensive try.
After the second failed attempt, someone at the breeding farm suggested, “Wh
y don’t you lease a mare? She’ll go back to her owner once she delivers the foal, but the foal will be yours. You might as well lease a Thoroughbred. That way, the foal will have papers that will enable you to get it registered with the Jockey Club.”
“I don’t know anything about registering a Thoroughbred,” I said. “I don’t want to race a horse.” It was true. While I loved to watch the Kentucky Derby, I had no ambition to race. I simply wanted to have a grandchild of Secretariat grazing behind my house, like a snow globe come to life.
“But a horse registered with the Jockey Club will always be more valuable,” I was told. “It’ll serve you well should you ever have to sell or trade it.”
So I started making some phone calls to Thoroughbred racing farms. My vet ended up approving a Thoroughbred, Precocious Pat, a dark mare with some reddish hairs around her muzzle who was due to give birth very soon. Pat’s owner, Don Shouse, was sick. He had had a heart attack, and he asked me to take his mare to our house to have the baby. The plan was that I would raise the baby for six months. At weaning time, by which point Don was expected to recover, I’d give it back to him. But I would be allowed to use Pat to breed a horse of my own with the sire of my choosing—Secretariat’s son. I wouldn’t have to pay to lease her since I would be taking care of her and her new baby for a while.
I said yes to the arrangement, and Pat and I took to each other right away. We immediately set up a large stall in the barn in which Pat could have her foal, making room by storing much less hay than we usually did—100 bales at a time instead of 400.
It was in that stall that before us now lay the baby horse’s wet, lifeless body. Though I’d known from the start it wasn’t going to be mine—this was the horse I’d have to return to Don before Pat could be bred to Secretariat’s son—my heart had already laid claim to this baby and its mother. I thought of performing compressions on its chest, but I knew that wouldn’t have been the proper procedure. Besides, a just-birthed foal is so tiny, so vulnerable. It weighs only about 100 pounds the moment it’s born—all bone, with its body narrowly compressed. I was afraid I’d hurt it.