Saving Baby

by Jo Anne Normile

  And the problem was much worse than I imagined. I had started asking trainers and others what happened to all the horses who went down, since I knew not all of them suffered a life-ending injury. Sometimes these conversations would take place in a local bar that we would go to after board meetings. Sometimes they’d occur right at the rail.

  “Oh, I got rid of it,” they would tell me.

  “What do you mean?” I’d ask. “I just want to keep my records straight.”

  “Oh, it went to auction.”

  “Auction?”

  “Yeah, the meat buyer took it. I got eighty cents a pound.”

  I still wasn’t quite getting it—I continued to have it in my head that the horses were retired to a farm, or rehabilitated somehow—but the more people I talked to, the more I began to understand.

  When horses at the track broke down, they generally weren’t taken somewhere for recuperation. And when they experienced a catastrophic injury, they usually weren’t put down humanely with an injection, as Baby was. Almost all who could no longer race were sent to a slaughterhouse, and the owners would receive money in return. Their horses would be killed and sold to actual butchers where horsemeat was legal—France, Belgium, Japan. All the little euphemistic blurbs printed with each set of racing results for horses who did not make their way around the track—“broke down,” “vanned off,” “DNF,” for “Did Not Finish”—they all meant the same thing.

  People explaining to me that a particular horse was removed would freely use terms like “kill pen.” They were all fine with it. It was part of the economics of racing. Why not earn a last few hundred dollars on a used up horse rather than lose money on the horse by chemically euthanizing it or paying to board it somewhere where it could graze on pastureland and be given a nice retirement?

  I started to realize that what I thought was abuse—Simply Darling being fed her sweetened grain all at once, the little filly with the bleeding welts—was nothing compared with this slaughter pipeline. It came over me gradually until one day, when my understanding reached a tipping point, I felt dizzy, like I needed to hold onto something. How could this be going on? I had had so much fun here. I laughed in the kitchen, kidded around at the rail, and these very people with whom I had been cavorting were giving their horses horrible ends. I needed to do something.

  I found antislaughter groups online who were trying to get the word out. I’d be at the computer and have to stop and look away. The horses, I learned, are crammed together, forced down tight metal chutes, one after another, no matter what their condition, whipped and beaten to make them go faster even if a leg is broken. Then they end up in a metal box and are hit in the head with a retractable bolt that is meant to knock them unconscious. But because horses are naturally head shy, they keep trying to move out of the way, so the bolt shoots out again and again, going into their heads but not killing them, after which they are hoisted up on a chain by one of their hind legs and a sharp blade slits their throats. I couldn’t read it all at once, or look at pictures of horses in kill pens starving and thirsty while they waited for a week or more to be sent to a slaughterhouse, often in cramped trailers meant only for hogs and cattle so that they had to bend their heads very low for the entire journey.

  It made people pressing me to take Scarlett back to the track all the more preposterous. “It won’t happen again,” Frank the Greek said to me, referring to Baby’s tragedy. “She’s sitting on a win. She’s on her way.” When he found out I now had a full sister to Baby, too, he tried to talk me into racing her as well.

  Jerry also had a hard time letting it go. While Pam knew that I wasn’t going to change my mind, he would say to me sometimes, “You know my plans for Scarlett. There’s the two-hundred-thousand-dollar Sire Stakes Race in October.” That’s how perfectly made Scarlett was for racing. She was the equine version of the most beautiful actress you can think of, like Julia Roberts or Angelina Jolie on the red carpet.

  Scarlett’s promise was so well known that even people with whom I was barely acquainted tried to talk me into racing her. “Are you ready yet?” they would ask in the kitchen.

  I would never be ready. It was so painfully clear that the track’s being dangerously uneven was only a small part of the problem. I didn’t want to have anything to do with this activity anymore, this so-called sport in which the “athletes” were treated like decks of cards or dice—gambling devices thrown away once they were “used up.”

  Even those trainers who treated their horses well inadvertently played a part in racing industry practices. Although such trainers made sure to find a place for all their Thoroughbreds who could no longer race, I knew it couldn’t be true for a horse they dropped into a claiming race that was then bought by someone else. That horse probably went from cheap claiming races to the slaughterhouse. These trainers did care. One or two would even cry when their horses broke down. But like others who cared—and there were people on the backstretch who truly didn’t mean any harm—it was easier to look the other way, pretend it didn’t happen, accept on blind faith the assurances of those who obfuscated the truth by saying they’d find a broken down horse “a good home” or “take care of it.” I couldn’t pretend anymore. The thought of it all turned my stomach.

  In the meantime, wrangling with the track and the Racing Commission went on through the entire summer and early fall, with me continuing to write unanswered letters asking why these entities were not adhering to the rules and regulations for track safety, why the track was not even taking measurements. Finally, in October, I and the rest of the HBPA board found out that the track had hired its own independent evaluator, the track superintendent at prestigious Belmont Park in New York. His final report was more scathing than Steve’s, stating that it would take $595,000 to repair the track. Even with that, however, no improvements were in the works.

  It was then that I decided to hire a lawyer. I wanted it acknowledged that beyond my own clouded judgment, it was a financial calculus that killed Baby. He deserved that. By forcing that truth out, I could save him, or at least something of the dignity he deserved. Even more important at that point, I needed to try to protect other horses from the same fate. I knew that if someone else had owned Baby, he would have ended up at a slaughterhouse, where, abandoned, he would have met a frightful end.

  Every horse, utterly dependent on its owner, understands what it means to love and to feel loved and to bond with other horses and with people. Every horse is by nature cautious. Every horse loves to roll in the grass, to shake out the snow. By working to save them going forward, I was in some way saving something of what I so loved about Baby.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Having been a court reporter for years, I should have known what a difference hiring an attorney would make. Through all my months of writing letters to the State Racing Commission, making phone calls, attending HBPA board meetings, and meticulously monitoring the injuries and deaths of Thoroughbreds on that form I had designed, I had gotten nowhere. But then I brought Bill Mitchell onto the case after researching who would be the best lawyer to represent me. Within weeks, the Racing Commission, whose job it was to make sure the track adhered to laws regarding safety for the horses, set a hearing date for December 10th. They subpoenaed dozens of people, including track experts, trainers, HBPA board members, veterinarians, even the track executives. These people were served not just subpoenas but subpoenas duces tecum, meaning they were to arrive at the hearing bearing supporting documents.

  How glad I was to be served my own subpoena one day at the HBPA Board office. Now, finally, all the documentation I had been amassing could be used to make the track do its job.

  William Mitchell III, outspoken, determined, and unfazed by controversy, came to me by way of the new president of the HBPA board, who had been elected just weeks earlier. I knew a lot of attorneys, but the board president knew attorneys who knew the racing commissioner, who had been appointed by the governor. He knew attorneys who knew the track execu
tives. He also had a really warm feeling for his horses and so understood how much I loved mine. And he, too, had lost one of his most promising Thoroughbreds to the track, a young filly whose two front legs literally broke off at the knees during morning training that year on the uneven racing surface.

  Bill Mitchell, my lawyer in the suit against the track.

  Bill had not been a complete unknown to me before then. A top criminal trial attorney both sharp and jovial, he was on TV all the time. I liked that he was a trial lawyer interested in high-profile cases and, just as important, I liked that he used to own racehorses himself. He really understood the inner workings of the track and the legal responsibilities of the various parties involved.

  Bill and I agreed that I shouldn’t start by filing a lawsuit but, rather, that he work to force the necessary repairs to the track to stop the maiming and, in addition, arrange a settlement for the loss of Baby. We assumed a settlement would be easy to reach. The evidence on what happened to Baby was so strong.

  To this day I don’t know what Bill did to get things moving so fast. If someone smoked in a shedrow, the Racing Commission didn’t hesitate to fine the person fifty dollars. But enforcing rules that would cost the track money—that it had not wanted to do.

  By 10 A.M. on the day of the hearing, the room was packed. I didn’t expect it to be jammed, but even the press was there. I wore a simple black dress with a black jacket—the same outfit I wear today when giving speeches about racing as a slaughter pipeline.

  “I’m going to be busy,” Bill said to me when he found me in the crowded hearing room. “I’ve got to talk to a lot of different people. But I’m here.”

  I couldn’t wait to be called to give my testimony after all those months of trying to get the attention of the racing commissioner. I had my written statement and all my other exhibits in order—minutes of board meetings, copies of letters to the commission going all the way back to May, my own horse’s veterinary records to show he was sound, and my continually growing list of horses who had died on the track.

  But hours passed as I and everyone else sat there, waiting for the hearing to start. Private meetings kept taking place in various small offices—I’d see Bill go in one room with the racing commissioner and some of his deputies, then exit that space and go into another with the owners of the track.

  Finally, there was an announcement that there would not be a hearing after all. The track had agreed to begin the repairs recommended by its own expert from Belmont, the one who had said the fixes would cost almost $600,000. Beginning as soon as possible, weather permitting, they would start the first of two phases: completely rebuilding the limestone base—not patching it but rebuilding it. They’d also add the necessary soft cushion. The work would be done from the rail all the way to forty-five feet out, which would be wide enough since we never had eighteen to twenty horses in a race, like the Kentucky Derby does. At most we’d have eight to ten, sometimes twelve.

  Phase II, the repair of the track at the two starting gate shoots—short areas on which the horses must run when they break from the gate in order to enter the oval of the racecourse—would take place later in the year.

  We won! I couldn’t believe it. Just like that, the track was going to be fixed. It was too late for Baby and all the other horses that had died throughout the season, but at least going forward things would be different. I couldn’t wait to call John to let him know that my doggedness had paid off. I couldn’t wait to come home and tell the horses. For once I’d be going to the barn with good news instead of just misery that Baby wasn’t there.

  Mostly I wanted to tell Scarlett. She was my direct link to Baby, even more than Sissy. Although, unlike Sissy, she was only his half sister, she had lived at the track with him, raced with him, trained with him, traveled to Florida with him.

  I also knew she’d be leaving again soon, right after Christmas, in fact. I had signed her up for eventing, and she’d be boarded and trained at a facility twenty minutes away, in Ann Arbor.

  It was not an easy decision. I loved having her near me, just enjoying herself in the pasture, enjoying being a horse. I also loved watching Scarlett and Sissy play together now that Sissy was big enough to be let out into the pasture with a barn mate other than her mother. Scarlett was still a young horse, only four, not even an adult yet, and had lots of young-horse energy, whereas Beauty and Pumpkin were old by then and didn’t want to tear across the pasture with a weanling. Pat was not going to play tag, either.

  Scarlett and Sissy would roll in the snow, get up and shake, then run together, their heels kicking in the air. It was beautiful to watch, if bittersweet. Here was a still-growing replica of the adult-size Baby cavorting with Scarlett, just as he had. The bonding between them was almost as intimate, as tender. It was a time-warped re-creation of what I remembered so well about Baby and Scarlett, one in which Scarlett had aged but Baby was still only months old.

  Does Scarlett know this is Baby’s sister, I wondered, in addition to being her own half sister through Pat? Does she recognize something about Sissy’s scent? Or was I superimposing all this on the scene because of my missing Baby so much?

  But while seeing them enjoy each other’s company tugged at my heart, I was not able to quell my competitive drive. Scarlett simply was too perfect not to perform, not to be shown off.

  I would watch her floating trot out back—her movements were so fluid that it appeared her feet weren’t even touching the ground—and feel torn between needing her close to me and needing to let her reach her potential. Looking back, it was probably a foregone conclusion even before I realized it. Her potential was going to win out. I wasn’t capable of nurturing a Secretariat snow globe, as I once thought I was. Even with Baby’s death, having had my competitive nature stoked after it had lain dormant for years once my daughters stopped skating and dancing, having laid bare that very spot in my core where love and striving were one and the same, I had no choice but to send her out to shine, to win.

  If you looked up “Thoroughbred” in an equine book or even a dictionary, the illustration would have been a likeness of Scarlett. She was so wonderfully proportioned. Everything hit the ground right. There was not an ankle bone that was too long or a leg that toed in. She had not too long or short of a back, not too short a neck to support her head. She also had huge dinner-plate feet, perfect for digging into the ground on a jump in order to get lift, and perfect for landing, for absorbing the shock over the widest area possible.

  I had thought hard about the discipline in which to have her trained before settling on eventing, which is sort of like a triathalon for horses. It combines dressage, in which a horse is judged on performing difficult but flowing movements without any apparent communication from her rider, almost like an equine ballet; cross-country jumping in varied terrain; and show jumping, a high, fast kind of jumping in which rails set in shallow cups aren’t to be disturbed and at which Scarlett, with her perfect conformation, would excel.

  I thought she would particularly love the cross-country jumping. The obstacles are set out, maybe fourteen within three-quarters of a mile in the easier competitions, each two to three feet high. But as the competitions increase in difficulty, covering more than two miles, the patterns become more difficult, with as many as forty obstacles to pass and higher jumps to make. The obstacles themselves get wider, too. Whereas at first the horse might have to jump only over a log, later she’ll have to clear things like a car, or a picnic table, flying five to eight feet through the air after taking off. The horse has to go faster in more advanced competitions, too, with penalties not just for lagging but also for refusing to jump. Scarlett would love the outdoor courses where she would be able to open up and run between jumps.

  She would also excel at it. When she was only two, she had been out in the big pasture grazing alongside Baby one day when, without her noticing, he walked out of sight. Suddenly, not knowing where he had gone, she grew frantic and started calling to him, deep belly
whinnies in which you could have heard the alarm way down the road. But Baby wasn’t down the road. He had simply walked back into the barn and didn’t answer her, probably figuring, “What’s the big deal?”

  I could see Scarlett building up a panic and running back and forth behind the pasture’s fence. She thinks he got out, I realized, and was wandering who knew where. Finally, desperate, she spun around and went tearing directly toward the fence, five feet high, to get to him. “This is it,” I thought. “She’s going to go straight into it and fracture something.” Now my own mind was in a panic. But instead, she took off and sailed over the boards, tucking up her front legs close to her chin and never even coming close to touching the fence top.

  Now out of the pasture and in our front yard, having escaped, she began looking for Baby, still bellowing to him. Perhaps sensing that her call was further away than before, he finally honked back. At that, she spun around and came flying to the barn, entering through its front door rather than from the pasture.

  With great relief she switched from whinnying to nickering, from “Where are you? I can’t find you,” to “It’s you, it’s you. I was so worried about you. Don’t do that to me anymore.” The two were immediately nose to nose as usual, continuing to live in the moment, as horses do.

  What I realized, remembering that incident, was that Scarlett could definitely compete in anything that involved jumping. A lot of horses leave a leg dangling as they jump, or both legs, and hit the obstacle, whether it be a rail or other object. That’s why, when training, they start out simply walking over poles laid out on the ground, then proceed to jumping obstacles only a foot high, and get to five-foot fences much later. But not Scarlett. At two, without any training, she already had it down.