Saving Baby

by Jo Anne Normile

  We had accepted that recommendation—by that point the cost of going further would have been prohibitive—but Ladbroke had not, insisting that we go to trial and dragging out the case till the end of June, when, after wasting more of our lawyer’s time in motions for summary judgment and hours and hours of preparation for debating the case in front of a jury, they accepted the mediation terms and sent me a $12,500 check.

  Ladbroke insisted on a confidentiality clause for a period of twenty-nine months, until the statute of limitations ran out, I assumed. Their aim, I believed, was to muzzle me so no one else would sue for the death of their own horse out on the track. That bothered me on principle, but Baby by that point had been gone for three years. If anyone else was going to sue, I realized, they would have already come forward.

  I was glad not to have to keep revisiting Baby’s death by way of the suit, going over witnesses’ statements and looking at other documents having to do with his life being cut short. It always churned it all up to the surface. But I did want the settlement to have some kind of meaning. My family had been so hurt by Baby’s tragedy. We all still loved him, still thought of him all the time.

  I told the girls I was going to put the money in a separate savings account, and that whenever the time came for them to marry, Baby would buy them their wedding gowns and throw them their bridal showers. That way, as our family member, he would be with each of them on their wedding day and forever after that. No woman throws away her wedding gown. It’s the most important day in her life, after the days on which her children are born.

  I couldn’t bring Baby back other than symbolically, of course, but I was able to take comfort in the fact that I was doing so well at saving Thoroughbreds at Great Lakes Downs that by midsummer, the major kill buyers had stopped coming around. There simply weren’t enough horses for them to pick up because CANTER had either been placing them or taking them outright. I had gone from acting solely as a conduit for trainers and buyers in the sport disciplines to a full-fledged rescue, not only arranging transfers off the track but also intaking horses trackside in CANTER’s name that could be brought to area farms to be fostered until someone could be found to adopt them permanently.

  No other horse rescue organization in the country was taking horses from the racetrack, literally. Our being on-site made all the difference. While other rescues were placing on the order of perhaps fifteen horses a year, we were now placing as many as fifteen a week.

  Horses did still go to slaughter. There were trainers who continued to refuse to deal with me. But I never had to turn down a horse that a trainer was willing to unload on CANTER.

  Part of what spurred the action were posters I would bring to the track entitled “Racing’s Graduates.” They contained photos of ex-racehorses in their new disciplines. I got the idea to bring in the posters after I received a call from one of the trainers one night. “We’re at the bar,” he said, “and are trying to figure out how you make money with CANTER.”

  I couldn’t believe that I was now in my third season of getting racehorses off the track, yet there was still suspicion that somehow I was on the take. “Louie,” I said to the man on the other end, “I have told you. I’ve told everyone. I don’t make any money from this.”

  “We don’t get it. Why do you do it, then?”

  “I do it because it’s the right thing to do. Why should a horse go to slaughter?”

  “Okay, alright,” he answered, half laughing, half defensively. “Everybody was kind of sitting around here trying to figure it out. And I just said, ‘Well, I’m going to call her and ask her.’”

  It was then that I decided to bring in the posters, hoping they would ease skepticism. One Saturday, as soon as I arrived, I left one inside the HBPA office and proceeded to go about my business. When I stopped back hours later, trainers were crowded around it.

  “Wow, this is really neat,” I heard one of them say. “Look, there’s so-and-so.”

  Others were laughing. “No wonder your horse couldn’t win a race,” one ribbed a buddy standing nearby. “It’s not a Thoroughbred. You got yourself a cowboy horse.”

  “Look at my horse jump,” another called out. “Look at that!”

  “It’s been like this since you put that here,” the HBPA secretary said from behind her half doorway. “There’s been a crowd all day.”

  Each time I’d get a poster board’s worth of pictures, I’d bring in a new board. “Would you make sure my horse gets on the next one?” trainers started asking me. That simple step of showing them their horses in their next life went a long way toward reducing their cynical view of my intentions—and keeping my horse-saving efforts successful, so successful that I realized CANTER was no longer simply a little program that had the blessing of the local HBPA. It was time to become a rescue in the formal sense, a full-fledged, tax-exempt charity.

  I knew that if people could write off their donations, more money would come our way to save horses. Moreover, I’d be able to convince some trainers to donate their horses in exchange for a tax donation receipt rather than demand the same price as the meat buyer.

  Having worked as a legal secretary early in my career, I filed the papers to make CANTER a 501(c)(3) myself, putting down my name as the incorporator. But the IRS sent me notice that I had to have three incorporators, and none of them could be a spouse. Fortunately, Judy, my first volunteer, agreed to be named, as did Robbie Timmons. I knew she had a soft spot for the horses and was glad that she let me use her name to dot the i’s and cross the t’s.

  Happy as I was about CANTER’s humming along by that point, I knew the time had come to lose one of my own. My vet had actually made the recommendation months earlier. One of the complications of Cushing’s disease that Pumpkin had was the inability to shed her thick winter coat, twice as heavy as the coat that grew in the spring. In hot weather, a horse with such a coat can die of heat stroke. We had body clipped Pumpkin in April to get her down to her normal length of hair, but still she was uncomfortable. Worse still, she was becoming weaker and weaker, to the point that just standing in the pasture and grazing, she seemed ready to fall over. Once a horse falls, she can’t stay down long. It compresses her lungs and doesn’t allow her to breathe. Even a horse who chooses to lie down for a while will keep shifting her body weight. What if Pumpkin fell one day when I wasn’t home, flies swarming around her, unable to rise? I had promised Pumpkin when we took her home fifteen years earlier that she would never have to suffer anymore, and I needed to make good on that promise, putting her needs above the emptiness and aching for her that I knew I would feel.

  Rebecca took the decision harder than Jessica had. Just ten when we brought Pumpkin home on Christmas Eve 1984, she had grown up with her. Not only that, Rebecca also seemed to have inherited my horse gene. Jessica always loved horses and all other animals and still does, but by the time she reached adolescence, if I’d say, “Come on down to the barn, I want to show you something about one of the horses,” she’d answer, “I just washed my hair, and I’ll have to shower and wash it again because I’ll smell like horse.” But Rebecca never reached that point. If I had told her on her wedding day that there was something in the barn I wanted her to see, she would have run down there in her wedding gown. Whatever boyfriend she had, she’d drag him to the barn and make him get on a horse. And she was the one with whom I did the most riding, the one who “took over” Pumpkin by herself once Jessica went off to college.

  I had a hard time with the decision myself. It wasn’t like with Baby, which was a tragedy in the true sense of the word—no time to prepare myself for the loss of a five-year-old horse with whom I had fallen completely in love and who I expected to be able to see gallivanting in the pasture behind the house to this day. But it was sad, so awfully sad. Pumpkin and Beauty were truly the horses of my dreams, the ones I finally got to have after a lifetime of wanting horses of my own so badly; the first ones I could see grazing together in the pasture when I looked out the window wh
ile working on my court transcripts; the ones who turned a good life into a perfect one. Even though Pumpkin was thirty-three, much older than horses usually live, I hated to say good-bye to her, to a wonderful, innocent part of my life before I knew the way in which people could treat horses they no longer wanted.

  Once Pumpkin was gone, I scattered some of her ashes in the pasture and put some more in a plastic bag that I placed next to Baby’s ashes in the stein. The rest I gave to Rebecca.

  I took comfort in the fact that I wasn’t running into any situation in which there was a horse at the track that needed my help but to whom I couldn’t give it. If no one wanted to buy a horse, there was always a foster home to which to take it. But people were buying horses to repurpose them for various other disciplines. Transfers from trainers to people in the sport disciplines were brisk, in fact. Being on the western side of the state, hours away from the site of the Detroit Race Course, I had a whole new local market to tap into. People who wouldn’t have come to the old track were willing to come to Great Lakes Downs, and along with the Web site, the “Horses Wanted” list was more active than ever, sometimes reaching to twenty-five pages. Again, I’d go into the men’s bathroom and Scotch tape copies all along the wall; into the racing secretary’s office, where the trainers went at eleven each morning to enter various horses into races, taking down the previous week’s list and putting up the new one.

  Still, as fall approached, things were going to become more difficult. More and more trainers would want to dump horses that weren’t going to earn them any more money, and more of those horses would have serious injuries, making them unsuitable for other kinds of competitions. I called it Fall Rush. The Detroit track’s closing for good the previous year certainly brought a special frenzy to the end-of-season dumping, but every October and November saw trainers trying to unload “useless” horses with increased intensity. Even uninjured, the Thoroughbreds who were good enough for our cheap claiming races in Michigan would never have been able to compete in Florida, where many of the trainers raced in the winter months.

  That so many more horses were coming into CANTER with serious injuries made our work much more expensive. Even checking for soundness could be complicated. A horse who had had multiple cortisone injections might still be able to run without pain—the shots would take down inflammation in soft tissue—but any bone at the injection site would be deteriorating, and that might not be readily apparent. People are given cortisone injections sparingly. Cortisone destroys bone, so you can’t keep administering it. But in racehorses, there’s no limit. They’re forced to run on a bad knee or ankle until the repeated cortisone shots given to mask their pain wear away their bone to the point that running becomes impossible. The bone actually collapses, and the horse can’t even walk without a severe limp.

  X-rays become necessary to assess the extent of the damage. Often, an operation is called for. A joint may have a dozen bone chips floating around in it, and every time the horse moves, the chips’ sharp edges dig into cartilage like tiny razors, tearing up the joint and other soft tissue. The bone chips have to be removed in an arthroscopic surgery for the horse to have a chance. That can easily cost $1,500. With so many horses needing evaluation and, often, expensive procedures to fix the cause of their lameness, CANTER would be at a financial loss. The money simply wasn’t there to take care of all their medical needs. Even chemically euthanizing a horse for whom there was no hope of a pain-free life—a much more peaceful, dignified end than slaughter, accompanied as it was by soft words and a kind touch from people who cared—cost in the neighborhood of $300, more than I often had to pay to keep a horse from the kill buyer.

  I hadn’t run into this problem before because in the previous years, CANTER wasn’t a formal rescue. The very damaged horses not bought by people in the sport disciplines went to the kill buyers. Now, I was intaking those horses personally as the head of the organization and sending them to foster homes. In fact, by the end of the season, the work was almost purely in the realm of rescue—taking horses off the track ourselves to keep them from the slaughterhouse. There were fewer and fewer sound horses left for sale that anyone in eventing or any other sport discipline would have wanted.

  With no options at hand, I decided to go begging, propelled by the fact that the daughter of the HBPA president, a trainer herself, had given to me at no charge a horse that she had already had x-rayed and was found to have a bone chip in her knee. She wasn’t sure if the horse, a beautiful filly named Lookalike with the look of eagles, had sustained the injury during training or during a race.

  I called the veterinary teaching hospital at Michigan State University in East Lansing, a little less than two hours away from the track. I had already had some good luck there, if you can call it that, when I had to put down a horse named Fabled Wolf earlier in the season. His last race had been July 4th—a Sunday that year—and when I came upon him the Saturday after, he had an ankle in such bad condition he was head-bobbing lame. Just seven years old, he had already raced in five different states and been claimed ten different times, which did not include all the times he changed hands privately rather than via claiming races—an anathema for horses, who crave routine and familiarity and need time to become used to new people, new surroundings. During those five years, stabled in barns from Delaware to Florida until finally taken to our end-of-the-road track in Michigan, he had won his various owners more than $80,000 in allowance races.

  But he had run out of soundness. I had him trailered to Michigan State to be evaluated, and it turned out that both ankles were fractured beyond repair. There was no way to save that absolutely gorgeous animal, a great big grey, not only beautiful but also so very sweet and trusting.

  We had already spent a good deal of money to have him checked out. I needed to hold onto as much money as I could to save other horses. Fortunately, one of the veterinarians there, Hillary Clayton, whom I had met previously at a horse expo in Lansing, told me she would take care of euthanizing Fabled Wolf as well as disposing of his body. Her program would pay for it.

  With that in mind, I thought maybe Michigan State would be willing to donate surgeries. Perhaps the students could perform the operations with the oversight of their professors, not only affording the school a way to train its pupils but also giving it a way to look good.

  I didn’t know who to ask for and kept getting transferred to different departments. Finally, a voice came on and, instead of announcing a department name, said simply, “John Stick.”

  I started explaining the situation and could tell pretty quickly that I wasn’t going to get transferred again. He didn’t interrupt me to say I had reached the wrong person. I talked for so long, explaining about how I started the program two years earlier and, in my nervous desperation, going into so many particulars, that at one point I wondered whether he was still on the line. He hadn’t so much as said “Mmm-hmm,” or even grunted.

  Finally, after quite some time, he said, “Hold it. Can you wait for a minute?”

  I was ready to burst into tears. I hadn’t honed my point strongly enough, hadn’t rehearsed what I was going to say, and now was going to get shot down before I had a chance to make all the important arguments for operating on the horses, having taken up the man’s time with extraneous details.

  “Do you know how many times a year I am asked to donate surgery?” he asked rhetorically, “and not just to individuals but to rescues? I am asked so many times that my secretary has a form letter explaining why we can’t do it—”

  It was over. This was Baby I had been pleading for. These were the horses that needed me most, not the Scarletts who were going out and doing wonderful things, and I had failed them.

  “—but I would have to be crazy not to get behind this.”

  Then he talked. “I owe my career to Thoroughbred horses,” he told me. “You happened to call one of the first universities in the country that perfected arthroscopic surgery on horses’ legs. We do this on a fairly comm
on basis. Thoroughbred racehorses have built my career, giving me everything in life I enjoy today. And I have always felt I needed to give back to them. But I never found the right vehicle to do it. This is that vehicle.”

  It turned out I was talking to the chief of staff for the entire equine hospital, a nationally renowned orthopedic surgeon, and he told me that what I was asking for would be ideal not only for him but also for the university. “If you would allow the students to do the surgery,” he said, “and I’d always be in the operating room directing them—they’d be directly under my supervision—I think we could have a deal here. Let’s try it with six horses and see where it goes.”

  The word “elation” couldn’t begin to get at what I was feeling.

  I watched nervously during Lookalike’s arthroscopic surgery to remove a bone chip in her knee. It was the first surgery donated to CANTER at Michigan State University.

  “But you know,” he then added, “I have people over me. This is a public university. It has to be clear that the university is not using tax dollars to pay for these horses’ care. I do have graduates of the vet school who turn around and donate money for me to use as I see fit. Right now I have an equine veterinarian who is retired and used to be a racing breeder, trainer, and owner. He donated twenty thousand dollars to the Large Animal Hospital for me to use at my discretion. I will call him and ask him what he thinks of my using it for this program. Then we’ll see about hooking up with our development department. Maybe between you, me, and them, we can keep a fund for these surgeries.

  “I’ll give you one little hint,” he added. “I still have to justify this, justify this use of our facilities, to the people at the university. And I will tell you that universities love good publicity. If you could get an article in the paper about our doing this, and I could show it to the dean, it would help solidify that this is a good thing to do. Just a little tip for you on your end.”