Authors: Jo Anne Normile
But he was terrified to leave the stall. I could leave the stall door open and walk away, and he still wouldn't come out. He had spent his entire life alone in stalls, never in pastures with other horses, and he was scared to death. It took days for him just to walk out of the barn to graze in the lush grass, and then only after he had made sure that none of the other horses were out there. It was the equivalent of a child's being afraid to dig into a big bowl of his favorite flavor of ice cream in the company of other children.
After about a week, I decided to lead Sissy to the pasture when River Wolf was already grazing. She tended to be the one who got put out with a new horse first because of her eager friendliness. Also, huge as she was, she still clacked submissively, opening and closing her mouth repeatedly while her teeth clicked together, a don't-hurt-me habit most horses outgrow when they're still weanlings. There was no way another horse could misinterpret her intentions. Still, River Wolf froze when he saw her. You'd have thought she was a mountain lion ready to attack.
Sissy was oblivious. She walked briskly over to him to “say” hi and find out if he wanted to play. At racing speed, as though Sissy were going to kill him, River Wolf ran to the farthest corner of the pasture. Sissy, still completely unaware of his terror, walked gamely toward him again, almost running the last few steps, the way a person might who hadn't seen somebody they cared about in a long time, sprinting toward their friend as they came closer in order to give a big hug.
Again, River Wolf ran to the farthest corner.
“Oh, is
that
the game?” I could see Sissy wondering, as she chased him in that direction, too. This went on and on until finally, giving up, she put her head down in the middle of the pasture and began to graze.
River Wolf stared at her for five minutes straight, not budging, every muscle in his body tensed. Then, gingerly, and still keeping his eye on her, he began grazing in the corner himself.
For two days, he kept as far from Sissy as he could get. On the third day, however, the two ate side by side, walking and grazing, walking and grazing. It broke my heart. I could see so plainly in River Wolf's behavior what an unnatural thing racing was for horses. Cooped up in stalls and run ragged his whole life, he literally had no idea what it was to
be
a horse, utterly unable to read the body language of another one, and had to learn by degrees.
But he did. It wasn't long before Sissy and River Wolf were playing halter tag, the way Baby and Scarlett had, and nipping lightly at each other's legs, then kicking up their heels and running off, finally grooming each other like tired puppies. Although twelve, River Wolf was actually playing like a weanling, enjoying the childhood he had missed.
Sissy hated to see him go about a month later, when he was adopted by someone who wanted to do Western trail riding, which would allow him to lead a much better life than at the track. So did I. It was always wondrous to see a herd shaping and reshaping. Horses, like people, have their favorites, their friends that they like instantly, and those that they can get along with but for whom they don't feel an immediate affinity. Even Beauty, once in a great while, would take right away to a new horse, pricking her ears in friendship, and the two of them would choose each other as grazing/grooming partners.
Things were proceeding as smoothly at the new track as they had for River Wolf. I even enjoyed my Saturday drives out there. It was a straight shot on I-96 from the Detroit suburbs on the east to Lake Michigan on the west, which was just a few miles from the new track. Starting out before the sun rose at 5:15 on a weekend morning after spending about forty-five minutes taking care of my horses down at the barn, I could go for the longest time and not see another car. Except for the loop around Lansing, trees surrounded the flat highway on both sides, and, the car in cruise control, I relished my private time.
I had by that point quit the HBPA board. There was nothing acrimonious in it; the new board president was disappointed to see me resign, in fact. But knowing that I would never race a horse again, I realized that I didn't have a right to vote on issues that would affect the livelihoods of those still involved.
I had also by that time been voted vice president of the Michigan Eventing Association. Life was to some degree spinning in a different direction.
One thing I was glad to finally put behind me was the lawsuit. Back in the previous December, it had gone to mediation, with a suggestion handed down that both sides settle for $12,500, splitting the difference between Baby's $25,000 valuation and no money whatsoever, which was what the track wanted to pay.
We had accepted that recommendationâby that point the cost of going further would have been prohibitiveâbut 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, âWell, 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 intentionsâand 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 wordâno 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 while 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.