On a sticky summer afternoon, with a thunderstorm slow-brewing in the distance, Yourgie shifts nervously in his stall. The five-year-old light gray thoroughbred seems uninterested in a sugar cube that is offered to him. He jerks his head slightly and turns away, only to return for a few loving pats from some young campers, all girls, who are eager to comfort him.
Moving repeatedly from side to side in the stall, or "weaving" as it’s called, is a habit of some racehorses. It’s a sign of anxiety. Yourgie has plenty to be anxious about, but he’s coming around. In the weeks since he arrived at Calypso Run Farm in Virginia Beach, Yourgie has become calmer and more receptive to his human companions. But he has a ways to go before he’ll be ready for trail rides with fidgety seven-year-olds.
"You have to let the horse down," says Calypso Run owner Sali Gear. "It’s my personal term: I wait for them to ‘sigh’."
Yourgie’s "sigh" came only recently.
"We were out in the pasture and I was giving carrots all around," says Gear, dressed for a day at the barn in khaki shorts, rumpled blue Oxford, paddock boots and a dusty ball cap. "Yourgie came up to me, which was huge, and he took the carrot. Then he turned around and put his rear end towards me, which could be deemed as threatening, but it wasn’t in a threatening manner. He backed up to me and asked me to scratch his rump, which was totally cool because that was him inviting me into his herd."
He’s also learning to like the sweet stuff.
"They don’t get treats. They don’t know anything about sugar cubes or carrots at the race track. So for Yourgie, it’s just about not pressing him mentally, just letting him know that things are OK."
Yourgie has found a new home at Calypso Run, a low-key 15-acre hidden sanctuary behind Hunt Club Farm off of London Bridge Road. Down a pitted gravel drive lined with lush July foliage and a patchwork of fences, sits an unassuming blue barn, the heart of Gear’s labor of love.
A retired Navy fighter pilot and 47-year-old mother of three boys, Gear comes across like a woman who doesn’t take crap from anybody. She also comes across like a woman who would give you the boots off of her feet if she thought they would do you some good.
Most of her dozen or so horses are "rescue horses."
"No one has a big ‘S’ stamped on their forehead quite like me—an ‘S’ for ‘Sucker,’" she says.
Yourgie is the latest addition. The fact that Yourgie is even alive is a small miracle. What saved him was his gentle nature and a little bit of dumb luck. He is one of a group of horses referred to as the "Sugarcreek Six," all of whom were rescued from certain death at the notorious Sugarcreek Livestock Auction in Ohio.
Word had gotten out in the horse community that HBO’s Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel was planning to do an undercover investigative special on the pipeline from racetrack to slaughterhouse, a shadowy world of which the mainstream public is largely unaware or perhaps chooses to ignore. The station had contacted a Virginia horsewoman named Anne Russek and asked for her help with the piece. They were planning to focus on horses being transported from Sugarcreek across the U.S. border for slaughter. When the originally scheduled date for their visit to Sugarcreek was postponed by HBO, Russek and some of her colleagues decided to make the trek to Sugarcreek to get the lay of the land before the rescheduled filming took place. They hoped to bid on a few horses while they were there in an effort to save them from slaughter.
They had three specific thoroughbreds in mind, all of which they located at the auction house by identifying their lip tattoos—all thoroughbred racehorses have a letter and five numbers tattooed under their lips which identify their breeding and ownership and can be used to track their race histories. Funding had been secured to rescue these three particular horses, but after witnessing the deplorable conditions at Sugarcreek, Russek and her colleagues were desperate to save a few more while they were there.
One striking gray gelding (a neutered male) caught their attention. Crowded into a holding pen, he positioned himself in a corner just so he could nuzzle and groom one of his fellow horses, presumably to find comfort in the chaos. He had a look of longing in his eyes as he hung his head out into an aisle where Russek was standing. She decided to check his lip number as well. Later, when more funding was secured, that gray gelding and two other horses were saved along with the original three—hence the "Sugarcreek Six." The gray gelding was Yourgie.
It has been called America’s dirty little secret. Racehorses whose glory days on the track are a few lengths behind them, carted off to be "processed" in a slaughterhouse far removed from the roses, mint juleps, and big-hatted fanfare of the "most exciting two minutes in sports."
Long-running jokes about horse parts ending up in pet food or at the proverbial glue factory are antiquated. There’s no horse meat in modern commercial pet foods, at least not in this country, and the advent of synthetic adhesives all but eliminated the use of biomaterial in glue in the 20th century. But the contemporary reality about what happens to unwanted horses isn’t much prettier.
According to the American Society for Animal Protective Legislation, more than 104,000 horses met their ends at slaughterhouses in the United States in 2006. And not just racehorses. Quarter horses, drafts, ponies—some are abandoned, others are sold by their trainers or track owners to "kill buyers" who in turn sell them into slaughter for a fairly meager profit. Yourgie, who earned more than $50,000 in prize money on the track—his track name was "East Over Baghdad"—was sold at auction for a mere $425. His rescuers paid $525 to purchase him from the kill buyer, who would have made about the same amount selling him for slaughter. The rescuers brought him to DMC Stables in Berryville, Virginia, where he stayed briefly before making his final journey to Virginia Beach.
The vast majority of horses that are sent to the auction house end up overseas on someone’s dinner plate, an idea that turns the stomachs of most people in the United States.
Americans have always had a love affair with horses. From the wild Mustangs that embody the pioneering spirit of the West to pony rides at the county fair, from Budweiser’s ubiquitous Clydesdales to the pomp and circumstance of Churchill Downs—horses are in our blood. They’ve plowed our fields, carried our soldiers into battle and been our constant and faithful companions for as long as we’ve called ourselves Americans.
For most of us, the concept of eating horse meat is downright revolting. But the meat is praised for its low fat content and thought of as a delicacy in many countries, particularly in Europe and Asia. Our squeamishness is reflective of a cultural divide.
"When I was in Italy it was on the menu at a Hilton Hotel," says Gear. "For the U.S., we go, ‘These are our pets, how can you do it?’ Well, how do people eat dog in Korea? These are the harsh realities."
Until last year, there were three major horse slaughterhouses, all foreign owned, operating in the United States—two in Texas and one in Illinois. Political pressure finally forced both states to pass legislation banning the practice in 2007. There are no slaughterhouses—or abattoirs as they are also known—currently operating in this country. But there is no national law in place making them illegal or preventing the sale of live horses across U.S. borders for slaughter in Canada and Mexico. And that is where thousands of horses end up every year before they’re butchered and sent off to France or Japan.
The American Horse Slaughter Prevention Act (H.R. 503, S. 311) was introduced in January of 2007. It would "prohibit the shipping, transporting, moving, delivering, receiving, possessing, purchasing, selling, or donation of horses and other equines to be slaughtered for human consumption, and for other purposes," effectively ending the slaughter of American horses, assuming it could be properly enforced. Local co-sponsors of the bill include Congressman Bobby Scott, who signed on in April of this year.
Slaughter opponents emphasize the brutal nature of the process, the lengthy overcrowded transport without food or water, the mass hysteria and abusive treatment at the auction arena and the inhumane nature of the slaughter itself. The HBO sports special mentioned previously eventually did film at Sugarcreek. It aired in May of this year. It’s not easy to watch. Horses are typically shocked in the head with an electric rod designed for cows before they are slaughtered. The problem is that horses’ necks are longer and much more agile than cows, so sometimes the shock doesn’t take on the first try because the horses thrash around so much. If a few tries don’t do the trick, they are strung up by their ankles alive and "bled out" by way of a giant slash down their abdomens. The process in countries like Mexico is even less humane.
Still, even the horse world is divided on the issue. Staunch opponents like Alex Brown of Alex Brown Racing, an online horse racing community, say it’s a matter of accountability.
"The issue is that you can get a couple hundred dollars from the horse dealer for your horse and then it goes into the slaughter pipeline versus paying a couple hundred dollars to have it humanely euthanized," he says. "So there’s probably like a 500-or 600-dollar swing at the end of the day when you talk about humanely euthanizing your horse and disposing of its carcass." But Brown adds that this shouldn’t deter owners from euthanizing horses. "Do the right thing by your horse," he says. "Don’t be an ass."
Alex Brown Racing is home to a group called "Fans of Barbaro," named for the beloved racehorse whose compounded injuries led to his death by euthanasia in 2007. Among other missions, FOB raises funds for rescuing racehorses. It was an anonymous donor from FOB that made Yourgie’s rescue possible.
Those who are against the slaughter ban—and they include some major organizations like the American Veterinary Medical Association—say slaughter is an unfortunate necessity to prevent widespread neglect and abuse of large numbers of unwanted animals.
Gear says the economy and other factors have led to a sort of perfect storm in terms of the potential for abandonment.
"You’ve got people with horses they can’t afford to keep any more. And they’re struggling to keep their houses. How in the heck are they going to keep a horse? Houses that are foreclosed on, the people have been evicted and the horses are left behind."
But Brown dismisses the notion that the slaughter pipeline is fueled by overpopulation.
"This is a demand-driven business," he says. "What that means is that the number of horses slaughtered is purely a function of the demand for horse meat in Europe and parts of Asia. It has nothing to do with the number of unwanted horses."
Yet even people active in the horse welfare community debate the issue.
Eileen Darland, director of the Tidewater chapter of United States Equine Rescue League says she’s on the fence.
"I don’t like it, but at the same time I know unfortunately it’s kind of necessary. There are just too many horses. There are too many people out there who are just breeding and breeding and breeding. It’s just like cats and dogs. You’re going to have overpopulation and you’re going to have to control it."
Darland says she’s been a horse lover all of her life. Horses even helped her overcome learning disabilities as a kid. And she is a founder of the local chapter of the ERL, which takes on the "most extreme cases" of neglect and abuse, working with Animal Control, rehabilitating horses and other equines and placing them up for adoption.
The official stance of the ERL is anti-slaughter because of the inhumane nature of the process. Darland says she wishes it could be done in a more animal-friendly fashion.
The racing industry in particular is no stranger to controversy. A string of recent incidents brought national attention to the darker side of the "Sport of Kings."
"Honestly the racing industry has gotten a big wake-up call," says Gear. "Eight Belles was a wake-up call."
Eight Belles is the filly who came in second to winner Big Brown in the 2008 Kentucky Derby only to shatter both of her front ankles during the cool down period following the race. She was immediately euthanized. Critics charge that racehorses have been bred to the point that their powerhouse bodies—often loaded with steroids (another controversy that has been brewing of late)—are too much for their fragile bone structure, that jockeys and trainers are too hard on them and that track conditions don’t offer adequate shock absorption.
But these charges seem to pale in comparison to the notion that owners and trainers can go from glorifying—if not practically deifying—their animals on the track one day, to selling them the next day for a few hundred lousy bucks to a known meat man.
Gear says the industry is not all bad and that the trainers she works with, from which she procures most of her horses, have the animals’ best interests at heart.
"These are trainers that care about their horses. So it’s not to say that the race track doesn’t have quality people because it surely does. But there are just a few bottom feeders there [for whom] it’s all about the money, and they don’t take care of the horses. To get your trainers license at a racetrack doesn’t take a whole lot frankly. The qualifications are next to nothing."
All the controversy is far removed from Calypso Run Farm, where Yourgie and his fellow horses are enjoying each other’s company in the afternoon sun. One dark brown thoroughbred has just gotten a nice cool bath in the hose. Let loose in the pasture, he promptly rolls on the ground and coats himself in a nice layer of putty colored dirt before sauntering towards a grassy patch for a snack.
Evenings are play time for the horses, after the campers leave. Calypso Run offers riding lessons and camps and parties. There is plenty of work to be done. Gear’s sons help out a lot. And for a few dedicated teenagers who’ve been bitten hard by the horse bug, the farm is a home away from home.
Sixteen-year-old Krissy Clarke is here practically every afternoon during the school year and almost every day in the summer. She’s all giddy over Slim, the horse she bought (well, her grandmother and another half-owner bought) in September of last year. Slim’s rescue was made possible by another national organization called CANTER (Communication Alliance to Network Thoroughbred Ex-Racehorses).
"I rode him and I just fell in love with him," she says.
Sisters Katie and Alex Hall, 18 and 14, also spend most of their free time at the farm, helping with camps, cleaning stalls, whatever needs to be done—just so they can be near their beloved horses. At one point Katie checks her cell phone.
"This is how bad of a horse person I am," she says. "My boyfriend keeps calling me to see if I want to go to the beach and I’m like, ‘Naaaaah.’"
They say the farm is like a family. Certainly that’s true for the horses as well.
There are large farms around the country that rehabilitate rescue horses on a grander scale, but Calypso Run is fairly unique for our region.
"I’m just a drop in the bucket," says Gear. "I’m a few horses here and there. I mean, all’s I can hopefully do is convey to these kids that there is responsibility in ownership and responsibility in breeding."
And though she spares the graphic details, she does try to educate the kids about the animals’ origins.
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