Saving Baby (29 page)

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 common 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.”

Instead of calling the local paper, I tried a Lansing TV station, keeping in mind how well we had done with TV the previous year, and reached the program director. As luck would have it, she was a horse owner herself. We spent the first twenty minutes just talking to each other about our horses, and when I finally was able to get around to why I was calling, she thought it would make a wonderful story.

Dr. Stick was delighted, even allowing the news team into the operating room to watch the surgery on Lookalike, Michigan State's first CANTER arthroscopy patient. He had also cleared using the $20,000 donation with the contributor, a Dr. Lyle Hartrick, who, it turned out, knew me and the CANTER program from the Detroit Race Course.

The piece ran a week or so before Thanksgiving, at noon, five o'clock, and eleven o'clock, and it even ran for more than one day, far beyond anything I had hoped for and certainly far beyond anything Dr. Stick expected. Our relationship was off to a solid start. And Lookalike—she came through her surgery great, ending up as a family horse used for Western trail riding. She was the first of five CANTER horses to be operated on successfully that year.

The season was soon over, and I'd have a few months before needing to go out again to Muskegon every Saturday. I missed Pumpkin. We were now into December, and I was constantly reminded of her, as I had taken her in just before Christmas so many years earlier. But I was finally at peace, to some degree, because of our ability to keep the kill buyers from the new track and to rehabilitate those horses who were so injured they had no chance whatsoever of moving to a new life without surgery.

It was during that period of letting down, of coming to realize that I could finally take a breath, with the tree already in the house and the girls soon coming home for the holiday, that John started shouting.

“Jo Anne, Jo Anne, get in here!” It was a Saturday afternoon, and he had been flipping channels to watch different football games, when there, on
CNN Headline News
, was the segment that had run in Lansing.

I was so frustrated that we didn't have a tape in the television. “Sometimes they repeat,” John said. “Let's put one in just in case.”

Sure enough, around it came again, right after a story about the Pope and then another segment on pandas at the San Diego Zoo, just like the previous time. It kept coming, in fact, every single hour. After about the third or fourth time, John said, “they're probably going to change stories now,” and it seemed they had. The Pope and the pandas were bumped. But the CANTER piece ran yet again, and kept running!

Checks started coming in from as far away as Washington State. Magazines with wider circulations than any who had already covered us began calling for interviews.

CANTER was now on the national stage. More racehorses than ever were going to be saved.

 

CHAPTER TWELVE

The CNN segment did prove to be the kindling that allowed CANTER to transition from a precarious flicker to a steadily intensifying glow. In 1999, our budget was $15,000 and change. By 2002, it was $107,000, and by 2004, $220,000. We were written up in publications ranging from
The New York Times
to the
Chicago Tribune
. A single article's worth of coverage in The Associated Press garnered us placement in more newspapers than I can count.

Feature articles about CANTER, some with huge spreads and lots of color photos, also appeared in magazines that for non-racing equine enthusiasts are the equivalent of
Sports Illustrated
for guys who love pro ball:
Equus, Chronicle of the Horse, Practical Horseman, Horse Illustrated
, and a number of others. We were even written about in the
USCTA News
and
USDF Connection
, the official publications of the United States Eventing Association and the U.S. Dressage Federation, thereby reaching people all over the country who might want to repurpose a Thoroughbred who was no longer going to race.

Dr. Stick was thrilled about all the publicity, as Michigan State's involvement was frequently mentioned. That made it easier for the development department at the university to go after new funding to support CANTER's surgery program there.