Animal Magnetism

Betting on Horses

When I was growing up, racetracks dotted the Mid-Atlantic landscape. Big Thoroughbred stables trained horses on their own tracks. County fairs cleaned up their tracks for harness racing, and state fairs usually boasted excellent tracks as well. Standardbreds were as popular as Thoroughbreds. The big wonderful tracks like Pimlico and Belmont topped the high end for Thoroughbreds, but many tracks filled the niches in between, right down to the end-of-the-line tracks, which made me sad as a child and continue to do so.

Harness racing touched everyone then. Flat racing (middle distance racing on flat terrain) and steeplechasing (longer distance racing with hurdles like fences and ditches) excited us all. But just about everyone, at least where I was raised, knew someone with a sulky, a light cart on two wheels with a single seat for the driver. A sulky is what you’d drive for harness racing. Driving in fine harness still held considerable social cachet. Today, many people have ridden a horse at least once in their lives. The ones who suffered a bad experience are quick to relate it, swearing they’ll never do that again. Pity. Would you stop playing baseball if you got beaned?

But baseball is human versus human. Riding or driving is a human and horse partnership. Most people don’t know how to communicate with a horse. I’m not saying that everyone understood horses when I was a kid, but they enjoyed a much greater familiarity with them.

Mother, who had a fabulous eye for a horse, was born in 1905. When she was born, roughly ninety percent of Americans lived in the country, ten percent in the cities. I was born at the end of 1944, and the ratio then was near to fifty-fifty. Today, ninety percent live in cities or suburbs and only ten percent of us dwell in the country. Country knowledge is shrinking. The effect on the animal population is disturbing and often unwittingly cruel. The effect on the human population isn’t very healthy either. We aren’t meant to sit on top of one another in rectangular cubicles peering out windows that don’t open, breathing canned air and subjecting our minds to routine jolts of stress.

No one, even in 1944, could have foreseen the dramatic shift in our population. It’s a sure bet horses didn’t see it coming either.

Money burned a hole in Mother’s pocket, as I mentioned earlier. She couldn’t help but be seduced by a bright scarf, a shiny pair of earrings, or the thrill of a horse race. Oh, how she loved to bet on the horses: flat racing, steeplechasing, harness racing. Much of my childhood found me on the back side of the tracks. In those days, no one thought the sight of wagering would warp a young mind, so I could come and go as I pleased, for which I will forever be grateful. I can’t understand why children are not allowed to attend racing but can be subjected to violence in the media around the clock. Perhaps we should rethink how we show the world to our children. Spending it with horses, for me anyway, was a wondrous experience. Mother, always decked out (she was a clotheshorse), would stroll along the shedrows pointing out horses to me.

“Look at that cannon bone. Now, that’s what I like to see.”

The cannon bone is in the foreleg, between knee and hoof.

“Why?”

She squinted at me for a moment as the smoke from her ever-present Chesterfield drifted into her lovely gray eyes. “This horse is a chaser. When he jumps the brush or the timber, the bang first hits his hoof, and then the thin chain of bones above that, and then it will hit the cannon bone. A heavy cannon bone usually means a horse will last. A thin one”—she shook her head—“breaks like a twig.” She made a gun out of her hand and fired, “Bang.”

“Oh, Momma.” I just hated the thought.

“Honey, you can’t fix a broken leg in a good horse. They don’t heal. They keep rebreaking the bone, and the poor beast suffers. You have to shoot them. It seems cruel, but it’s a dreadful thing to let an animal suffer.”

“Does a racehorse need a good cannon bone?”

“In truth, all horses do. That’s why old Tweetie Byrd hunts Suzie Q. I wouldn’t be caught dead in the hunt field on a draft. A lady should ride a Thoroughbred, and that’s the end of it.”

I loved all horses, even the paints and the Appaloosas with their beautiful coat patterns, but they were beyond the pale then in the hunt field. You wouldn’t dare show up on a horse of color. Thankfully those days are gone and many more horses have the opportunity to foxhunt.

In some ways, foxhunting mirrors a horse’s natural order. They’re running in a herd, except for the staff horses, which are out alone. They’re outside in a big space, not circling some track or show ring and putting stress on that inside shoulder. Horses can smell the fox better than we can, although not as handily as the hounds. And they are loved. Most foxhunters lavish care upon their horses. For one thing, you’re together sometimes for four hours—even five, on those rare days when you rouse one fox after another—in sleet, in rain, in snow, in sunshine. The bond that’s formed is deep.

Back on that shedrow I already understood that bond just by being around all the horses and meeting the special people who worked with them so closely. Mother loved a horse show and she was as happy to watch good Saddlebreds or a bracing steeple chase with perfectly conditioned Thoroughbreds. Naturally, she swanned about in something stunning so she became part of the show. I sometimes think one of the reasons she took me was because she could rest her drink on my head. She stood only five foot two, but as a child, I was still much shorter. This pleased her.

Our family was spread over Maryland, Virginia, and southern Pennsylvania. Mother’s uncle, my Great-uncle Johnny Huff, owned a large stable between Baltimore and Green Spring Valley Hunt. He lost it when he was arrested for making book. But Mother got along with the new owner—well, not so new because Great-uncle Johnny went to prison way back in the Great Depression. Occasionally we’d drive out so I could play with a suitably calm animal, although I could get along with high-strung horses, too, and Mother eventually noticed this. I’m a whiz with a horse in that I can sometimes calm down a horse that someone else has jazzed up or who is naturally a little spiked. I have no idea why.

Confession time: as I have aged I am not as thrilled to be calming down hot horses or green ones. The jigging just wears me out. Gone is that youthful ego that shouts “I can do it.” Now my motto is “I can do it, but that’s what children are for.” This is not to say I’m a good rider. What I am is tough.

Mother appreciated my devotion to hounds and dogs, but her special love was for horses and cats. When she saw I could talk to them, in a manner of speaking, she realized I could be very useful. She’d send me back to the shedrows on research missions. Whoever was running that day I was to check on and report. What was the condition of the coat? This was very important to her. Could I see their hooves? Was any horse improperly shod or past due? What was the animal’s attitude? This mattered most of all to her, and it does to me, too.

I’d stroll along, peer into stalls, jabber with the grooms, who were goldmines of information, and not just about horses. Many of the grooms were Negro. We’d never say “black.” That would have been rude. The word was “Negro,” and if someone was highly respected, it was “colored gentleman.”

Racing season, summer, meant stretches of sitting in a chair leaning against the side of a barn that was under the overhang to be in the shade. Work started before sunup, so by twelve you could take a long break unless your horse was running. No one wanted to leave the track. The excitement overpowered you. And the truth is, most of those grooms loved their horses. How it must have hurt when one was claimed or bought out from under the caretaker. For many owners, then and now, it’s about money. For the grooms and for me, it’s about the horses.

Those men were good to me. Maybe they got a kick out of a kid asking such pointed questions. Chances are they just liked kids.

If I asked “When did that horse bow?” the groom, if he didn’t know me, was surprised.

A bow is a strain of the superficial flexor tendon, which is on the back of the foreleg above the fetlock (which is right above the hoof). It literally bows out in a convex manner. A long rest often takes care of it.

What I relayed to Mother factored into her bets. She was all business at the track, although most people wouldn’t pick that up since she was a highly skilled, convivial flirt.

Foxhunting was different. No bets. She wasn’t as enthusiastic, although she’d see everyone off. But of all the horse sports, this one was magic to me. Everything I loved was encompassed by this activity: foxhounds, horses, foxes, and the outdoors, to say nothing of the clothing. Just smashing.

Foxhunting is a fall and winter sport, so I’d stand there in my cowboy boots, or rubbers if it drizzled, protected by my sweater and a coat, absorbing everything.

Many of Mother’s friends still walked the earth then. In their sixties, seventies, eighties, and a few in their nineties, they seized the day. Carpe diem. Unless crippled by pain or disease, no one enjoys life as much as someone who’s lived a long time. It felt like the wealth of equine information was slipping away whenever one of these cronies would be “called home,” as we say.

I figured I’d better visit them, one by one. Some of them, like Humphrey Finney, a partner in Fasig Tipton, an auction house, were well-known. But Humphrey passed before I could have a long chat liberally spiced with his favorite libation. His son, John, a Dickens scholar and successful trainer, exuded much of his father’s charm, combined with a keen mind. He died young, but I had the opportunity to talk to him many times. Mother couldn’t wait to hear the results of our talks on bloodlines. (Shortened version: Go back to Domino, Commando, Peter Pan, and always, always Teddy.)

In some cases, the conditions in which the former trainers and jockeys lived—most in Maryland, a few in Delaware, and more in Virginia—shocked me. No fund existed for older shedrow people (for lack of a better term). These people gave their lives to racing. Granted, when young, many of them blew their money on wine, women, and song, to say nothing of laying down bets at the window. But they did their jobs. By the time they realized the years were telling on them, they had families to support. Horse racing was all they knew. Most of them lacked the training to set up a business, even a simple one like repairing tack. A few were illiterate. Some found places in the good hunter/jumper barns or among foxhunters, but the track is an encompassing world: drama, danger, sexual escapades, and sometimes death to horse and human. Few wish to leave under their own steam. So they hung around until they could barely move.

One fellow—Angelfood was his nickname, the point being that angel food is white and Angel was black as the ace of spades—roared with good humor. What a fabulous attitude he had, sitting in his tiny apartment. But it was decent and at the edge of a big farm where he could do odds and ends.

These men, all men then, did not want to be idle. As happy as Mother was that Angel could get along (the farm being very close to Hanover Horse Farms, the nirvana of standardbreds) she was upset to hear of those who were barely getting by in little better than shacks with a wood-burning stove. I heat with one, but I have electric heat, too. These guys depended on wood to keep warm, and many cooked with it.

I bring up their condition because any one of these men would have been willing to endure more hardship if it had meant reuniting with some of the horses he loved.

This was back in the mid-seventies.

A few cried at the recollection of seeing good horses broken down and hauled off on the knacker’s wagon. Some weren’t broken down, just tuckered out. Boarding them at a pasture for a good rest would have brought most of them back. New careers could have been possible. But then, as now, flat racing is ruthless. No matter how they dress it up, it stinks. Horses are run too young, too hard. They break down and are cast off.

If those in flat racing wait for the government to clean up their act, so much the worse for them. It will produce results like the slaughter bill: more suffering than the suffering it was intended to relieve. Since horses can’t be sold for meat value people let them starve … or worse, load them onto double-decker trucks to be hauled to Mexico. The conditions are horrible. The problem has been the treatment of horses awaiting slaughter. I’m not keen on slaughtering horses, but it’s a quick death. Starvation is much worse. But here’s the point: doing nothing will cost more money. Ultimately, the public may become so sick at watching horses break down that racing will be voted out.

That upsets me as much as the abuse I have seen, not just on the low-end tracks but at the high end, too. Are there good people in racing? Yes, some of the best. But for whatever reason, racing seems to have too many chiefs, and achieving cooperation takes the patience of all the giving saints. Plus, racing has lost some of its finest leaders in recent years. We just lost the incomparable racing journalist Joe Hirsch.

I stopped by to visit those old fellows. They spoke more eloquently than I can. I always brought treats and an envelope with cash, which I put in the bottom of the basket so they wouldn’t have a fit in front of me. Why cash? Because no one with a grain of sense will send cash through the mail. I knew they wouldn’t send the money back. And it wasn’t a lot. I didn’t have but so much, but I figured it would pay the rent for a month and buy groceries.

Now there are special funds for injured jockeys and their families. There are also organizations that help track workers with drinking and drug problems. Whether there are retirement plans or emergency funds for old trainers and grooms I don’t know. I hope so.

Even more, I hope and pray that racing cleans up its act. When the 1986 Kentucky Derby winner, Ferdinand, a gentle, sweet horse, was sold to Japanese interests for stud and he faltered, they killed him. Ferdinand beat the 1987 Derby winner, Alysheba, in the Breeder’s Cup Classic, too. Claiborne Farm in Paris, Kentucky, owned Ferdinand. His stud fee was thirty thousand dollars. His first crops didn’t do well at the track. In 1994, they sold Ferdinand to Japan’s JS Company. Placed on Hokkaido Island, he bred mares for six seasons. Business slowed. The owners either sold or gave him to Yoshikazu Watanabe, a horse dealer. JS never tried to reach Claiborne Farm or the Kech family, who originally bred Ferdinand. It was reported that he left the farm in Japan on February 3, 2001. He was sent to the killer.

The Hancocks of Claiborne Farm were sick, just sick. These are wonderful horse people. The Kech family was also horrified. They weren’t the only ones. When the story broke in the United States we were all devastated. Kill a Kentucky Derby winner? Kill the 1987 Horse of the Year?

I pray there is a special hell for people who mistreat animals. The lowest chamber should have Yoshikazu Watanabe in it and the rest of those heartless money-grubbers.

There are enough death sentences here. Ferdinand was unbelievable. An average Thoroughbred is all the more likely to suffer when his career is over. It must be stopped.

A glorious show jumper called Sea King also landed on the knacker’s truck. His former owner saw what was happening and did nothing. Too expensive to feed a horse past his prime. The owner never really recovered from his betrayal of Sea King. His wife left him—well, maybe not just over that, but I’m sure it was a factor. A nice man, he had suffered a big lapse of judgment, and Sea King paid for it.

You and I have a contract with animals. No court will honor it or even recognize it, just as no court will allow a child to press charges. As for animals, they can’t argue for themselves. Bob Barker has just given one million dollars to the University of Virginia Law School for people to study animal law. God bless that man.

Every animal in the United States depends on the human being who owns it to honor his or her obligations. When the role of the animal is to generate cash, this contract falls apart as soon as the animal is no longer ringing up the cash register. Dog and cat owners also dump their pets, but for a large animal like a horse the problem is far greater.

Few people these days understand how to care for a horse or cow. Few people understand the animal’s mind. These are prey animals.

Many people do understand that a horse is not a pet; it is a team member. What that means is that you work with your horse differently than you work with your cats and dogs. (The exception, of course, is the people who work with gun dogs and hounds.) A horse has a job to do. More to the point, if treated decently, the animal wants to work. Horses, like people, get bored. Idle hands do the Devil’s work. Idle hooves can do the Devil’s work, too. Usually their pranks are funny. Sometimes, like when a mare, in a mood, takes out part of your fence line, it’s not. One night, just after sundown, three horses under my care got out of their large pasture. A tree weakened by a recent ice storm had fallen on the fence, and those bad boys got out and trashed my barn. I had to laugh once I finished cursing.

It all boils down to money.

The Thoroughbred Retirement Fund can do only so much. There are some other rescue leagues out there as well. I happen to know the Fund the best, as I have one of their former racehorses. I also take horses off the track before the Fund ever sees them. That’s one less animal for them to house and feed. If I take them they must be able to foxhunt, so it depends on my being able to read the animal. So far I’ve done okay. I have five Thoroughbreds working at the moment, and one youngster coming along, too. He wasn’t fast enough for the track but he’s plenty fast enough for me.

One of Mother’s distant relatives through marriage was Berta Jones, MFH of Farmington Hunt. Mrs. Jones had three former Kentucky Derby winners at her farm, Ingleside: Meridian, who won in 1911; Omar Khayyam, 1917; and Paul Jones, 1920. She hunted them. I hasten to add that Berta could ride—sidesaddle, no less. This was all before my time, but Mother always said that Berta showed us the way.

One other huge problem for anyone with stock is that Congress is made up of suburbanites and city boys—still mostly city boys. Every time taxes get raised, animals suffer. People only have but so much money, and targeting racing because there are some wealthy people in it is wrong. Who do you think provides jobs? A poor person? Hell, no. A rich one. Give them a tax break for everyone they hire. Well, I give up. It’s too tempting, I guess, to demonize the rich. I’d love to see everyone of substance take their money right out of the country. Even for three months. Oh, my, would Congress sing a different tune.

But again, it’s the animals that suffer. Small example: twenty years ago, as a farmer, I could income average. I had seven years in which to make a profit. Now, thanks to those blistering idiots on the north side of the Potomac, I must do it in four. Well, for the last three years we’ve had droughts. Instead of three to four hay cuttings per year I’ve harvested two, and the second one isn’t worth much. I have to buy hay from the Midwest to feed the stock. Do my taxes reflect Mother Nature’s bad hair years? Nope. Unless a region is labeled a disaster area there is no recognition of what bad weather can do to a farmer’s profits. When the pine beetle destroyed half my timber crop there was no adjustment to taxes and no help from the government, either. And you wonder why the family farms are shrinking, and why animals are being abandoned? It isn’t right, but when it comes down to a person feeding the kids or the cattle, the cattle are going to get cut loose if they can’t be sold. It’s horrifying to those of us who see it.

Sea King’s dreadful end and his owner’s sobs haunt me. Ferdinand’s fate still brings tears to my eyes. If nothing else, no matter how wrongheaded I can be (me?), no matter how stupid (I admit it), I honor my commitments. I have made more promises to animals than to people, and your word is your honor, your life, your self-worth. You cannot break your word. You shouldn’t break your word in Indiana, but you sure don’t break it south of the Mason-Dixon Line. You bring shame on yourself and your whole family.

I’ve given my word to a rescued horse named Gunsmoke, and the other rescues that I acquired directly. I’ve given it to every hound, horse, cat, and dog on my farm. Even my chickens. I’ve given my word to my foxes, too.

If you’ve given yours, live up to it. Times are tough and going to get tougher. What do you give up? Hopefully not your house, but if you must, then you are obliged to find good homes for animals you can’t feed.

People think I’m rich. I’m not on food stamps, but I’m in a profession that depends on the goodwill of the public. Chicken one day and feathers the next. One day people may no longer wish to read what I write. I’ll be old news, washed up. As this is a country that worships the new and the young, I’m surprised it hasn’t already happened. The last thing I represent is the new.

What’s kept me in oats is my love of animals. It infuses everything I write, whether it’s the mysteries or my stand-alone books. I finally figured out that millions of Americans truly love animals. Maybe they don’t understand horses but they are willing to consider a prey animal’s view of life. They may not be able to take on a horse but they’ll send twenty dollars to the Thoroughbred Retirement Fund or swing by the SPCA and drop off a bag of cat food or dog kibble. I finally came to realize how many of my countrymen and women loved animals. A lot of them read me, so I can rescue larger animals than they can. The reason I work—and, yes, I do love writing, but the real reason I work—is for animals. People respond to that.

Since you love animals (or you wouldn’t be reading this sentence), make a vow with me: no more Sea Kings. No more Ferdinands. Let’s do what we can. I know you honor your contract with animals. Now you and I must honor those that have been broken. One by one, we can save animals. If we join forces, think how much more we can do.