After the Finish Line^TM President Dawn Mellen and friend.

Effort To Rescue Horses Strains Sanctuaries

Rescuing horses Habitat for Horses caters to guests of varied temperament: sweet horses, mean horses, mellow horses.

The Hitchcock organization that takes in — and dotes on — horses considered useless by their former owners is part of a loose network of 100 or more rescue groups across the country determined to provide a haven for every imperiled horse.

Those sanctuaries face a new urgency: saving American horses from being slaughtered across the border in Mexico and Canada.

So far this year, some 55,000 horses have been shipped across the borders to be butchered, often under conditions far worse than they faced in now-closed U.S. operations.

But rescuers are struggling with too many horses, too little money and no national standards.

"We get requests all the time: 'My horse is blind and crippled. Will you take it?' " said Jerry Finch, 63, a retired home improvement salesman who founded Habitat for Horses nine years ago and oversees 50 of the animals on the 23-acre sanctuary and about 300 elsewhere. "I'd like to get it down to 200. But how do you walk away?"

Worker Jennifer Sylvester, 41, whips up special dishes for the finicky eaters, such as a handful of grapes and soup like meals for Sherman, a black Tennessee walker in his late 20s who has hip problems and no front teeth.

When handling horses that kick people, she approaches carefully and makes plenty of allowances.

How many times has she been kicked?

"Oh gosh. I couldn't tell you," Sylvester says with a good-natured laugh. "Recently I walked up to a sleeping horse. He side-kicked me."

The movement to save U.S. horses from abandonment or slaughter is two decades or so behind the movement to rescue common household pets. The lag, say those involved, is because of the greater expense of keeping horses and fewer contributors to their care.

So while spay and neuter programs for cats and dogs are common, few if any programs help horse owners with the cost of veterinarian-assisted euthanasia, which usually runs $100 to $150, or of castrating stallions.


Easing financial strain
Nicholas Dodman, director of the animal behavior clinic at Tufts University, hopes to persuade veterinarians to provide free or low-cost euthanasia at designated sites around the country, to ease the financial burden on owners who otherwise would sell old or unwanted horses at auction to a high-bidding "killer buyer" who supplies slaughterhouses.

Last year, Dodman helped found Veterinarians for Equine Welfare, but the group has accomplished little more than setting up a Web site. He said they are stymied by lack of money and an inability to solicit help.

"We want to do mass e-mails and a mass letter-writing campaign but we don't have addresses or e-mails," Dodman said.


Outsourced operations
The group was formed to counter the pro-slaughter stance of the two major veterinarian associations, the American Veterinary Medical Association and American Association of Equine Practitioners.

Those groups and the American Quarter Horse Association correctly predicted that horses would suffer more if U.S. operations closed and traders simply outsourced the job.

In September, the Houston Chronicle visited a municipal plant in Juarez, Mexico, where horses — 90 percent of them from the United States — were paralyzed with knife hacks, then hoisted upside down and their throats slit.

Killing them with captive bolt guns had been the standard at U.S. plants, but court rulings this year closed those operations.

Exports of horses for slaughter are surging as a result, up 370 percent to Mexico so far this year, though overall, 15,000 fewer American horses have been killed compared with the same time last year.

Dodman and others are holding out for a legislative fix, the pending American Horse Slaughter Prevention Act, which would prohibit the slaughter of horses anywhere in the United States and bar the export of horses for slaughter.

Horse slaughtering in this country was halted this year because the only states in which it was occurring — Illinois and Texas — banned it.

But if American horses were protected from slaughter, it's hard to say whether there would be enough havens for the ones that owners were willing to give away.


Horse slaughter number
More than 140,000 American horses were turned into meat last year, about 1.5 percent of the 9.2 million horses the American Horse Council estimates reside in the United States, according to government figures.

Finch calls the number going to slaughter negligible and said such horses could easily be absorbed by rescue groups and by families if slaughter were no longer an option.

"If the killer buyers don't buy them, someone else will. And the older and sick ones should be euthanized," he said.

There's no central registry for rescue groups — the closest thing to it might be the Web site of the American Horse Defense Fund — and no government agency regulates them.

Rescue organizations number in the hundreds, from the tiny ones with a horse or two to the large, New York-based sanctuary for retired racehorses.

The Thoroughbred Retirement Foundation cares for 1,200 horses spread out in foster homes in 11 states. The organization receives some of its money from the racing industry.

The Cleveland Amory Black Beauty Ranch, operated by the Humane Society of the United States in East Texas near Athens, takes care of about 1,200 horses.

Last week, Dawn Mellen, of San Diego, started a new organization, After the Finish Line^TM, that will raise money to help care for retired racehorses. Mellen said the group raised $7,000 in its first week.

Three months ago, the Miracle Ranch Foundation opened a 35-acre Hill Country sanctuary in Bandera County. Jake Borne said eight horses are being cared for now; the organization can take in 22 more.

"Our main objective is to take horses about to be slaughtered," he said.


From retiree to rescuer
Finch, the founder of Habitat for Horses, did not set out to become an anti-slaughter activist. In 1998, he was retired, living on a ranch in Galveston County, trying his hand at writing until someone mentioned something about a starving horse on a nearby farm.

"The judge (in the starving horse case) said, 'If you want to do something, you're going to have it do it yourself,' " Finch recalled.

Finch took three courses tailored to law enforcement on equine cruelty, bought a larger property and set up Habitat for Horses as an organization that would both investigate cruelty cases and give shelter to horses the courts ordered seized.

Soon, folks were bringing him starving horses and authorities began calling him to help with cruelty investigations.

Today, his organization relies on three paid staff, 2,500 volunteers and private donations that covered its $425,000 budget. Most of the rescued horses are eventually put up for adoption.

Finch would love nothing more than to be put out of business, but judging from two new skinny arrivals, that isn't likely. Many of the newcomers arrive in such bad shape, he notes, that not even a slaughterhouse would want them.