Unwanted?

2000-UPHA 14 Spring Premiere, she won a first, two seconds, and a third

Mentioned in Saddle and Bridle magazine in September 2000 edition

On that late September Monday morning, Sara stood on the auction floor at New Holland and struck her best pose to try to please her handler.  The bidding began, but the people bidding on Sara did not care about her beautiful Saddlebred conformation or her impeccable stretch.  They did not care that she was in her prime and a wonderful and obedient horse who had always tried to please her owners.  In fact, not caring was what these people did best.   

Sara’s registered name was Starmaker’s Serenade and her blood lines were literally a “who’s who” of the Saddlebred Registry, but today she had become what the horse slaughter industry and their loyal supporters in the AVMA (American Veterinary Medical Association) euphemistically call an “unwanted” horse.  But Sara was not unwanted.  Men were hurriedly and dispassionately bidding on her as the auctioneer rattled away.  Every dollar was offered up grudgingly until the auctioneer gave up and snapped “sold!”

Sara must have sensed that this was not the adoring crowd that she had enjoyed when she gave her performances for her first owner.  No one had spent the hours before the show rubbing Show Sheen into her beautiful liver chestnut coat or combing conditioner into her mane.  There would be no ribbons this time, just a sticker.  She was in a place where almost no one appreciated her beauty or royal lineage.  Instead, cold and calculating eyes stripped away her beautiful flesh and estimated the meat it would yield to please the palates of foreign gourmets.

Sara was now the property of Don Nickerson, a well known killer buyer.  She had sold for $3,700 less than four years ago, but this morning she brought only $275.  She was quickly hustled into Don’s “kill pen” behind the auction area to await the application of a USDA slaughter tag that would mark her for sure death.  She stood among the more than two dozen horses in the pen, including another saddlebred, thoroughbreds, several drafts and standardbreds, and a mule.  Sara seemed to sense that this was a place of doom.  Domestic horses sense these things, just as their wild cousins sense a mountain lion hiding in ambush at a waterhole.  Like her companions she seemed confused and dejected.  Had her pose really been that bad?

Her companions weren’t old, skinny, or injured either.  Most of all they were not “unwanted”.  They were wanted by a slaughter house in Canada and would soon be loaded onto a cramped huge semi trailer for their last ride.  After years of serving their human masters they had slipped through the cracks of compassion and fallen into a hell they sensed but that they neither understood nor deserved.

As Sara stood idly between her new companions there was a flash from behind her, and she heard a young woman saying “that’s her in the middle”.  The woman was holding the camera in one hand and pressing something to her ear.  In urgent tones the woman said “This is Christy and we found the saddlebred with the papers.  Nickerson says he will sell her for $325, and some of the folks on trot.org are chipping in.”   Of the twenty seven beautiful and once loved horses in the pen, Sara alone had just been reprieved.

In Virginia, John stared into his computer screen as the first images of Sara popped up.  He had just hung up with Christy and he called to his wife, “want to see the horse we just helped save?”  A few days before, they had agreed to donate $250 to try to save one of the horses going to slaughter.  The Ensign/Byrd amendment had just passed the Senate and they prayed that this would be one of the last auctions where horses would still face slaughter.  They and thousands of others had worked years to stop the slaughter, and although the amendment would only protect horses for a year, they were already working on a permanent ban to horse slaughtered called The American Horse Slaughter Prevention Act or just HR-503.

Moving behind John, Sheilah peered over his shoulder at the screen and gasped at the unexpected beauty of the horse.  “Wow!  She is classy!  Is she rideable?” she asked.  As if to answer her question, the next image popped up showing an athletic young volunteer named Andy riding her bareback with nothing but a rope halter.  “Why don’t we take her?” said Sheilah, “I need to retire my old black mare soon.” 

Sara could not have known it, but within those few minutes she had gone from being an “unwanted” horse to the cherished new mare of a woman who had loved horses all her life.  Sara had always been wanted, but the people who wanted her were not the people controlling her destiny.  She had been betrayed and then saved by volunteers at the rescue known as Another Chance for Horses (AC4H), by people who simply wanted to help horses like her, and by the internet that put them all in instant communications.  In fact, had Sara been sold through an online auction, she would probably have brought far more, but the Amish man selling her did not know nor care for such contrivances of “the English”. 

A few hours later, Sara was running free in a paddock at AC4H, and John was dialing the latest owner listed on her papers.  “What do you mean you bought her from a kill pen?  Sara is a wonderful mare!” said her former owner.  “We sold her four years ago to a training school and she was fantastic with the students.  I don’t understand how she ended up there!”  Only Sara will ever know the series of transactions over four years that left her in the kill pen at New Holland.

People who rescue horses have a saying for their arrival.  They say the horse is “coming home”.  Within days, a posting on a yahoo group (haulahorse) would be answered by yet more kind people, and Sara would be “coming home”.  Sara had not been “unwanted”, merely “unappreciated”.  Sara would soon be carrying her new friend on leisurely Sunday rides, showing off the incredible style of her breed, and hanging out with a small herd of new horse friends during the rest of the week.  Many of her new friends would be too young or too old to work, and some would have disabilities, but all knew they had a home.

Sadly, Sara’s beautiful pen mates from New Holland were all soon killed and dismembered.  Their flesh was sealed into neat air tight plastic packages, dosed with intense gamma radiation to keep it from spoiling, and shipped to Europe where it was sold as a gourmet delicacy.  They weren’t “unwanted” either, merely betrayed.

Written by John Holland hollandtech@earthlink.net