Off Track Thoroughbreds

Joan Dunlap can’t believe her eyes as she reunites with Mynah’s Boy this summer in Pennsylvania.

Mynah’s Boy stood on a doubled-bowed tendon at the Puerto Rico racetrack, a place where it’s said that a mediocre racehorse hasn’t a prayer in hell of making it back across the Atlantic Ocean.

His future held two possibilities: a good death, or a bad death, says Joan Dunlap, a Pennsylvania woman who spent six sad, exhausting months beating her head against the wall as she tried and failed to raise funds to get the gelding, a son of her very own cherished OTTB Mynah, to safety and properly retired.

“I was thinking it wasn’t going to happen, and I was about to send a couple hundred dollars to the track and ask them to dig him a respectable grave,” Dunlap says. “I was going to ask that they give him a sedative first, and then the final dose to put him down.”

Mynah’s Boy
Sire: Mingun
Dam: Mynah (GB)
Foal date: Jan. 28, 2009This was her only hope for a gently and people-friendly Thoroughbred with bad legs, a bad eye, and stranded on the Puerto Rican island, where she learned during her many hours on the phone and emailing horsemen, that this racetrack, “is the very end of the road—they don’t return to the United States (mainland) from there,” she says.

“Down in Puerto Rico they don’t have a slaughter facility, and I was told they either find them a good home through their rescues down there, or they put them down at the track. Worst case is to be thrown out in the bush to fend for themselves,” she says. “Some die of starvation, and others wind up either in the hands of kids who run them on back streets, or being eaten by predators.”

Mynah’s Boy sustained a double bowed in a tendon.

Try as she did to raise funds to fly the Kentucky bred back and find a safe landing, she received more pushback than sympathy from Thoroughbred advocates who, though kind, pointed out that there were so many horses in need on the mainland that saving Mynah’s Boy seemed a much lower priority.

“People didn’t believe he was worth the money or the support,” she says. “But I disagreed. This horse was bred in Kentucky and … just because he’s a low-end horse, and not a Derby winner, made no difference to me.”

But unable to shoulder the cost of transporting the horse herself, or offer him a place to live, Dunlap was resigned to sending a couple hundred dollars so his owners—who were always cooperative and helpful throughout the process— could put her mare’s fifth foal to sleep.

Mynah’s Boy enjoys a good roll back on the mainland of the U.S.A.

And then in early May 2015, as Thoroughbred fans around the country turned their attention to the fabled Kentucky Derby, a Thoroughbred advocate with a reputation for being able to “move mountains” intervened.

Marlene Murray of the Thoroughbred charity R.A.C.E. Fund (Retirement Assistance and Care for Equines) contacted Dunlap and offered to mobilize her vast network to bring back Mynah’s Boy.

“She told me she believed that just because a horse may not be a potential sport horse after they’re done racing, that they still have value,” says Dunlap, adding that in the process, she and Murray were able to garner enough support to pay $3,000 to get the gelding flown back, quarantined, and stalled comfortably near Dunlap in Pennsylvania.

“The owner gave the horse away for free and we got that horse out of Puerto Rico in June,” she says, adding that she was told afterwards by rescue workers in Puerto Rico that this was the first time they’d seen a Thoroughbred like Mynah’s Boy make it out. “They told me this never happens,” she says.

Dunlap was reunited with Mynah’s Boy over the summer; her face lighting up with pure joy to see the fifth foal of her OTTB Mynah, safe and happy.

He may not have been the most competitive racehorse on the track, and his injuries will hobble his chances as a riding horse, but Mynah’s Boy still mattered. And after three years of monitoring the horse from afar, and six months of trying, her mare’s fifth foal now has a chance to just be a horse. A chance few if any get after they ship to Puerto Rico.

“Because of his injuries, we knew that he was not really adoptable, and probably not rideable. He’s only 6. But I believed he deserved a chance anyway,” she says. “None of this would have happened without Marlene Murray and a team of incredible people who stepped forward” to deal Mynah’s Boy a better hand than ignoble death in a land far from his birth.

Paoli was adopted by the Rosenbergs from the Thoroughbred Retirement Foundation. Too injured to ride, he enriches their lives nonetheless.

Paoli is a 17-hand strapping gelding so beautiful that strangers will stop their cars to get a picture.

He presides like a king over the small Kentucky farm he shares with three other ex-racehorse Thoroughbreds. As the alpha male in the herd he makes sure everyone behaves; and, as the apple in the eye for owners Elizabeth and Glenn Rosenberg, he’s a powerful reminder of the worth of all equine athletes.

“Paoli in particular is such a wonderful, wonderful horse,” Elizabeth says. “Never could I have imagined having a horse like him before he came along. And even though he can’t be ridden, he is a tremendous addition to our family.”

Paoli
Sire: Brunswick
Dam: Dijla (GB)
Foal date: March 30, 1999Though the striking chestnut gelding broke down in his last race at Suffolk Downs in 2005, fusing his pasterns and making him un-rideable thereafter, the Rosenberg’s adopted him not for what he couldn’t do, but for all he had done.

“Paoli was raced until he broke down. He gave everything he had,” Elizabeth says. “Paoli and horses like him give such tremendous pleasure and love, and they bring such calm and beauty to our world that I feel very proud and extremely lucky to have athletes like him in our care.”

The Rosenberg’s decided to adopt Paoli after first sponsoring a horse at the Thoroughbred Retirement Foundation, she says. Week after week, she and her husband would visit the mare at the TRF’s Blackburn facility, who has long since died, and marvel at all the beautiful horses, some of them quite needy. “The one I really wanted was really quite handicapped, and I wasn’t able to find a facility to put him in, so someone said, ‘we have 88 horses here. Do you think you could find someone else? And I saw Paoli’s name and I knew him! I saw him race in Delaware and he’d come off the track in the spring. I got him in August 2006.”

Elizabeth Rosenberg takes exception to the expression, “lawn ornament.” Injured ex-racehorses deserve to be thought of better, she says.

For the first few years, before the couple purchased the 16-acre Le Bon Cheval Farm (Translation: The Good Horse Farm), they boarded Paoli at a nearby facility. After a time, Glenn decided he wanted to buy ex-racehorse Speedway, a horse he had admired from afar. And after that, the couple acquired two more Thoroughbreds (Interpretation and Miss Moderate) and a Quarter Horse. And they built a house squarely in the middle so they could watch their equine athletes from every window.

“We have pastures all around, and when we get up in the morning we can look out and see them every minute,” she says, noting that Paoli has inspired them. “We had no horsey background before this. Paoli has taught me all there is to know.”

And he has protected her as well as he looks after his herd of fellow OTTBs, she says. Like the time he stepped in, years ago, to drive off two charging horses who made a beeline for her at their old boarding facility, she says.

“I was facing the barn and watching a couple of guys spraying water, washing the barn down. The spray must have spooked these two horses, because they came straight at me, and Paoli turned around and reared up, and they just took off. I’ve seen him get bitten by another horse rather than move into my space, and when the other horses crowd the gate when I come through, he steps in and moves them away.”

Paoli is as much a member of her family as any of them, far more than a pretty face, and certainly not to be dismissed as a mere “pasture ornament.”

“I actually find the term lawn ornament offensive,” she says. “Paoli broke down at his last race at Suffolk Downs. People think it’s clever to talk about lawn ornaments, but you don’t hear them saying this about a professional football player who gets injured, they don’t call him a lawn ornament. These horses gave their all to a sport, and some of them got hurt.”

They deserve more respect, she says, noting that at Le Bon Cheval, her little group of equine athletes is living the retirement life they all so richly deserve.