Parklane Hawk (OTTB) winning the 2012 Rolex Kentucky CCI****.
(All pictures kindly supplied by Allie Conrad and used with her permission with thanks)
Like me you may recognize Allie Conrad’s name as the author of some great articles in the the Chronicle of the Horse, documenting the OTTB at Rolex for instance, or her struggle to retrain a particular horse. Since reading them, I’ve been lucky enough to meet Allie at several events (we’re usually admiring the same horses too!) and this week I spoke to her about her love for the OTTB and her mission at CANTER Mid-Atlantic for the Eventing Radio Show. Dedicated and driven, passionate and smart but still down to earth and a pleasure to talk to, you can hear our entire conversation on the podcast this week.
It all started when Allie was in her early 20s and her current horse had gone lame. After a little research on the internet where she learned about the New Holland Sales, she saved up a whopping $500, borrowed a trailer and set out, determined to make a difference. “I bought this mess of an animal, but I wanted to bring him home and save his life. The horse I picked up at New Holland is my lifeblood; I still own him. He’s 22 now and shuffling around a bit. I built my barn for him, I built my farm for him, and he’s the love of my life. He changed my life. He’s a bit of an ass, but he can do no wrong. I let him get away with just about everything. His racing name was Clever Ma, so all the horses here that I’ve bred have been named after him. My farm (Clever Covert Farm) is named after him … he’s like my legacy!”
In the beginning though, Clever Ma’s future was still uncertain. Allie detailed her doubts that he might not even be sound — “He had lymphangitis in all four legs and a huge knee!” — but to her surprise and joy, she discovered he had the most beautiful, swinging and sound trot on turning him out in a round pen on arrival at her farm. “He and I did just about everything together. He stayed very sound until just about a year ago, and then his hard life began to catch up with him. But he evented, we did the jumpers, we hunted all over the place, he did hunters, we did hunter paces, we did everything. He was my everything horse and just the absolute horsey love of my life. He’s why CANTER Mid-Atlantic exists, and he’s saved a lot of horses. I tell him all the time; his ego is huge!”
Clever Ma had come with his papers, so Allie was able to find out a little bit about his background. “I ended up tracking down his old owners, and they were trainers at Charles Town; they had bred and raised this horse, held him in their laps when he was born and when I told them what had happened I just heard silence and then bawling crying. They were so upset.”
Unintentionally, Clever Ma’s breeders had sent all their horses to the killer buyer having been promised that he would find them a good home. “This guy had them completely fooled, and so all 10 of the horses that they had sent him had been slaughtered and they were dealing with the realization of that. Thank God this one was saved, but it was at that moment that I decided to help both the Thoroughbreds coming off the track, but also people like them who wanted to do the right thing.” Thus CANTER Mid Atlantic was born about a dozen years ago, the second CANTER program in the U.S.
“The more I got into it, the more I just realized they’re just the coolest animals. They’re thankful; they try hard. The only thing that stands in their way is soundness when they’re not cared for on the track, and that’s another battle I’ve been fighting: to try and get them cared for better, to change the drug rules and to change their future so they aren’t raced past their ability to have a second career.”
Doug Payne and Running Order at the Rolex Kentucky CCI**** last year
Allie is approaching her fourth decade, which means she has volumes of experience and can speak with some authority on how things are different and how much they have improved for the better since those early days. “Being involved in this for so long has given me a certain perspective, and what’s really cool is the change in attitude at the tracks. When I first started and went into Charles Town or other tracks, nobody would talk to us, or they would actually kick us out of the barns. I just kept going back and the more I went back, eventually they began to give me the time of day.”
The first time Allie took a horse for a trainer and sold it via CANTER Mid-Atlantic within a day, “It spread like wildfire. The biggest change was that instead of running their horse in those last few races knowing they didn’t have a chance but might bring home a little bit of a check, even $100 or $200, those people don’t do that anymore. They list them on CANTER where they might sell them for $1,000 instead of risking one last run and possibly their horse breaking down completely. That’s been the biggest change, and I think that is influencing the track in a very big way.”
Unbelievably, Allie combines her work at CANTER Mid-Atlantic with a career in project management for a software development firm that essentially manages contracts for the government. “The technical term for that is NERD! The CANTER stuff is all just a labour of love. We all do it as volunteers. On a slow week, it’s about 30 hours a week. On other weeks, it can be upwards of 50 or 60, depending on how many abcesses we have — literally!”
Will Faudree and Andromaque at the 2012 Land Rover Burghley Horse Trials CCI****
In any given week, there will be three or four CANTER Mid-Atlantic volunteers visiting the half a dozen or so tracks in the area that weekend. “We’ve been very lucky that we’ve been able to grow an awesome group of volunteers.” Depending on the funding level at the time, if people are in a situation where they need to get rid of a horse immediately, then CANTER Mid-Atlantic will take them as donations. Once again, depending on funds, CANTER Mid-Atlantic takes in anywhere from 60 to a 100 horses a year; those horses will be turned out for three to six months depending on what they need, then re-trained and re-homed.
The extensive retraining is what probably stands CANTER Mid-Atlantic apart from a lot of other OTTB programs. “You can’t truly evaluate a horse in one or two rides; you can only evaluate those two rides. We started insisting on 30 to 60 days of re-training so that we could really go about re-training and evaluating them in a very thorough, systematic way. Our success rate in placing them in new homes is at about 99 percent. I think we’ve had two horses come back ever that were not the right match.”
Obviously this makes the process extremely costly. “It’s much more expensive, but our service has to be to the horses and not the bank account, and we’re not doing the horses the right service if we’re placing them in a home that has unrealistic expectations of them, both mentally or soundness wise. We are extremely transparent in our re-training process. We write extensive blogs about each horse, and we document everything. I call it ‘The Good, The Bad, The Ugly and The Really Ugly!'”
Funded by donations and grants — a very generous grant from ASPCA enabled them to double their efforts — most of their funding comes from donations and the sale price of the nicer horses, although “for every horse we sell for $3,000 or $4,000 or sometimes even $5,000 if it’s been to a few shows, we’ll probably give 10 away for a dollar or a couple hundred.”
At Southern Pines, CANTER gave an award for the highest placed Jockey Club registered TB, and for the last three years they’ve also highlighted and rewarded the best placed OTTB at the Rolex Kentucky Three-Day Event. Allie started that award after being told by someone at Rolex who should have known better that she might be disappointed to find that there just weren’t any OTTBs at the the top of the sport, and oh, has Allie proved her wrong!
Michael Pollard and Wonderful Will
Allie also enjoys going to events as much as time allows to take pictures of the OTTBs competing and to highlight how prolific they are at every level. “The thing that they have at the end of the day that other horses don’t is more heart than anything. In my opinion, that’s what wins in eventing. You can have a 10 trot all day long, but the fact is you have to go cross country and you have to be sound on the third day, and I think that’s what they’re good for.”
You can hear Allie’s entire conversation on the Eventing Radio Show this week, and please be sure to check out the CANTER Mid-Atlantic website. Thank you for reading, and thank you to Allie for chatting but especially for all her great work to help the OTTB. Go CANTER Mid-Atlantic and Go OTTBs Eventing!
