On Thursday in Part 3 of this excerpt from the new book Equine ER, Marching Orders, the stoic Thoroughbred with the big heart, ran into trouble in the operating room. Today, we look further at the prison farm program where an inmate's life was transformed by Marching Orders.
From the outside, Blackburn Correctional Complex looks like a former boy’s school – old-fashioned brick buildings with tall windows curved at the top – but it has always been a prison. The prison farm program is on 100 acres at the back end of the property. Headquarters is a converted dairy barn. It is white with green shutters, an octagonal window in the middle, and old-fashioned lanterns on either side. It looks like Anne of Green Gables mucks out the stalls inside, not men who have been convicted for dealing and selling drugs, DUIs with manslaughter, burglary, or writing illegal OxyContin prescriptions.
Horses graze in paddocks of the Blackburn prison farm program.
The need is great for racehorse retirement homes such as Blackburn’s. In 2008, approximately 35,000 live Thoroughbred foals were reported born in North America, according to The Jockey Club. When I looked at the yearly foal report published by The Blood-Horse, its blue ledgers listing name after name, it was mind-boggling to think about the competition they would face at the track. A study done by the Thoroughbred Times analyzing data from 1990-99 found that out of the 360,741 foals born during that nine-year period, 48.1 percent would win a race but only 3.7 percent would be stakes winners, 0.8 percent graded stakes winners. As one inmate in the Blackburn farm program told North American Trainer magazine in 2008, “If they were humans, they’d have their players union and they’d have their retirement package. They don’t have a voice.”
Linda Dyer, who runs the Blackburn program, is a Lexington native and veteran manager of various farms in the area. She teaches the inmates everything she knows: from worming and giving vaccines … to how to wrap a horse’s legs and feet … to recognizing lameness, colic, and other problems. Since Rood & Riddle vets treat the horses, with access to technology you might not have outside the Bluegrass, inmates have gotten to see things they wouldn’t elsewhere – on-site digital X-rays and sinus scoping, for example.
Inmate Chris Huckleby was one of the best horsemen Dyer had ever had. She hoped he would get a job at one of the Lexington horse farms when he got out. One of the bigger operations had hired Blackburn inmates before, with good salaries and benefits. But the law is that a prisoner has to get a job fourteen days after he gets out, and inmates receive bus tokens but no money for other transportation. Farms want to see you in person and looking sharp. The buses don’t go out to many of the farms, numerous inmates don’t have family to take them, and the clothes they are given come from Goodwill.
Huckleby was transferred from Blackburn to another prison in 2006 and got out in 2008. He relocated to Lexington so he could adopt Marching Orders once he saved up enough money. He had already lined up a barn where he could board him. He soon got a job with a plumbing company making a decent salary. He thought about the horse all the time. The horse’s previous owners, a Bluegrass couple, had acquired the Thoroughbred in a claiming race. After donating him to Blackburn, they visited the horse regularly. Huckleby had become friendly with them during their visits, and now wrote and called the two constantly to find out how Marching Orders was doing. When the place Huckleby had lined up to board the horse fell through, Huckleby knew he’d find someplace else. He had to. It was as if he were separated from one of his kids. But it had to be the right place, one where it felt safe to leave the horse.
Thursday: What Marching Orders’ surgeon found in the operating room.
Equine ER is currently the cover story of Ace Weekly in Lexington, Ky. Writer Kim Thomas calls the book a "must-read" for horse lovers. To order Equine ER, click here. Thanks for visiting this blog.
