Dyna King has been restored to full health thanks to Judy Glore of the Heart of Tuscson equine rescue and Fans of Barbaro after he was found wandering in the desert near death. Image / KIM REIS
The horse was scrawny and matted and so sick, he could stand for only minutes at a time.
When Arizona animal-control officers found the thoroughbred wandering the desert last December, they considered immediately euthanizing the animal.
But someone suggested they bring the horse to Judy Glore at the Heart of Tucson, an equine rescue center. She sat with the dying horse.
“He had more fight in his eyes than any other horse I’d seen in my life,” she says.
She soon learned why: He came from a family of fighters. The tattoo on the horse’s inner lip revealed he was Dyna King, son of Dynaformer, who also sired Barbaro.
And then Glore knew where she could go for help to pay for the horse’s expensive care.
Since Barbaro’s death in 2007, an informal network of supporters known as the Fans of Barbaro has, by rough estimates, saved thousands of horses and donated more than $1 million to their care.
“They’ve been very, very generous. Actually, to call them generous is an understatement,” says Dr. Dean Richardson, the center’s chief of surgery and Barbaro’s veterinarian. “They want something good to come out of a very bad outcome.”
In his younger days, Dyna King ran 56 races and had been nominated to run in the Kentucky Derby in 2000, Glore says. His last race was at Tucson’s Rillito Racetrack in 2007. He was 10 years old.
“At one time, he had grooms and good care and was just treated like a prince,” Glore says.
After Dyna King retired from racing, his owner gave him to a friend. The horse was handed down that way until his last owner, a Mexican immigrant, was deported, and Dyna King was left to wander in the desert.
Glore says that when she first saw the horse, she assumed he was about 20. His ribs were prominent and his feet were abcessed. He couldn’t stand for more than 5 minutes at a time.
But he had the will to live.
“I had no idea who he was, and now people send me emails and tell me Dynaformer is one big, tough cookie and he makes tough babies,” Glore says. “I believe it, because I’ve watched this horse. This whole family of horses has got this fire, this really strong spirit to live.”
By JANE ALLIN
Research Analyst, Int’l Fund for Horses
Eight Belles was euthanized on the track at Churchill Downs, breaking down just minutes after she finished second to Big Brown in the 2008 Kentucky Derby. Eight Belles broke her cannon and sesamoid bones which led to her ankles collapsing, said Dr. Larry Bramlage, the on-call veterinarian for the American Association of Equine Practitioners. That is the same type of break suffered by 2006 Kentucky Derby winner Barbaro in his off hind eventually leading to his death. Photographer Unknown.
“As the 20 horses were being loaded into the starting gate for the (2008) Kentucky Derby, with Eight Belles — standing in post position five — poised to make her bid to become only the fourth filly in history to win America’s most important race, Ellen Parker, a thoroughbred breeding consultant and analyst in Kentucky, said quietly to her husband, “I just hope this filly doesn’t break down.”
What Parker was referring to is the bane of horse racing in today’s syndicated commercially-driven industry where money, greed and short-term gains preside over the welfare of the horse. A shift in the industry in recent decades and the maniacal frenzy for speed at the expense of durability and soundness has all but decimated a once genetically diverse and robust species.
Over time, especially in the last four decades, the manipulation of the gene pool of the Thoroughbred and relentless inbreeding at the hands of unscrupulous breeders has created inherent weaknesses in the bloodlines that have led to dangerous flaws in physical conformation. In the tragic case of Eight Belles, Parker had identified a series of foreboding crosses stemming from a line notorious in the Thoroughbred breeding world for unsoundness.
“What so concerned her on the eve of this Derby, what she found so disturbing, even infuriating, traced to her unshakable belief that Eight Belles was carrying in her DNA the seeds of her own destruction.
“Specifically, in the pedigree of this speedy gray filly, Parker had seen the same kind of dangerous crosses — in her case, lines of known unsoundness triply crossed behind an unsound sire line — that she believed had contributed to the racetrack breakdowns and deaths of such prominent horses as Ruffian and Go For Wand, of George Washington and Pine Island, and even of Barbaro.
“Indeed, when Ellen Parker first perused the bloodlines of Eight Belles, she saw a danger clear and present: a family tree that bore three branches of the extremely brilliant but unsound racehorse Raise a Native, who was a very muscular chestnut, heavy on the front end, who had won all four of his starts before he broke down in front and limped off to stud.”
As it happens, today’s Thoroughbred population is so saturated with the blood of Raise a Native’s sire Native Dancer – speed at the expense of endurance – the threat to the viability of the breed is in question.
As an example, all of the starters in the past three Kentucky Derbys (2008, 2009 and 2010) carried the gene pool of Native Dancer, many of them multiple times.
Moreover, the blood lines of the current 2011 Derby contenders are equally infused with Native Dancers volatile genes, some of which ominously parallel the pedigree of Eight Belles in terms of the degree inbreeding and multiplicity of crosses. This proclivity for the Native Dancer bloodline is not limited to North America but rather persists throughout the entire global Thoroughbred industry.
The Rise of an Ill-fated Gene Pool
It is widely understood that the ancestry of the Thoroughbred dates back over 300 years to three foundation stallions – the Darley Arabian, the Godolphin Arabian and the Byerly Turk – hailing from North Africa and the Middle East. During the 17th and 18th centuries these stallions were bred to select mares, native to Britain, and so began the process of selective breeding.
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Caroline Jaffe
Horse Warrior
January 16, 1942 ~ October 25, 2009
Explaining what Caroline Jaffe meant to us is like explaining why you can’t have powdered water. What would you add?
What can you add to somebody who has dedicated her entire life to giving?
CJ, or Potlucky, as we all called her and she called herself, was truly a unique character. How do I describe her? Horse advocate does not seem to do it, although that sums up her importance for those of us who care about horses and their welfare.
CJ, ex lawyer, self dis-barred, turned her life toward her music and helping animals. CJ played with the group Mystic Figs in the Chicago area.
She managed to mix her music with her passion for horses and horse welfare and often sang such songs as “Fusion = Horse-songs for Barbaro.”
Here is a brief excerpt from an autobiography CJ wrote in 2006:
I am Caroline Jaffe – CJ in Hammond IN.
On January 16, 2008 I turn 66. Hard to believe. Still feel like a kid. I used to be a lawyer (1963-82). Was law clerk to US District Judge Julius Hoffman right out of NW Law School, where I got a Master of Laws (LLM) in Criminal Law (Ford Foundation Fellowship) after completing the regular law school program with an LLB and passing the Bar (at 21) in 1963. Went from federal service to the Cook County IL Public Defender’s Office where I eventually headed up the Juvenile Court Division. Left in 1972 in the wake of a politically-motivated scandal, went to work for some rather famous Chicago criminal lawyers. Resigned from practice of law in 1982. From 1982 until the lead lawyer died in 98, I did well enough to maintain 2 horses at boarding facilities, doing writing and research, mainly specializing in criminal appeals and collateral attacks on convictions both State and federal. I was working for just one, very long term, who suddenly decided my services were no longer needed in November 06. I have been scrambling ever since.
I was born into a home with a grand piano in the living room; mother played piano and Dad played violin. Classical and folk music playing all the time, records, radio, live. I started playing piano by ear at age 3 – sat down and played melody to Greensleeves – and they schlepped me to the neighborhood music school where I became quite the oddity. Learned to read music the same time I learned to read English. Got to be quite the prodigy, but quit cold at not quite 16 when I started college. Was told I had to be a doctor or a lawyer, no exceptions. Anything else would be “throwing my brain in the garbage can.” I decided early on that I would do less harm as a lawyer, haha, so switched to Law School after 3 years pre-med (with a 3.75 on a 4.0 grade average).
In 1977 one of my friends dragged me to The Earl of Old Town on a weeknight when there was Open Mike. I didn’t get up on stage that night, but that brought me back to music. Soon after, I was one of the open mikers and played for no less than 9 years for nothing before I was hired as a weekend act. Getting back to music, that’s what really changed my life.
How I got involved with horses & my Horse History
Family all animal lovers & rescuers. Dixie, a black cocker spaniel my parents had brought back from their honeymoon – rescued from the fishing guide who kept her in his car – was the family pet when I was born. Eric the Boxer became my Brother a few years later. The family regarded all pets like people. All life precious, even bugs. Earliest visual memory, my mother eyedropper-feeding a baby bird. On road trips, my father would stop the car to move turtles to the shoulder.
Rich kid; grew up West Side of Chicago. As a toddler I was taken to the pony ride at “Kiddieland” where my grandpa paid the pony boy 5 bucks to make the ride last a long time. By the time I was nine I convinced my familial powers that be and the riding lessons started, along with my Dad who took it up for the first time in his life in his 40s. I rode upwards of 70 horses.
In my mid 30′s I went back to horses and signed up for semi-private lessons. During this time I met Sunny, my horse of a lifetime. After that I had many horses and was rarely horseless until Blackie March 15, 2007. And all of my horses have turned out to be special needs horses who would have been “useless” to most anyone but me.
I learned about slaughter in 1982 and have been fighting it at every possible opportunity since then.”
Most of us met CJ in 2006 as we all watched the racehorse Barbaro in his brave fight to survive a catastrophic injury in the Preakness, shortly after he won the 132nd Kentucky Derby in 2006. We met online and formed a community dedicated to helping Barbaro and his caregivers at the University of Pennsylvania, New Bolton Center. That was the beginning for us. We all turned our focus toward helping horses in any way we could. We did fund raising for laminitis, the disease which actually killed Barbaro, and we went on to fight horse slaughter, and to rescue horses from feedlots where they were headed to a certain death at the slaughter house. Many of us did this through an online site called Alex Brown Racing.
And as the story goes, Barbaro succumbed to complications, or laminitis, actually, on January 29, 2007.
CJ, among others, soon emerged as a leader and took up the cause with Americans Against Horse Slaughter. I think I can speak for all who knew her when I say, “She did it with a passion!” CJ’s lawyer training and past made her adamant about details, crossing the “t’s” and dotting the “i’s.” CJ would post our daily strategy for the horse legislation without fail. I can recall a time when she asked me to do it, as she was having computer problems. I did it, and felt I had done a good job. Well, good for me, but not for CJ! She pointed out all the flaws in how I had posted the information, all the while thanking me, but could I do it this way next time? Well, of course, I did it right the next time! She would say, “Good, good, good, Barb!” and of course it meant a lot to me!
CJ’s passion did not end with the horses. It just began there. She would share her knowledge of cat diseases and treatments, and what worked for her, or “You should try this….”
It was NEVER about CJ. She gave and gave and gave…. to horses, and all animals, and to US.
Explaining what Caroline Jaffe meant to us is like explaining why you can’t have powdered water. What would you add?
