Northview Stallion Station Joins As Partner With Aftercare Organization Beyond The Wire

Northview Stallion Station, located in Chesapeake City, Md., has partnered with Beyond The Wire to provide financial assistance for “sanctuary” horses—retired Thoroughbred racehorses that cannot move on to second careers. It is a major step forward for Maryland's Thoroughbred aftercare program.

Beyond the Wire is an industry-wide initiative between the Maryland Thoroughbred Horsemen's Association, the Maryland Jockey Club, the Maryland Horse Breeders Association and Maryland jockeys designed to facilitate safe and enriching placements for retired Maryland-based racehorses.

Northview, which stands nine stallions including Great Notion, the current leading stallion in Maryland, was launched in 1989 by the late Richard Golden, Dr. Tom Bowman, and the late Allaire DuPont. For the past few years, Golden's son, Michael, has overseen operations at the farm. David Wade, general manager of Northview, said Michael Golden has had a passion for retired racehorses and was looking for mechanism to generate financial support for them.

“Sanctuary horses need funding,” Wade said. “Some of them spend the rest of their lives at a farm because they're not adoptable. Northview wants to help fund that effort, and we'd like to challenge other stallion farms to do the same.”

Wade said Northview will donate 5 percent of the stud fees it collects from contracts. It can do so from stallions wholly owned by Northview or from the shares it owns in other stallions that stand at the farm.

“This program is such a critical part of the progressive efforts of the Maryland racing industry to support all of our retiring horses, whether they can have a second career as a riding horse or not,” said Laurie Calhoun, who operates the Union Bridge, Md.-based Foxie G Foundation, a Thoroughbred Aftercare Association-accredited facility that works closely with the Beyond The Wire program. “It concentrates heavily on horses with past racing injuries that need extensive rehabilitation. Given enough time and careful management, the majority of these horses can live a comfortable life in our sanctuary program if they are not adopted out as companions or used in ground-based, equine-assisted therapy programs.

“Since 2018, Foxie G has had five horses in an equine assisted therapy program at the Baltimore Agricultural Center, serving veterans and first responders. We will also begin a new equine-assisted therapy partnership in 2022, where up to 10 of our sanctuary horses will be used. Horses are natural healers and they can give back so much to our community. Northview's generous, lead gift in support of these horses will literally be life-changing for horses that have not had many options in the past thanks to the caring efforts of Michael Golden and David Wade.”

Beverly Strauss of MidAtlantic Horse Rescue, another TAA-accredited farm that partners with Beyond The Wire, agreed with Calhoun.

“Maryland racing does a good job filtering horses off the track and into TAA-accredited facilities, but the number of horses needing sanctuary care that are not rideable is significant,” Strauss said. “It puts a strain on each (partner) organization. These horses need ongoing support from the racing and breeding industry—we owe this much to them.”

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Gelding in ‘Inhumane Treatment’ Case Settles in at New Home

Food and Wine (War Front), the 5-year-old gelding whose mistreatment for a bowed tendon resulted in a trio of “improper or inhumane” care rulings issued by the Delaware Park stewards last Friday, is settling in at his new home, a rehab farm in Townsend, Delaware, that serves as a satellite facility for MidAtlantic Horse Rescue (MAHR).

“He's very, very cool. He's just a real classy horse,” said Beverly Strauss, the co-founder and president of MAHR. “He's in beautiful condition except for his leg. It's just an unfortunate situation and it's really sad, because it looks as if he's got some talent but just ended up on the wrong side of the racetrack.”

Strauss said Food and Wine's owner, Jose Rosales, had asked her for help in trying to get the gelding re-homed earlier this fall by listing him on CANTER, but there were no takers.

“They had called me about taking him a couple of weeks ago, but we've been totally swamped,” Strauss said. “We do the aftercare for Delaware Park and we help with the Beyond the Wire program in Maryland, plus some kill pen horses here and there. So I suggested we list him and see if somebody wanted to rehab him.”

This was in the weeks before Rosales was fined $2,500 and suspended 30 days for ignoring his own veterinarian's recommendation to give Food and Wine up to a year off to heal a bowed tendon, then drugging the gelding in an attempt to mask his lameness from a regulatory veterinarian.

Strauss only learned about that darker side of Food and Wine's recent history last Friday when the Delaware Thoroughbred Racing Commission (DTRC) ruling came out against Rosales.

According to that Oct. 15 ruling, Rosales had administered drugs to mask the gelding's pain from a bowed tendon in order to make it through a workout that Rosales hoped would get Food and Wine removed from the DTRC's restricted list. But Food and Wine went lame at the end of that Oct. 3 breeze, and the Delaware Park stewards launched an investigation into his care based on a tip from a veterinarian.

Food and Wine's trainer, Linda Manchio, was also fined $2,500 and suspended 30 days. Assistant trainer Belinda Manchio was fined $1,000 and suspended 15 days (details here).

DTRC executive director Sarah Crane told TDN that as of Oct. 19, no appeals to those rulings had been filed.

“As far as other horses that were in the care of that trainer, it is my understanding that there were not very many, and they have all been transferred out to a different facility,” Crane said. “So there are no horses at Delaware Park under the care of anybody who was listed in those rulings.”

Strauss said that once she learned that Rosales would be leaving Delaware Park immediately because of the ruling against him, she decided that MAHR would just care for the gelding instead of trying to place him through CANTER.

“I just said, 'We'll take him,'” Strauss said.

“Now he's in a paddock the size of a double round pen and he's moving around and comfortable,” Straus said. “With bowed tendons, I like to have them moving a little bit. I don't like to have them stuck in a stall. I know everybody rehabs bows differently, but I think it's better for him if he can move around a little bit. We don't have him on Bute now. He'll get it as needed, but he hasn't been on it in the few days since he's been with us. He's very sweet and very nice, and once he rehabs, I think he'll make somebody a really, really nice horse.”

Based in Warwick, Maryland, MAHR is a non-profit, accredited equine aftercare and placement organization with a 158-acre farm along the banks of the Sassafras River. Strauss said that since TDN last profiled MAHR in 2016, the operation has substantially expanded.

“I think when we last spoke we only had one facility,” Strauss said. “Now we've got the main farm and four satellite farms–two that we use for rehab and two for retraining and adoption. We have about 45 horses here at the main farm and close to 90 horses in the program at all times. So we've grown.”

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Jockey Club Round Table: HISA ‘Best Ever Opportunity To Right Our Badly Listing Ship’

The 69th Annual Round Table Conference on Matters Pertaining to Racing concluded Sunday with emphatic support for the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act (HISA) by The Jockey Club Chairman Stuart S. Janney III, who presided over the conference and referenced in his closing remarks the arguments made by groups in the racing industry that have stated their opposition to HISA.

“When the history of this is written, it will be clear who the obstructionists were and who opposed this industry's best ever opportunity to right our badly listing ship,” Janney said. “I am proud to stand with those who support HISA, and I look forward to the needed reform it will bring to our industry and to seeing our ship finally sailing a straight course.”

Sunday's event was held virtually and streamed on jockeyclub.com and made available on NYRA's YouTube channel, Racetrack Television Network's respective platforms, and bloodhorse.com.

Janney was preceded by presentations from Charles Scheeler, chair of the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority board of directors, and Dr. Tessa Muir, director of Equine Science for the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA).

Scheeler described the components of the authority's work ahead, which include the establishment of an anti-doping and medication testing program and a safety program; constituency outreach; and utilizing the industry's plethora of data, much of which will be sourced from The Jockey Club's databases. In advance of the implementation of HISA next year, plans call for the authority's board and standing committees to publish proposed rules for public comment before they are submitted to the Federal Trade Commission.

“What I saw when [I looked at HISA] was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make the sport safer for horses and jockeys, to serve the overwhelming majority of horse people who want to win fairly and who want to play by the rules…” Scheeler said.

Muir spoke of USADA's plans to work with the Thoroughbred industry, including leveraging expertise for both human and equine athletes to create best practices.

“Our aspiration is to establish and maintain a uniform and harmonized program that is centered on promoting and safeguarding the health and welfare of horses and protects the rights of all participants to race clean and win fairly,” she said.

Emily Lyman, founder and chief executive officer of Branch & Bramble, a digital marketing agency used by America's Best Racing (ABR), discussed how “social listening” online can be used to gauge public sentiment of horse racing and how highly publicized events can have a positive or negative impact on how the sport is viewed. She talked about how ABR's marketing strategy is influenced by this data and that influencers can be effectively used as brand ambassadors to introduce new audiences to horse racing.

“Maintaining the status quo doesn't protect a brand's long-term health,” Lyman said. “Without growth in impressions and public sentiment, your key audience will eventually die out.”

Will Duff Gordon, the chief executive officer of Total Performance Data (TPD), spoke in a presentation with Will Bradley, director and founder of Gmax Technology Ltd., on how TPD and Gmax have collaborated to create timing systems for horse races and how they are working with Equibase to determine how the tracking data can supplement and enhance the information that Equibase provides. They noted that this information will become more valuable with the expansion of sports betting in the United States.

“We do know from our European experience that sports that have the richest set of data, as well as pictures, as well as odds, capture the most betting turnover and handle,” Gordon said.

Dr. Yuval Neria, professor of Medical Psychology at Columbia University and director of the PTSD Research Center, was joined by Dr. Prudence Fisher, associate professor of Clinical Psychiatric Social Work at Columbia University, to talk about the Man O' War Project, which was founded by Ambassador Earle I. Mack. It is the first university-led research study to examine the effectiveness of equine-assisted therapy (EAT) in treating veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Neria described the findings as “extremely encouraging,” noting measurable changes in the parts of the brain involved in the capacity to seek and experience pleasure among trial participants. There were also decreases in symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder and depression.

Moving forward, plans call for the creation of the Man O' War Center, with goals to train others in EAT protocol for veterans, adopt the protocol for other groups, pursue a larger research study, and expand the use of former racehorses for equine-assisted therapy work.

“We are proud to partner with the Thoroughbred Aftercare Alliance to connect groups trained in the Man O' War protocol with accredited aftercare facilities,” said Fisher. “It's a great way to incorporate more retired Thoroughbreds in EAT programs throughout the country.”

Kristin Werner, senior counsel for The Jockey Club and administrator of The Jockey Club's Thoroughbred Incentive Program, moderated an aftercare panel with panelists Erin Crady, executive director, Thoroughbred Charities of America (TCA); Brian Sanfratello, executive secretary, Pennsylvania Horse Breeders Association (PHBA); Beverly Strauss, executive director, MidAtlantic Horse Rescue; and Dr. Emily Weiss, vice president, Equine Welfare, American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA).

Each panelist shared their perspectives on challenges in the aftercare landscape, from securing a safe first exit from the racetrack to placing retired breeding stock. Crady talked about the TCA's Horses First Fund, which helps Thoroughbreds in case of an emergency.

“Plan, plan, and plan some more,” Crady said. If you've prepared a business plan for your racing operation, include a section on aftercare.

“Please remember one thing that I feel is paramount to your horse's future. Make every effort to retire your horse while he or she is still sound. A sound Thoroughbred can have an unlimited future.”

Strauss talked about the kill buyer market and the frequent social media frenzies when Thoroughbreds are offered for inflated prices to save them from being sold to slaughter. She warned that individuals and organizations that participate in these practices are often scams.

“If you're contacted because one of your former horses is in a kill pen, do some research, don't just throw money at it, don't just send money blindly, do research and see that the horse truly is in a bad place and then ensure its safety,” Strauss said.

Sanfratello detailed the PHBA's stance on aftercare and its creation of a code of ethics that will sanction those who knowingly send horses registered with the PHBA to slaughter.

“Our board understands that aftercare is just as important as making sure that we increase the numbers of mares bred,” Sanfratello said.

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Weiss focused on the work of the ASPCA's Right Horse Initiative, which assists with placing horses in transition. She noted that a problem seen with placing horses is that Thoroughbreds are often not located where the demand for them exists.

“There's some disconnect between the interest in the general public and getting these horses into their hands, and part of that is just getting those horses where those people are,” she said.

David O'Rourke, the president and chief executive officer of the New York Racing Association (NYRA), provided an update on that organization's efforts to promote safety, integrity, and the sport of racing. According to O'Rourke, NYRA has allotted 50% of its capital budget since 2013 to infrastructure improvements such as new track surfaces, barns, and dormitories. He also addressed the legalization of sports betting and NYRA's belief that this represents a critical opportunity for horse racing to expand its wagering options and boost handle

James L. Gagliano, president and chief operating officer of The Jockey Club, delivered a report on the activities of The Jockey Club.

Also in his closing remarks, Janney announced that Len Coleman and Dr. Nancy Cox, co-chairs of the nominating committee of the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority, have been awarded The Jockey Club Medal for exceptional contributions to the Thoroughbred industry.

A video replay of the conference will be available on jockeyclub.com this afternoon, and full transcripts will be available on the same site this week.

The Jockey Club Round Table Conference was first held on July 1, 1953, in The Jockey Club office in New York City. The following year, it was moved to Saratoga Springs, N.Y.

The Jockey Club, founded in 1894 and dedicated to the improvement of Thoroughbred breeding and racing, is the breed registry for North American Thoroughbreds. In fulfillment of its mission, The Jockey Club, directly or through subsidiaries, provides support and leadership on a wide range of important industry initiatives, and it serves the information and technology needs of owners, breeders, media, fans, and farms. It founded America's Best Racing (americasbestracing.net), the broad-based fan development initiative for Thoroughbred racing, and in partnership with the Thoroughbred Owners and Breeders Association, operates OwnerView (ownerview.com), the ownership resource. Additional information is available at jockeyclub.com.

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