Chip Tuttle is the chief operating officer at Suffolk Downs and a partner at the Boston ad agency Conover Tuttle Pace. He was the vice president for communications at the N.T.R.A. from 1999 to 2001.
Soon after Richard Fields bought an interest in Suffolk Downs in March 2007 and I signed on as the track’s C.O.O., we had a conversation about his opposition to horse slaughter. “This is very important to me,” he said. “I don’t want horses from this track to end up on someone’s dinner plate.”
Richard is one of many people who draw a distinction between animals raised humanely for food and animals raised and used for sport or pleasure. He has four lucky former Suffolk Downs runners at his ranch in Wyoming. Sam Elliott, our vice president for racing, shares Richard’s opinion. Over the last few years, Sam has personally financed the transition of over a dozen horses from the track to second careers, buying them from their owners and laying them up at local farms until good homes could be found. I came at the issue with a different point of view, but discussions with Richard, Sam, anti-slaughter advocates and my two teenage daughters, Libby and Annie, both of whom ride, led me to the same place. (Libby and Annie are soon to be the proud co-owners of an Off-The-Track Thoroughbred).
Luckily for us, by the spring of 2007, Suffolk Downs had already been working on the issue for a few years. Patricia Moseley, one of its prior owners, had established partnerships with two great organizations, Canter New England, which finds good second careers and homes for healthy runners that can no longer race, and the Thoroughbred Retirement Foundation, which places those who are not fit enough to be ridden in one of its retirement facilities.
In 2007, we increased our financial contributions to both organizations and quietly enacted a policy that prohibited the transport of horses from the Suffolk Downs backstretch to auction facilities that supply slaughterhouses in Canada. We worked with the New England Horsemen’s Benevolence & Protective Association to educate horsemen on our position and we restricted certain individuals and transport companies to dropping off here only.
A year later, a reporter from the Thoroughbred Times asked Sam about our policy, specifically, what would happen if someone violated it. Sam confirmed for the reporter we would revoke that individual’s stall privileges and, voila, we were credited with the country’s first “zero-tolerance” anti-slaughter policy.
Since that time, it has received quite a bit of attention. HBO called and NBC Nightly News did a feature. The owner Tracy Farmer and the trainer Nick Zito said it was one of the reasons they sent Commentator to Boston, where he won the 2008 MassCap. Other tracks adopted similar policies. The N.T.R.A. Safety Alliance insists that tracks participate in aftercare programs for retired Thoroughbreds as one of the key components of its national accreditation process. We received plaudits last year when we revoked stall privileges of five individuals who violated the policy and catcalls this year when we reconsidered and allowed three of the five to return.
We never expected or anticipated the attention, but we’re happy it has brought so much positive discussion of the issue. The endeavor has been an education for all of us on how complicated this is and how much time, energy, effort and money is required to ensure our athletes are treated humanely after their racing days are over.
Once you rule out slaughter, there are only three options for horses at the ends of their careers – adoption, where we partner with The Communication Alliance to Network Thoroughbred Ex-Racehorses (Canter); retirement, where we work with the Thoroughbred Retirement Foundation; or humane euthanasia, a difficult but sometimes necessary decision among individual owners, trainers and vets.
At Suffolk Downs, we work with the New England H.P.B.A. to educate the local horsemen not only on our policy but on the alternatives available to them. Canter hosts open houses on our backstretch for interested buyers and adopters. Trainers get to use our Equine-Ciser, a specialized treadmill for horses, by making small donations to the T.R.F. We designed a standard bill of sale for our horsemen to help prevent horses falling into the wrong hands. The trainer Lorita Lindemann works the barn area, identifying and monitoring horses whose racing days are over.
As a result, over the last two years, Canter has helped our horsemen find second careers for over a hundred horses and the T.R.F. has taken 65 to its various facilities.
These aren’t all modest claimers who plied their trade on the secondary circuit. Among the 65 are horses that raced at Keeneland, Belmont Park and Gulfstream Park; horses bred by perennial leading breeder the late John Franks, former Kentucky Governor Brere Jones and Eclipse Award winners Ken and Sarah Ramsey; and, horses trained by Dale Romans, Tom Amoss, Scott Lake and Gary Contessa.
The reality is tracks with modest purse levels like ours, Finger Lakes, Emerald Downs and Tampa Bay Downs are much more likely to have horses of retirement age due to the cycles of racing. That’s why it’s so important for everyone in racing – tracks, owners, breeders and other participants who earn their livings from our game – to support these retirement and aftercare programs.
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