Aging Thoroughbred takes a detour from the slaughterhouse

ST. LOUIS — The slaughterhouse was just six hours away. The kill truck was packed tight with 41 horses and a single mule. It was just before 3 a.m. Sept. 27. The livestock trailer sped along Interstate 44, getting ever closer to its final destination.

An old racehorse stood in the back. His hide was the color of fudge-brownie batter. His nose was dotted with a white star of hair. He looked thin, his ribs showing like rolls in a bunched-up carpet.

But he was eye-catching still, a gentleman horse with a regal air. And he was tall, even for a Thoroughbred. He loomed over the other horses in the trailer. At this moment, though, he was no different from them — an animal valued only for his meat. Maybe 50 cents a pound at the DeKalb, Ill., processing facility.

The only clue to this horse's past was a tattoo under his lip — a past, illuminated through records and interviews, that tracks from breeders in Kentucky to a reclusive millionaire owner to horse traders in Colorado and Oklahoma, including a period where he largely disappeared. This old racehorse's story is the typical one, experienced by tens of thousands of unheralded Thoroughbreds. It is the story at the heart of the national debate over slaughtering horses.

Reprieved

Except this one has a twist.

This old racehorse was finally going to find luck on his side.

In the early-morning dark, the kill truck rolled over.

The rig slid on its side into the grassy median at mile marker 232. The animals were trapped. Rescue workers stood by helplessly waiting for a special tool to cut into the metal roof.

The only sound: hooves banging against the metal walls. No whining. No snorting. Just the eerie dance of feet.

An hour passed. Then, prying open the roof like a sardine can, the rescue workers moved with care. Inside the trailer were compartments. Horses were piled on top of horses. Blood was everywhere. Some horses walked out. But as the rescuers worked toward the back of the trailer, the horses were tangled in a mess of heads and legs. They had to be pulled out with straps attached to a tow-truck winch.

The dead were laid on the highway shoulder and covered in red or blue tarps, until the tarps ran out.

"It was the worst thing I've ever seen," said veterinarian Amy Adams.

Seven hours after the crash, with the autumn sun rising in the sky, rescuers reached the last compartment. There were four horses inside. A white-and-brown painthorse lay dead. Another horse, a sorrel, had its back leg opened to the bone and had to be put down. A white horse walked out alive. So did the old racehorse.

In the end, just 25 of the 42 animals survived.

In good hands

Amanda Hirshberg, ranch manager for the Humane Society of Missouri's Longmeadow Rescue Ranch, first noticed the racehorse at a small arena where the horses were evaluated later that day.

As Hirshberg worked on another horse, the racehorse crumpled to the ground, on his side, head down.

"He looked like he was going to die," said Adams.

Hirshberg reached him first. "Calm down," she recalled whispering to him as she petted him. "Calm down."

He responded to her touch, his muscles appearing to relax just a bit. He was covered in small cuts. He had a puncture wound by his tail. Adams stuck a catheter into the horse's neck, pumping him full of fluids and drugs. He groaned and shortly climbed back to his feet.

He spent the next two weeks recuperating at a clinic in Wildwood, Mo. It was there that veterinarian Anne Taylor named him Stan. It was a sturdy-sounding name. Sometimes Stan would break into a trot, bouncing like he was being ponied up to the starting gate. He had a lip tattoo, too, a sure sign of a racehorse. Taylor said she would look at Stan and say to herself, I wonder what you used to do?

A cold trail

By late October, Stan was living at Longmeadow Ranch. In a few days, the Humane Society would gain ownership of all 25 slaughterhouse animals from the trucker's insurance company.

Almost nothing was known about how they got here. The only documentation was a receipt noting that on Sept. 26, the day before the accident, the 41 horses and one mule had sold for $14,997 from one horse trader to another. From there the trail ran cold.

At the same time, the kill-truck accident had found life in the political arena. Animal-welfare groups used the wreck to push for a federal bill to shut down the three U.S. horse-slaughtering plants, which ship horsemeat overseas for human consumption. The House passed the legislation, but it stalled in the Senate.

At Longmeadow, Stan stood in stall No. 2 eating fresh hay from a hanging feeder while keeping one big, brown eye on a visitor. He appeared not wary, but curious. His brown skin was dotted with yellow antibiotic cream.

Keely Morgan, head of the Southern Illinois chapter of CANTER, a nonprofit group that rescues ex-racehorses, walked into the stable. She held a small desk lamp and 60-watt black-light bulb.

It was time to look at Stan's lip tattoo.

Stan was the only horse off the kill truck with a permanent identifying mark — there were no other tattoos or brandings or microchips. All U.S. racehorses are required to have a unique six-digit code tattooed under their lip. A black light makes the skin around the tattoo glow.

Reading the clues

While Hirshberg held the reins, Morgan rubbed Stan's nose to calm him and slid her hand over his upper lip, coaxing it back. A series of greenish letters appeared against a wall of mottled flesh.

The first digit looked like a "Q" or a "G." The middle sequence appeared to be "3752," with "3" or "5" at the end.

In Hirshberg's office, Morgan called the Jockey Club in Lexington, Ky., to have the tattoo researched.

Ten minutes later, the Jockey Club had a hit.

Stan had a new name: Prince Conley.

Bad timing

According to Jockey Club records, Prince Conley was born on April 21, 1987, in Kentucky.

It was perhaps the worst time in U.S. horse-racing history to be born.

That year the number of registered newborn Thoroughbreds — called foals — reached an all-time high of 50,917. The industry simply could not support that many horses. Already, the average number of starts per horse was falling. Each horse's career was getting shorter and shorter. Since then, the number of newborn foals has crashed.

All those extra horses have to go somewhere. And for some that means the slaughterhouse — the fate for an estimated 90,000 horses of all breeds this year alone. Even the famous don't get a reprieve. Ferdinand, winner of the 1986 Kentucky Derby, ended up going to a slaughterhouse in Japan after failing as a stud.

That left little hope for unheralded runners like Prince Conley. He never started an official race — but he must have come very close or he wouldn't have a tattoo, according to racehorse owners.

Prince Conley was bred by two men, Max Killian and Kim Ellsworth. For years, the two cousins ran a horse farm in Paris, Ky., the heart of bluegrass horse country.

Neither man could remember Prince Conley.

Ellsworth, 63, now retired from the horse business, wasn't surprised he failed to recall one horse. Ellsworth's farms produced 150 foals a year. "If they're not that good, they're sold and I never see them again," he said from his home in Riverside, Calif.

In the late 1980s, Ellsworth and Killian's horses were raised in Kentucky and then shipped to an Arizona farm before racing at West Coast tracks. They assumed Prince Conley followed this path.

Killian, 80, an attorney living in Mesa, Ariz., said that if a Thoroughbred doesn't work out, "it's a business and you sell them. They serve no useful purpose."

Killian could not recall the origins of the name Prince Conley.

"You know, I had a very good friend named Conley. I sold him some mares. He might have bought this horse," he said.

Conley was Conley Wolfswinkel. He did buy the horse.

Once again, it was bad timing for Prince Conley.

Hard times

Just as the horse might have hit his stride on the track, his owner hit the skids. In the 1980s, Wolfswinkel was overseeing a real-estate empire in Arizona. But then he was implicated in the nation's savings-and-loan scandal. He declared bankruptcy, was convicted of bank fraud and was hit with a billion-dollar civil judgment. Reached by phone in Arizona recently, Wolfswinkel said he doesn't remember the horse, either.

Then Prince Conley disappears. It is perplexing, but not unusual, say horse owners. After all, Prince Conley barely registered with his original handlers.

Ellsworth was at a loss. "Where was he the last 15 years?" he said.

The last known place for Prince Conley was the George Baker Stables in Stroud, Okla., where the kill truck was loaded. Baker, a horse trader, turned down repeated requests to help locate Prince Conley's previous owner. Other horses on the kill truck bore auction stickers from an auction barn in Sulphur, Okla. But the auction owner said it would be difficult to trace back any one horse, even with the buyer's help.

"Kill horses"

Baker puts together shipments of horses for another horse trader, Charles Carter of Loveland, Colo., who has a contract to supply the Cavel International slaughterhouse in Illinois.

Carter estimated half of the 300 horses he buys each week are slaughtered. Known as "kill horses," those animals "are the ones you can't do nothing with," he said.

Carter said he was astonished at the attention paid to the accident. "If that was a load of cows, or a load of pigs or even a load of children," he said, "we wouldn't be hearing as much about it."

And that gets to the heart of the problem with horse slaughtering, why it creates such a controversy. No other animal teeters so precariously between livestock and pet.

"There's an argument about what a horse is," acknowledged Rose Sylvia, a Texas horse rancher who once worked with Kim Ellsworth. "Is it livestock, like cattle? Or is it like a big dog, part of the family?"

New fans

Prince Conley might have been livestock.

But Stan is a pet.

The 19-year-old racehorse still lives at Longmeadow Ranch. He is eating well, gaining weight, the outline of his ribs disappearing. He's now well over 1,000 pounds — adding to what he'd be worth at the slaughterhouse.

But the slaughterhouse will not see this old racehorse. He, like the 23 other horses and one mule that survived the kill truck's crash, will be adopted out next year to new owners who promise to provide good care and to keep them from slaughter. Stan has plenty of admirers, too, including Hirshberg, the ranch manager.

There was also an inquiry from the new owners of the Paris, Ky., farm where Prince Conley was born. They loved the idea of the old racehorse returning to run the bluegrass pasture he grew up on, to live out his last years with dignity, a chance for a horse that never made anyone a dime at the track to be treated like a prince, with luck finally on his side.