Grooms, trainers, owners, and others deal with emotions that arise from the catastrophic loss of a horse

DURING the Breeders' Cup Mile (G1) on October 29 at Belmont Park, Cheveley Park Farm's homebred Funfair (GB) presumably took a bad step while racing down the backstretch, and the torque caused the cannon bone of his right hind leg to fracture. Funfair was euthanized shortly after the horrific scene played out in front of a crowd of 54,289 and a worldwide television audience.

"To go into a day like that with a lot of dreams, you don't expect that kind of nightmare," said the horse's trainer, Graham Motion. "The horse didn't deserve that kind of end."

Funfair seemingly had come into his own in America after an undistinguished career in Europe. The six-year-old gelding, based at the bucolic Fair Hills Training Center in Elkton, Maryland, had an unblemished record in the United States. One start before the Mile, Funfair had been victorious over eventual Mile winner Artie Schiller in a head-to-head battle in the Kelso Breeders' Cup Handicap (G2) at Belmont. Understandably, hopes were high among those in Motion's barn that they would be celebrating a Mile victory, not mourning the death of a friend.

Three days later, another tragedy struck the Fair Hills family when 24 horses were lost in a devastating fire that leveled Chevation IV barn. Trainer Bruce Jackson suffered the greatest loss when 11 of his horses perished in the blaze. Six other trainers also lost horses.

When a catastrophic loss of a horse occurs, the emotional toll on the people who work with the horse everyday can be devastating. To the stable crew, the tragedy is the almost incomprehensible loss of the golden child who had made their chests swell with pride. They grieve for the horse's passing as they would a member of the family, especially if the bond between them has grown strong over time.

One of the darkest days in the history of American Thoroughbred racing occurred on October 27, 1990, when champion filly Go for Wand shattered her right ankle while battling Bayakoa (Arg) to the wire in the Breeders' Cup Distaff (G1) at Belmont. So devastating was her injury that she had to be euthanized on the track. Go for Wand was bestowed a second Eclipse Award posthumously.

Billy Badgett Jr. trained the remarkable homebred for Jane duPont Lunger, and Badgett's then-wife, Rose, was Go for Wand's exercise rider. Josh Pons, owner of Country Life Farm in Bel Air, Maryland, was a friend of Lunger and owned Go for Wand's half brother, stallion Carnivalay. These people, as well as the staffs of Country Life, Lunger's farm, and Badgett's stable, were Go For Wand's extended family, and all deeply felt her loss.

"My job was the captain of the ship, trying to keep everybody in good spirits," Badgett recalled. "It was almost like losing somebody in your family. Unfortunately, in our sport, you kind of know that on any given day, something like that is possible to happen."

Badgett said the most difficult task was helping his people cope with the loss, especially his wife.

"My wife at the time was probably closer to [Go for Wand] than anybody," Badgett said. "She galloped her and came back every afternoon and gave her carrots. So she took it harder than everybody. But that was kind of easier because I was living with her and we just talked things out."

While Badgett and his wife talked to each other, Pons shared his feelings with Carnivalay.

"It is absolute nonsense to think for one minute that Carnivalay understands what happened yesterday," Josh Pons wrote in Country Life Diary. "Nevertheless, I found myself talking to him tonight in the stallion barn.

"'It's all right, boy,' I said, rubbing his nose through the bars of his stall. 'Everything's all right.'

"A few hours later, I woke up in a nightmare. All the stallions had broken their legs at the ankle.

"'It's not all right,' I told myself. 'It is not going to be all right for a very long time.' "

Jockeys and veterinarians often are thought to take the death of a horse in stride as part of their everyday jobs. But Ed Donnally, the development director for the Race Track Chaplaincy of America who had a successful 20-year career as a rider, said nothing is further from the truth.

"I always thought there was a moment in a race when you actually become one with the horse," Donnally said. "You and the horse become indistinguishable. Sometimes it is difficult to figure out where you end and the horse begins."

Donnally said when a rider has that kind of rapport with a horse, it is difficult for him or her not to be affected. He recalled an incident that happened to him almost 40 years earlier that still haunts him.

"I was riding a horse by the name of Curt Summons in Maryland, and he won four or five in a row," Donnally said. "He broke down and had to be euthanized. I was walking back on the outside rail with my saddle, and I was totally dejected. And one of the fans leaned over the rail and called me a horse killer. And I completely lost it, and I ended up getting into a fight with him.

"Yes, jockeys do have acute memories of horses breaking down, and to say it doesn't affect jockeys isn't accurate at all."

Donnally recounted a story about legendary rider Don MacBeth, whose mount broke down. MacBeth held down the horse's head to keep him lying quietly while the rider waited for the veterinarian to come to euthanize the horse.

"The horse's head was lying in the infield," Donnally said. "Don MacBeth gave the horse a mouthful of grass. A lot of people asked him later why he had done that, and he said he wanted the horse's last memory of humans to be a good one.

"So jockeys are like anybody else. They wear this faade of bravado, because it does take a lot of guts to do what they do, but, believe me, when a horse breaks down underneath them, they're affected."

"Emotions are very tough on the veterinarian, as well," said Robert Holland, D.V.M., Ph.D., a former Kentucky Racing Commission veterinarian who maintains a private practice in Lexington. "At times, people think we can just walk away and it's done. But it's tough on many of us.

"Sometimes when a horse gets injured at an event and you have to put him down, it is very difficult to go back to the farm where the rest of the staff wasn't at the event. They haven't had a chance to say goodbye. I've seen a whole barn full of people be upset. I've never had anyone take it out on me but I've had owners who had me put their horse down who never want me back to their farm. It had nothing to do with me, but I was a reminder to them."

Coping with loss

Anyone who has had a relationship with a horse might go through a period of grief over the animal's death. Individuals handle grief in different ways. Some are stoic. They put it behind them and go on. Others observe a period of mourning. Yet some individuals sink into a deep depression, unable to cope with the tragedy on their own.

Badgett coped by immersing himself in his other charges.

"It's like falling off a bike," he said. "You just get back on the bike and start riding again. You go back to the barn, and you have other horses to deal with. You just have to get right back in there and keep going. It seemed like a lot of people just felt at ease talking about it, trying to get it behind them."

Jackson, who lost his entire stable in the Fair Hills fire, helped his crew by putting them to work with yearlings at his farm and finding a job for one of his exercise riders.

"Obviously, they are very concerned about the horses, but I felt getting them straight into some work somewhere else rather than having nothing to do was probably the best way to go," Jackson said. "They have their [financial] needs, too, and they needed to find something."

Sherene Bracho, a member of the board of directors and a barn owner at Fair Hills, immediately began to organize a fund-raiser to help those who were affected by the fire that leveled Chevation IV. With that project in motion, she paused to enlist the Race Track Chaplaincy of America to help with grief counseling.

Grief counseling

Everyone grieves in an individual way, but the healing process involves five stages: denial, anger, guilt, depression, and acceptance. Guilt can be particularly haunting, especially when people think of the horse in human terms.

According to Nicholas Dodman, B.V.Sc., director of Tufts University Animal Behavior Clinic, one mistake people often make is ascribing human thought patterns and emotions to the horse, which can make it more difficult to cope with the events.

Horses, unlike humans, live in the present, and their immediate thoughts are only of the suffering they are enduring--not hope for a better tomorrow or feelings of betrayal that the people they worked to please would end their life.

"Horses are thinking, feeling, emotional animals, but they are not the same as humans in their cognitive abilities," Dodman said. "I really don't think they have the power of abstract thought. I don't think they have the ability to wonder, 'What will happen to me when I die?' They are very much more immediate than human beings. They can form likes and dislikes, they can have emotional experiences, but they are not extrapolating the past or predicting the future."

Michael Bingaman, the national field director for the Race Track Chaplaincy of America, said the first step when helping someone cope with the loss of a horse is to acknowledge the validity of the relationship.

"A lot of people want to minimize the relationship ... but, psychologically, this may be their best friend," Bingaman said. "If possible, the best thing to do is to acknowledge the grief and talk about it.

"One of the theories of counseling is that emotions are going to make their way out, one way or the other, whether you actually facilitate the emotions coming out or whether they come out in other ways, like nightmares," Bingaman said of Pons's experience. "It's real therapeutic to talk about it when you're dealing with loss. He was coherent enough to realize that [Carnivalay] didn't understand what he was saying, but it was still valuable to him; any way that we allow our emotions to get out is cathartic."

Trainers need to know their staff well enough to determine the best way to help each individual cope with the loss. Sometimes this means assigning a new, challenging horse to the crewmember to keep him or her occupied. For other individuals, it might mean giving them a day off to grieve. No matter what action the trainer believes is appropriate, he shows concern for the individual, which is paramount.

"If I see a horse break down, typically I'll go find out about it first," said Churchill Downs chaplain Ken Boehm, who has been trained in grief counseling and crisis intervention. "Then I'll go to the trainer's barn, and I'll ask who took care of the horse. I will spend some time with him or her and let them talk for a little bit and let them grieve."

Boehm said typically the first stage of grieving that he helps people deal with on the racetrack is guilt.

"The vast majority of the time, there is nothing that indicated the horse was lame or the horse shouldn't have been out there," Boehm said. "I reassure them that not only did they take care of the horse and see that it was okay, but the vet came and looked at it beforehand, and the vet pronounced it okay. The trainer saddled that horse and pronounced it okay. The rider got on that horse's back and thought it felt okay. Maybe it just took a bad step or something happened in the race, and it was something that could not have been prevented."

Intervention

Bingaman said people do not have to be trained in grief counseling to aid someone who has sustained a loss; they simply need to be compassionate, and they need to be able to recognize when intervention is needed.

Grief that becomes debilitating, interferes with a person's life or work, or persists for an unusual length of time might signal the need for professional help.

"As soon as a horse dies if you want to elicit support from your chaplain, that's appropriate," Bingaman advises trainers. "Ask your chaplain to come by and kind of hang around the barn a couple of days and be available for people to talk to and just tell their stories. So often when I'm dealing with people in grief, if I encourage them to tell all the stories--the funny stories, the traumatic stories, and the stories of victory and the stories of defeat--and relive their experience, that's huge."

Churchill has a support network that includes the chaplaincy office, which has two Hispanic-speaking assistants; the Lifestyles program, which offers counseling; and the Kentucky Racing Health and Welfare Fund, through which a licensed racetrack worker can obtain mental healthcare.

But despite all the available avenues, some people never overcome their loss.

"They may carry it with them all the time, but they need to learn to carry it with them in a way that it won't interfere with their work or with their family life," Boehm said.

"When you face it alone, that's when grief becomes morbid," he continued. "When you are dealing with it by yourself, that's when I worry about severe depression and alcoholism. And that's another way that people deal with it. They don't go to a friend or a pastor. They go to a bottle or to a syringe. It's an escape, but it doesn't change the situation."

More than money

Owners are not immune from grief, even though they might be geographically removed from the horse. For some, the horse is a loss of an investment, but others may find it emotionally difficult to continue in the business.

"Maybe if one horse dies, it's generally not traumatic enough for them to spit the bit," Bingaman said. "But sometimes it happens after a series of recurring difficulties with horses."

For those owners, Bingaman tries to help them recall what it was about horses that got them into the business. He does not pressure them into buying another horse. He allows them to come back to racing on their own time frame and sometimes suggests they become part of a syndicate, which relieves them of the responsibility of making daily decisions about the horse, yet allows them to dip their toes in the industry again.

Sometimes Bingaman will take the owners to a farm where there are young horses--not to shop, but just to enjoy the animals and remember their love for them. "There's something about new life that gives us hope for the future," he said.

Hope

A catastrophic loss of a horse is a crisis, which should be met by immediate crisis intervention and counseling for all those involved: trainer, owner, groom, hotwalker, rider, veterinarian, and anyone else who was close to the animal.

"It happens so quickly that you try to get them through the initial shock; you try to reassure them; you try to bring them words of comfort," Boehm said of his job as a grief counselor. "As a Christian chaplain, for me, that comes very naturally. I believe there are horses in heaven; I believe this horse is in heaven, that there is no more pain.

"Scripture tells us that Jesus will ride back on a white horse, so [horses] must be there if he's going to come back on one. Do they have a soul like we do? I don't know, but I know they are living, breathing animals, and they bring us pleasure. And I believe heaven is a beautiful place, and there are plenty of pastures with horses in heaven. At least, that's my hope, and I try to share that hope."