Good Direction is about to leave us for a wonderful home with a woman who simply wants a beautiful and lovable horse in her life. Watching him happily munching his hay it is incredible to think that just last December he was discovered on a feedlot in Fallon, NV, standing miserably in the mud with a bowed tendon. Good Direction was a throwaway, doomed for the price of a few months rehabilitation.
The cycle of abandonment and salvation endlessly repeats itself to the point that the stories are nearly unbearable to write. The ultimate irony is that the ones we cannot save become the grim statistics of studies and surveys that are slyly thrown back in our faces by those seeking to reinstate horse slaughter in this country. People who turn horse ownership from a priviledge into a pathology.
My last post announced the excellent position taken by the New York Racing Association to ban owners and trainers who would do to their horses what was done to Good Direction. It is a great step forward, but the flip side of that golden coin is that tracks with an anti-slaughter policy must create a fund to channel horses to appropriate non-profits for rehabilitation and adoption. Without that we once again have hollow promises, and no gain for the horses. It's time to get to work.
