To paraphrase Jay Leno…
Nov 15 2007
Jay Leno once said “It’s not that everybody on the Internet is nuts, it’s that all of the nuts are on the Internet.” Well, sometimes I think the same can be said of the horse industry!
Woman on tractor tried to slam cops, police say
10/27/2007
POUGHKEEPSIE – A Union Vale woman was arrested for attempted assault during the evening hours on Wednesday after she allegedly tried to run police officers down with a tractor.
The Dutchess County Sheriff’s office responded to 1927 Bruzgal Road in Union Vale on Wednesday evening to assist the Dutchess County ASPCA on a warrant to seize horses from the location, police said.
Upon arrival, Sandra Kistner, 62, became violent and uncooperative toward both deputies and ASPCA officers. Police said Kistner ultimately attempted to run officers down with a tractor.
Kistner was taken into custody. There were no injuries as a result of the incident, police said.
Kistner was charged with first-degree attempted assault, a felony. She was remanded to Dutchess County Jail in lieu of $25,000 cash bail or a $50,000 bond.
OK, so apparently this wacko bitch has been running a scaryscaryscary “nurse mare” operation for years and the humane authorities finally caught up with her. So she tried to run them over with a tractor. Nice! If you google her, you can find her ALL OVER the Internet posting like she’s some kind of freakin’ authority on mare and foal care. Um, maybe she’s a pro at starving them – you have to be doing quite the job of that before the ASPCA shows up with a seizure order.
This is a good opportunity to discuss the “nurse mare” industry in general. Early this year a friend of mine lost a mare to a torsion colic when her baby was four days old. We googled and found some kind of “nurse mare network.” How great, we thought! We thought it was a service to match up mares who had lost their foals with foals who had lost their moms. It honestly never occurred to us (damn, 30+ years in horses and still naive) that it was an equine rent-a-center, asking thousands of dollars for the loan of a lactating mare whose own baby had been, so they said, pulled off of her early in order to get her into the cash-producing rental string (OK, they didn’t say it quite that way but that was the gist of it!). After we heard the base cost, daily cost, additional costs, etc. we decided we would give Little Squirt a try on the milk replacer. After an interesting first evening of syringing milk replacer into a colt that was already showing phenomenal jumping talent by jumping over the top of us, Little Squirt figured out how to drink from a bucket. At 8 months and 13.2 hh, I’m thinking he suffered no ill effects.
Nevertheless, this did cause me to do a little more research into this odd little corner of the horse world. Turns out there are entire rescues devoted to cleaning up the colossal mess made by the less-ethical nurse mare providers. Here’s a page explaining how the nurse mare industry works. Here’s another. Still more – a pretty good FAQ on this page. And that rescue is actually trying to link up motherless foals with foal-less mothers as a public service, too!
While I’m sure some of our discussion today will be from those of you who have had prior experiences with Ms. Kistner (doubt that’s the first time she’s chased someone with a tractor), the other thing I’d like to discuss is the ethics of the nurse mare industry in general.
If a foal can be raised perfectly fine on milk replacer and milk pellets, and given that there are other alternatives that do not create an orphaned foal, such as putting 2 foals on a quiet old mare who is a good milker (a friend of mine used to do that every year to get her show mare back in the ring and it worked out fine for the mares and the foals), or actually finding a mare who has genuinely lost her foal to natural causes…is it ethical at all to pull apart a mare and her foal just so that some other baby can benefit from natural milk?
Has anyone actually proven that a foal raised on milk replacer will not perform as well as an adult as a foal raised on mare’s milk?
I understand how much money is at stake with a high dollar foal, but I still think there are better ways to deal with an orphan other than creating another one. What do you think?
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Here’s a good recap of the whole AI issue for TBs:
http://tinyurl.com/2fnb8u
Heh, the problem with us East Coasters is a lot of us have horses with less winter fur than necessary. I loves me a fuzzpony, but a lot of barns do significant clipping. Especially come springtime – don’t want those clouds of fur cluttering the aisle!
Shoulda mentioned the lack of run-in shed, too.
Been watching this blog for ages but finally felt like time to comment.
A couple of years ago when completing my diploma I had to go on a field trip to the Hunter; large thoroughbred breeding area in Australia and visited a place called Pine Lodge, more commonly know as ‘Nursing Nannies’. This farm was a mare station i.e. foaled down mares for various owners under watch, but was famous for their ‘Nanny Mares’. These were mares mostly part draft, but basically anything with a very docile temperament and excellent mothering skills. The mares were ‘employed’ by large breeding farms to foster orphaned and rejected foals, typically worth big $$$$. So the ‘nannies’ foaled down and when they were needed their own foals were taken off them and the mares were transported to where they were needed. The foals stayed at Pine Lodge with the other ‘nanny’ foals and were ‘hand raised’ in a similar way to dairy calves with feeders with multiple teats. When the foals were old enough to not require milk they were turned out to pasture with older retired brood mares or clam geldings to learn horse manners and were sold at an action held by the farm. The foals appeared to suffer no ill effects from this process and the majority were sold as very quite, well handled youngsters, from what I have been told most went for around $1500, too much for the meat industry to be interested in. Fillies that were up to 1/2 draft were retained by the farm to become future ‘nannies’. From what I can gather the majority of these foals went to riding homes as show jumping, dressage and trail mounts. I also know that some other studs took on the geldings, I think they called them ‘clumpers’ as buddies for weanlings and to use to walk yearlings off. From what I saw I would say that this was a well operated business who was interested in the welfare of their horses. I will say that I do not agree with producing foals simply so that their mothers will produce milk for another foal, but I can also see that many of the studs that these mares serviced would not be interested in hand raising a foal themselves, suggesting that they would likely use a nurse mare service, even if it were not as well managed as this one.
Anyway here is the only link I could find for them; it is a 2005 site, but you get the idea. http://www.hunternursingnannies.com.au/
“Girl” – Are you a friend of Adam’s or Arlin’s?
Don’t worry, we make sure Victoria sees each update to the site… haha… We all have our Fugly shirts. We even wore them to the auction last time we went!! She loves it!!
I had an orphaned colt about 10 years ago and wasn’t able to find a nurse mare in a hurry. What I did find was a dairy goat farm and a nearly endless supply of milk; palatable, natural, and very digestible. Colt was very healthy and grew up to be a 16.2 hunter hack horse!
“Lauren”- I am friends with Arlin.
Oh, emilie, clipping. I can understand that. I should have presented that as an “acceptable” need for a blanket reason.
We never showed winter circuit. My father refused to bail out the trailer from under 3 feet of snow. We did it when my mare was preggers and in transit once. We never did it again. It took us 2 and a half hour and a WHOLE lot ‘oh butane in that blowtorch to bail the trailer out.
He knew my mother and I wouldn’t be the ones shoveling the trailer out. We didn’t. However, he couldn’t use the lighter to get the blowtorch going. As a young chem whiz, I did it better. It annoyed him for an eternity.
But back to the relevant it really annoys me that people think horses NEED to be blanketed. I have a friend here from Florida that blankets when it is 50 degrees and the horses have coats and are NOT show clipped. She was amazed to see pictures of my horses in the snow sans blankets and asked how they could exist like that.
I, of course, burst out laughing and said, “that was how God made them.”
I’m sure more than one person has called me a witch!
————-
I’m sure they have, but the question is, was it an insult or a compliment?
This coming from a fantasy buff haha!
One more post on blanketing:
I blanket my 15-year-old TB because:
1. He’s got arthritis in his hind legs and it helps keep his joints happy.
2. He’s got kissing spines and needs the extra warmth to help keep his back relaxed and painfree.
3. There’s no run-in in his paddock for him to take shelter in.
In his younger years he went naked and did just fine. Now that he’s older and has issues, he can use the extra help. I’d prefer not to have to deal with blankets in all their expensive, mud-crusted, manure-scented glory, but what the heck? If they keep him sound, comfortable and moving freely, it’s all good.
The AI issue for TB’s has had a huge airing here because of the Equine Flu issue. I know it is something a lot of you probably shake your head at as it is a vaccination you can routinely give, but it has been devastating here.
Because it came in through quarantine with the TB shuttle stallions, and because it was spread further by desperately getting mares to the studs etc there have been a lot of people asking why can’t they just AI like the rest of us.
We have been told by the TB people it is not just an Australian decision. If we allowed it, our horses wouldnt be recognised in international studbooks. We have also been told it is to stop certian stallions dominating because they could serve so many more mares. And we have been told it is because of fraud.
Well our (FPS) stud book puts limits on the number of breedings stallions can have, we dna test everything, which gets you over the flooding and fraud issues.
But interestingly was talking to a STB guy who said they have moved away from importing frozen (still use chilled) and do shuttle in stallions, they just use them for fresh AI instead of sending the mares – so you still have the quartine risk.
Rugs – Hmmm. Australia is Rug central!
“What would you do if someone ran out to your place tomorrow, waiving a paper saying you were mistreating your critters when you know full well that wasn’t the case?”
Oh, the joys of this.
It’s happened a few times to the owner of my yard. I’ve mentioned before that she has separate land and a further set of stables for all her retired horses? You would not believe the number of times she’s had to go out there and explain things to an RSPCA officer. She’s seen the same person a few times, I think, and actually made a pretty good friend out of them. The RSPCA hate dealing with silly claims by the non-horsey as well.
It’s pretty simple, although not at all enjoyable, to ahve to go down there and explain that the pony is skinny because she’s 38 and has digestive issues and and that gelding is a little off-looking because he HAS NO TEETH and it’s probably his last winter. Look! here’s the medicine we have to mix up and feed to her 3 times a day, and all this special food we have to buy (YO does this and it’s not even her pony!). They have to call out the little mare’s owner. Even the VET had to be dragged out one morning, just to prove the pony was under his care. It generally sees off all claims when the pony has a matching set of pink rugs and headcollars.
We’ve also had complaint calls about a lame horse in that field. She’s lame due to an old injury, and will never be sound, but yanno what? She’s living out her days happy and fat in a humungous pasture with all her friends.
And my YO has never driven a tractor at anyone. Odd, that.
Blackfluffyhorses
Just read your post on AI and EI. On the subject of TB breeders etc(or any breeders) not using AI as a primary method of reproducton for stallions located overseas is madness to me. I think that changes need to be made by the Australian goverment and the international TB society to legalise AI throughout different countries with no penalty to breeders for doing so. To me AI is a safer way to go. It would also give anyone access to any stallion in the world thus avoiding your concerns of one stallion dominating. Because there are so many good sires worldwide. Who knows what kind of nasty virus could come in next breeding season or in the future?
As for the initial outbreak of EI in Australia it came from the quarentine station in Sydney and was subsequently spread throughout Sydney by recreational horses. At this time an international olympic qualifying event was being held in Warwick QLD which some horses from sydney travelled to, thus starting the spread in SE Queensland, not primarily through the transfer of mares to stud.
I am well aware that proper biosecurity measures were not in place or this thing would never have got out. This is a subject that has personally touched me as we have been victims of EI. We are hobby Harness racing trainers who have spent a large amount of money on 3 service fees for yearlings we have just bred. We wont really know what kind of effect this will have on their future race performances.
That being said i know that what you put in your post does not necessarily reflect your own views. Maybe FHOTD should do a post on AI versus natural service? Hope you get to read this.
There are NO grey areas in this matter- it is a horrible HORRIBLE “business” and, along with PMU farms, should be made illegal.
Since when is it in any way right (or even sane) to torture animals (is anyone going to tell me ripping a four day old foal off it’s mother is OK?? That the mare will be fine with that??
Obviously never bred a foal then!!) for our own fancy- this is not anywhere near touching on vivisection (which I do not agree with on principle but do not consider myself well enough informed on matters to pass real judgement) this is up there with Mengele!
How in the name of God is it OK for a mare to lose her own foal just so selfish, greedy, LAZY people are able to raise their own little darling whose mummy dies or even worse, is going back into the show ring??
You breed form mares when they have finished showing, you do NOT get to have your cake and eat it!!
Strange that the European Race Industry manages just fine without these terrible places- our legislation would not allow them to exist!!
I hope this woman and as many other farms as possible get put straight out of existence.
If you have an orphan foal and you cannot find a mare who has lost her foal you get on with it.
It’s hard work- who said keeping horses and breeding was easy??
You don’t want or cannot do the work, give the foal to someone who can.
And whilst we are still on the subject, buying the discarded foals is NOT helping- let them kill them and make no profit, then send the whole story to as many papers as will buy it- imagine how pictures of the poor deliberately orphaned foals would look- foals are SO appealing.
Then you can start on the dairy industry who does exactly the same thing so that you can have your totally USELESS milk in your coffee!!!
Honestly the human race is such a screw up I wonder how we survive.
All these stories of the AC being sent actually makes my glad. It shows that some folks still care.
I know for a FACT that foals raised on milk replacer are JUST FINE.
A friend of mine had a mare reject her foal just last year… guess what!
They rigged an igloo cooler full of milk replacer and and it worked beautifully. Taught the foal how to operate it, I think they altered the nozzle part, and all was fine.
The ONLY benefit I can see of having an actual MARE on site is for behavioral and social reasons.
And if you have the foal out with the other babies, it will get plenty of that.
If it’s alone… well, I can definitely see the advantage of having a nurse mare.
But c’mon.
That woman is nuts and we all know it. Who tries to run authority figures down with a tractor??!!
horror-fied said…
oops, i meant this:
All Breeders Beware the SPCA!
got my UBB and HTML mixed up. sorry!
———————————-
I read that thread a few weeks ago! Thought something sounded fishy. A lot of people think she’s wonderful.
The igloo idea is at http://www.shortassets.com/igloo.htm
Not sue if the link still works, but it was emailed to me this spring and I saved the email.
I’m much more comfortable with embryo transplant, where the foal is carried and raised by a surrogate mare. To me that makes more sense and is much more humane than the nurse mare industry.
Also that way you can have the bloodlines you want and the fancy show mare can go on about her business.
Although I haven’t been to her farm recently, I have known Sandy for years. The last time I visited (which I will concede has been a couple/few years), the horses were well-cared for. They were not underweight, there were plenty of round bales of hay ~ in the pastures/paddocks with the horses, as well as outside to be fed when needed, & they were grained. I walked all over her farm (including back fields) & saw every horse on the place. The barn was clean & the horses appeared content. I don’t recall how often the bucket babies were fed but they had plenty & none had any hesitation with drinking their milk replacer from a bucket. I can’t post a photo here (I don’t think) but here’s one pic I took of the bucket babies. [IMG]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v422/VickiGaudreau12345/Friends/BcketBabiesb.jpg[/IMG] I have others that I’m trying to find but they may be on an old hard drive.
While I can’t speak for the situation at hand, because I wasn’t there, I can say that the Sandy I know, truly loves her horses & would do whatever she needed to do to make sure they were cared for. I’ve been involved with rescue for years. Those of you who know me, know that I have a big mouth. If I had seen a problem with Sandy’s horses, I would have hesitated to say something.
If I still lived in NJ, I would drive up to Poughkeepsie & offer my support to Sandy & Len. Since I live in Ohio now, I’ll call & ask if there’s anything I can do from here to help.
There are plenty of folks who condemn those who operate nursemare farms just on “principle”. I hope they never lose a mare & have need for one. I can recall a few “attacks” & campaigns against Sandy in the past, solely because she had nursemares. I can also recall a very big & nasty stink, & quite a bit of controversy, regarding a nursemare foal rescue, several years ago, so no one is immune.
Each of us has our own idea of proper horse care. I’m sure there are plenty of folks who’d want to crucify me for neglect just because my Arabian stallion sometimes gets dreadlocks in his mane because I don’t always brush him very regularly, or because my horses are out 99.9% of the time (unless it’s cold & wet or someone needs to be in for some other reason), or because of this or that. To some, just making sure their horses are fed & watered is appropriate. For others, a horse must be stalled 20 hours of each day, be blanketed in winter, have the vet called if he blinks wrong… & each may think their way is the only right way. I don’t think there is only one right way but there should be a minimum standard of care. I’m sure I’ve made my point. *blush*
For those of you that think there are never abuses by authorities & those in positions of power, you might search COTH for the thread about a situation in Sumner County, TN, with some Arabians. While most authorities may have pure motives, there are those will abuse their power, for whatever reason. That’s just human nature.
Sorry for such a long post. Those of you who know me also know that I sometimes talk alot. *blush*
When my mare lost her foal to neural complications, we had put an ad up for her on the website you put up for foalless mares and orphaned foals. I was actively looking for an orphaned foal up to a month after she lost her own, however, there was none to be found. I’m sure I’m not the only mare owner who tried to help an orphaned foal without luck. There really needs to be a better system in place for all those mares that lose a foal to natural causes to find a foal who lost its mother.
>>For those of you that think there are never abuses by authorities & those in positions of power, you might search COTH for the thread about a situation in Sumner County, TN, with some Arabians. < <
Uh, those horses totally needed to be confiscated. That woman had a zillion horses, no way to properly care for them, feet weren’t done, horses were thin, nothing was dewormed…that was a wreck. The authorities were not “picking on her.” She was an old lady who couldn’t possibly care for the, what, sixty horses she had? And they weren’t cared for.
I’m glad to see the info on the nursemare babies. It’s so amazing how such an industry can have such ugly skeletons and it should be exposed. I’m a true lover of the TBs but lately I’m so saddened by how throw away they have become. Their astronomical breeding fees, sales prices and in the end the horse doesn’t run and is sent to the auctions and the lucky ones become “rescues” and many find a loving home.
Then hearing about the TB nursemare babies (PMU also) and the “need” for the mares only to find the babies are thrown away or slaughtered. Do these farms really need these mares?? After visiting Last Chance Corral I’m not so sure. LCC does an awesome job nurturing those orphan babies. Visit if you can. It’s something everyone should experience. I think Victoria is fanastic in what she (and everyone) else does to save these babies (and other horses). I have visited three times already and have adopted a fundraiser horse who is awesome! Kudos LCC!!
barngal, who did you adopt? ; )
A great alternative to milk replacer (which can cause diarrhea) is good old goat’s milk. A neighbor of mine, who had a mare die after foaling (prolapsed uterus), also kept a small herd of Nubian goats. The foal grew strong and healthy, on a natural food, and later went to a very good home.
I knew about the nurse mare foals situation, as some friend of mine once adopted two nurse-mare foals. They had a lot of problems with one of them from the milk replacer.
Lauren, sorry I just saw your post. I adopted the two year old Cool Conclusion.
barngal, how’s he doing!!! Email me at missimplicity @ gmail.com. I
was the one who rode him for his first time. ; ) He was such a gem,
I tried to get my summer camp to take him so I could train him but
their insurance won’t allow green horses. How big is he now?? Send
pics!!!
Lauren, I sent you an email but it was sent back. Tried another but if you don’t see one come through mine is planter68@gmail.com
horse racing stables…
Congratulations, you just earned yourself an entry in my feed reader, great blog….
horse racing stables…
I don’t comment often, but I do like your blog….