The Girl Loves Horses

Much has happened since I last posted.

I had a really bad couple of days at work.

I thought I was gonna have a meltdown on account of trying to get things going faster and then suddenly not having anything to do, but that has been reconciled.

My friend and protégé Erin is having her share of difficulties getting started at the racetrack – nobody wants to use her until she has some experience and she can’t get any experience unless someone uses her – and I have suddenly been too busy to help her. The bad horses I was getting made me believe I was causing them; by just agreeing to help the wrong people, or by being inattentive and preoccupied.

I was having trouble communicating my desire to get paid for my work. That issue resolved itself into having even more trouble getting paid, but less trouble communicating about it.

Finally everything broke through and I feel like things couldn’t be better and to top it off, people are thanking me for all kinds of stuff. The money is still slow, but the economy has hit us, too.

It has been cloudy and rainy for a few days and began to rain just as things were winding down Friday morning. My clients are not quite fast enough to enable me to get on 10 or 11 a day, but that has been my choice. I love the people I work for, and feel that it’s somehow wrong to bark out “rush rush rush” all the time.

It can’t be all about money for me at work. It has to be about the horse. I want to ride them to the track and back to the barn and I don’t like people having to lead them down there for me and switch off at the bottom of the hill. If, to do it consciously and without getting all flustered means taking those few extra minutes helping tack up or riding back and forth, I’m happy with that when the people I work with have done what they can to have everything go smoothly.

I’m not getting on six before the break every day as I wished. But I’m satisfied because I let go of my own self-pity long enough to say what I needed. The extra effort to make things go smoothly for me makes me feel appreciated, and I think that is all any of us really want, more than money.


So YESTERDAY…NO, THE DAY BEFORE yesterday, I went out galloping with Erin, who had asked me to help her get a summer job at the track and is now attempting to get up to galloping. She’s too big to be a jock, but loves the track and racehorses - at least so far, better than anything else. She’s galloping a horse we call Captain that is a little too green for her. He isn’t bad, but he won’t go forward. Looks to be that although he's been gelded, his testosterone is still elevated, and especially with male colts you really have to get behind the engine and get them to scoot forward.

The thing about us humans is we like to use our hands to hang on, and most of us, to do this, must lean forward to have a grasp of some part of the horse. It doesn’t come naturally to lean back. Still, it makes more sense to do this when on horseback. That is, if you are short of the level of impulsion that you desire.

If a panther jumps on the horse’s shoulder, the horse will duck away, either left, right, or backwards. Thousands of generations of horses have learned this at the cellular level; it’s a reflex just like jumping when frightened. Lots of weight on the shoulders begs that reflex.

On the other hand, if the panther jumps on the horse’s ass, the horse goes forward.

So it makes sense to get back on the horse’s ass to get it to go forward, except that our instinct is to reach for the closest thing. So we reflexively lean forward and grasp the horse’s mane. In doing so, most people allow their entire body to shift forward – from the hips. But that reflex actually threatens to trigger the horse’s reflex. Or worse, it does trigger that reflex and the horse winds up running free and unhindered probably somewhere in the direction from whence the two of you came.

Older horses who have learned “all about riders” are incidentally kind enough to overlook the mistake, opting instead to go faster. (Actually, that's a sort of tounge-in-cheek joke; because half the reason so many novice gallop people get run off with, only to hang on more tightly, only to get run off with even worse, and on and on... )

It’s difficult to resist the impulse to hang on in that fashion, and it takes a certain amount of inner thigh muscle development. You have to be able to sit with your ass back and your feet forward. That’s at least part of why you can tell someone what to do, but they will look like they aren’t listening; they think they’re doing it, or they’re trying to do it, but it’s just not there yet.


So Erin is riding a bit too far forward and horse is confused. As soon as she gets her center of balance farther back on Captain he’ll go forward instinctively, then he’ll have learned something, too! Then she can stop clucking and tickling him with her stick; right now he has no idea why she is doing this.

After she gets it down pat, she probably won’t remember how to do it the wrong way, but until she does, the horse cannot learn what she wants.

Bear in mind, he also probably wants to play and maybe be mischievous, because after all, he’s a young horse and that’s what’s fun about being a young horse; telling jokes and being spontaneous. In fact what's happening with Erin is that Captain thinks she's playing a game and he's honestly trying to accomodate her. He has no concept of the reality of racing looming in the near future.

I shoudn't digress so far, but I want to add that when you change the scenario it changes the dynamic; place Captain beside anther horse for a week, and his attention will focus on the other horse as playmate, and allow the rider to play a more dominant role as coach.

Cassie has the same problem when she rides him, although she has more hours in the saddle and is a little farther along than Erin. Nobody wants to let the horse’s head go but it's awfully hard to steer when they get behind the bit, which is what Captain is doing. Learning to play with the rider instead of gallop can be counter-productive. Nobody wants a racehorse that tells jokes and is spontaneous when the objective is winning a race.

Poor John Holder needs Junior to pay for his oats in five months, not plod around bobbing his head and kicking the air!

Which reminds me that Captain is a beautiful gelding. I took a video of him with Erin aboard.

And that brings me to the next exciting event of late; that this young woman actually came to visit when I invited her over. I wanted to tell her about my career and how it sucked. No, no, actually it didn’t suck; it was fantastic and I’m so glad to have had it. But my career was about experiencing life and learning to ride any horse, as opposed to getting somewhere or becoming someone – which I still managed to do in my own little way. Oh, yeah, and having something to write about (which I haven’t even begun to do!)

So, Erin comes over on, um, Friday. A nineteen year old person might actually be my audience. It’s one thing to talk to a group, but another entirely to hang out one-on-one, at least for me. I’ve always been nervous and self-conscious about that; still she managed to put up twith me. She stayed couple of hours and I showed her all my photos and tols her about my career. After she left I realized I never said a word about being a jockey and never showed her a win photo.

The last thing I said as she was leaving was; “if you got nothing else out me jabbering at you for two hours, just know two things: first, when things suck or something bad happens, you are not alone. Whatever has happened to you has undoubtedly happened to someone else, somewhere else, at some other time. Second: when it’s good, it’s really good.”

So the next day (Saturday) she agreed to take a horse to the gate for someone she didn’t know, from the receiving barn. Everything bad that could happen happened, except for she didn’t get injured.

It was schooling race time, so he had to tell the trainer she couldn’t jog him to the gate (I guess the horse was gonna be too tough and he didn’t want her to gallop it) then she got on the track and the horse was wheeling or something and she asked Barb to help her, and Barb (the Outrider) freaked out and sent her back, after a tongue-lashing about not picking up receiving barn horses with a provisional license and anyway she (Barb) used to have the horse and it was a flipper, and what the hell was she going to the gate for?

Naturally word spread like an oil spill to poison half the back side with; “what the hell was that girl thinking?” and now she gets to carry that stigma – of having done something stupid.

Nobody seems to remember when they were just starting out and they were the stupid one. Either that or else our "village" uses strong language and sound reprimands to "raise the child". Still, I honestly think there’s an element of satisfaction whenever somebody new blows it; people have only one way of thinking, and that is, if one does something wrong, it’s bad. So when somebody new does something wrong, everyone else is happy to point it out to mitigate the seriousness of their own past offenses (which nobody remembers but them anyway).

As far as I’m concerned there is no wrong, when you are starting out. Or if there is, there's at least no bad. And there’s no right, either. There’s only trying to do whatever you can, and that is all positive, as in; it’s a three-dimensional event. Erin’s acting on her dreams and that’s a good thing. When you start with no prior experience of how to go about something, you have to make mistakes, and almost invariably that’s the first thing you do.

You have to keep going out there with the willingness to bounce left and right if you want to find the center, and bouncing left and right is bound to put you in out of bounds territory. There’s no such thing, in my opinion, as shame in making any glaring mistake. You can do wrong but it doesn’t make you bad. And you can do right and wrong at the same time, even if you are the only one who sees the right part (and you probably will be).

Anyone who does everything right the first time without introduction is lucky. If they never miss they’ve never learned. And I suppose it’s true, too, that they may have never needed to learn, but then so is it that they are lucky. They are the Lucky Few; they don’t even figure in the bell curve. The rest of us could lighten up.

I couldn’t wait to tell Erin how pumped I was that she took the initiative, but she left after that and I never found her till the next day. I told Barb I was helping her and that I was glad that she tried to do something even if it was wrong. It tells me how committed she is, that she could take that bold of a step (for readers who have no sense of what galloping out on a racetrack is like that was one scary thing to try. Some veteran gallop people will not seek work out of the receiving barn).

She doesn’t have any direction yet, though. If she’s anything like me she’ll probably go back to school later when her idea gets a little clearer and she knows what’s out there.

Anyway, I saw her the next day (Sunday) and told her. And in the meantime, Lori’s horse Casey’s Girl won, which is really great because Casey’s education was very incomplete. She was mainly conditioned on the equiciser at the farm. She was very fit but not very educated; not even to do what she would naturally do when placed beside another horse, which is test her speed against it. We put some time into teaching her and encouraging her competitive spirit, and it paid off.

And now Lori can afford to pay me off. We counted roughly thirty gallops since the last time they wrote me a check. So that’s another $300 in my accounts receivable column…

While Erin was visiting, I took her down to the house I bought in ’07. She said it was “awesome”. This morning she asked me if she could show it to Walter, so she really did like it. I told her I was gonna have a bonfire over there, and they could come. Maybe Wednesday if the weather is OK. I have tons of brush and tree limbs that have I have to get rid of. Come to think of it, I better sharpen up my axe and get out the saws and so on…Maybe I can get a little help moving and chopping brush!

It’s been very rainy the last two days, but I’ve been still working. The track surface is holding up unbelievably well; very few wash-outs. The only thing I’m not happy with is that a very small filly that Danny has working with (whom I call “Butterball”) seems to be sore somewhere. I’m hoping it’s only her feet, but she stumbled all over the place yesterday. She needs some shoes, and she needs him to take the warning seriously. I can’t let her get sour – he already has one young horse that has really sore feet. I got on her one day and I thought “she could flip over, and I wouldn’t blame her”. I don’t want to try to make a horse go if it doesn’t want to. I only like making horses go that want to.

Well, speaking of going, I’m gonna sign off. I’m tired and I want to sleep an hour before I go to work. But it’s been good lately. Really good.

The Post That the Post About the Post Was About..

It's two days later....

I can always tell when I am stressed beyond normal; I don’t sleep much but I don’t feel tired (good) an dI have a host of other physical symptoms. I’ve noticed this since I was a kid. I just have too much going on. There’s a lot of noise in my head.

Money is #1 right now. The hardest thing to handle (at least for me) is not being able to keep my clients aware of how badly I need every spare second.

This is the story of free-lance galloping in a nutshell, so any novices might want to listen up – because you’ll be facing this as surely as you will face serious injury or death once in a while, and a lot more often.

The track opens at 7 a.m.

But if you are there, it opens at 6:54 or 6:55. That’s five minutes earlier than 7. If you get there in time to set foot on the surface at the actual opening time, that puts you returning from your gallop at ten past, or quarter past if you are higher up on the hill (farther from the gap). If you get your second horse ate quarter past, you can be on your third at 7:30. It’s not hard at all to finish four horses within the space of an hour. Seven before the break is easy; hell, I’ve gotten seven AFTER the break. That’s seven in an hour and twenty minutes. Surely I could get seven before the break.

But the way tings are currently going is; my first two horses are two-mile joggers; or my first horse goes with the pony and can’t go any faster than the pony. Thankfully this only slows the walking to and from part of the gallop. I’m not one to race my horse to and from the track; still, if I have the opportunity to walk the horse freely I can encourage it move purposefully, so for the most part, at least in my mind, the pony is a costly accommodation

It’s good for the horse to have a pony if the horse is in an unfamiliar place, if it’s balky or nervous or any number of reasons. But personally I’m familiar with the Mountaineer routine of getting thrown up, turned loose and tie on while on the move, so I don’t treasure the pony by any means. I tell myself I do when I have one, but unless the horse is bad I’m always lying to myself. On the one hand, you’re safe, but on the other hand, you’d better be because he won’t help you pay for your workman’s compensation. It’s an expensive trade-off with no guarantee.

It’s great for the trainer. With a pony they have a ride to the track and more control over the expensive investment they are charged with protecting and conditioning, so I know why a trainer would like a pony. Then again, most trainers who have ponies and use them daily also have expensive gallop people and offer workers comp. What I’m working under is slow ponies, no expensive salary and no workers comp.

That’s the great bonus about West Virginia; they have this great new Workers’ Compensation system that has matched the other states in comparable premiums, but they don’t require employers to actually have a policy. If you ask me they cut their own throats. Because if they had left things the way they were, with the low premiums they used to have, they’d have more people actually obtaining it. I had to let it go after I had been injured and earned nothing, and my premiums doubled. I gotta remember to send the Governor a video of me explaining this.

The bottom premium rate is based on twice as much as I earn, and four times as much as it used to be: Instead of 7-8K, the rate is based on a minimum payroll of $32K. And here’s the part that makes the wealthy laugh and the un-wealthy cry: my wage compensation is not based on a payroll of 32K; it’s based on my actual payroll of 15-25 K (15 when I get injured, 25 if I work all year without taking any time off for anything.) I’ve been priced right out of my range of affordability. Religious symbolist will love what I got every two weeks during my most recent disability period; $666.66.

And the pony isn’t helping me. Since everything moves slower when we factor in the pony and/ or the two mile joggers, and/or the not yet mentioned “we need to throw the same tack on the next horse”, “we’re waiting for the smaller girth – it’s on the one that the jockey is breezing”, “we need to clean the poultice off the legs yet”, “we gotta switch tack – this one has a loose shoe, and so on, and so forth, we’re talking about losing three fo the five minues we gained when we got to the track at 6:55.
What’s three minures, you might ask? Nothing. Three minutes is nothing. Six minutes is something; the track closes at 9 to be renovated (re-harrowed), but the reality is, it’s 8:55 when they stop allowing people through th egap. Anytime you create a cut-off; anytime you draw the final line and say noboy else can cross now, then six seconds is too late; never mind six minutes.
Here’s a word problem for math lovers:

On a normal day six horses go to the track in two hours. The first two take twenty minutes each, and the third has to jog two miles so it takes twenty-seven minutes. The first horse goes on at 6:55. The last one is finished at 8:02. The fourth horse is in another barn and it takes three minutes to get to that barn and get on the horse, and twenty minutes for the horse. That one is returned to the barn at 8:25. Same for the fifth horse (are you counting with me?). We’re on the sixth and last horse at 8:48, seven minutes before the cutoff. Plenty of time to get to the track and gallop around without holding up the harrows.

If we have to fuzzle around for three minutes with just two of these horses, we’ve shut down our window of opportunity for getting the sixth horse out. We’d only have one minute of grace to beat the clock.

Theoretically we make it, but in practice it’s a bit messy.

Three minutes becomes four minutes, five minutes and so on. Sometimes I’m waiting for a second rider so we can take a set (go together). Sometimes the horse has to go two miles the wrong direction at a jog and doesn’t want to jog, so I have to keep pulling it down from a nervous, hobbyhorse canter back into a proper trot. Most of the horses need some kind of warm-up whether the trainer says so or not. Sometimes the horse hasn’t been out for a number of days and I jog a mile before taking up a faster pace. I may or may not be asked, but I will do it simply because in my judgment (for any one of several reasons) it’s best.
Sometimes I have to pee. If I have time for the real bathroom I might go (cuz they have toilet paper) but if I’m short on time I find an empty stall and do like the men, only squatting. But most of all I find the things that stall me are those that happen within an outfit. The girth is too long and needs to be changed; the horse needs rundown bandages. Some other rider came and took the tack that was gonna go on my horse and we’re waiting for it to come back; one of the grooms or hotwalkers didn’t show up and now there aren’t enough people to do the work so I have to tack my own horse.
“We gotta get the poultice off before we send him out”
“She spread a shoe so we’re changin’ the tack to Bubba and you can get her later” (later WHEN?)
“I just have to get this horse in the (ice) tub and I’ll be right with you…”

I try not to get excited because it casts a pall on an outfit and everyone becomes either frantic when they see me or resentful of having been spoken to with a raised voice as in; ”hurry the fuck up! I got four more to get before the break!”

I’m not done with this post by any stretch of the imagination, and as soon as I get time again (like when it rains) I’ll finish it. But I was going to end it with:

You can bet that if I charged by the hour, it would be 40 bucks per hour. And I’ll give you ten-to-one that suddenly all my problems are solved.

But nothing’s that simple.
I have to try to get some work done on my house before Monday or Tuesday when it rains, so I might not write again till after.

The Post About the Post

My posting is almost as bad as my record of visiting with friends. It's as if there's never a good time. Right now I'm writing a post about time, and as soon as I find time, I will post it.

Saturday!

I get up at 4 a.m. and don't get to writing until 5:20. That's not so good.
Oops, I got tied up writing to a friend. Now it's 6 a.m. Looks like the morning is coming up fast and furious.
By the way, I want to thank my friend Charles Sage for championing my writing . I met Charles through this very BLOG, which he came across while searching for Jerry Norwood. It's very inspiring, first to know that there is actually at least one person reading this, and second just to hear that it makes a difference that I print a page.
So if you are out there, Charles, thanks cuz you've made a difference for me.
Also, I'm taking my Norwood article in to the man himself. Properly edited for disparaging content, heh heh. No, seriously....
I'll have to write my "great revelation" later. I had a great revelation about Mountaineer Park, but don't have time to reveal it right now.

Sleepy Bones and Downsizing at Mountaineer Park

Yesterday was so busy I crashed like a 747 when I got home. Used to be able to gallop 13 head without it taking so much out of me in a morning. Today I got 10 and my even my bones were sleepy.

Maybe it was just that I wasn’t concentrating on so many other things; I mean, I would just come home and nap, then take the bird for a walk, then read or play a computer game or my fiddle, or something. But over the last 5 years that has all changed since I figure if I want to retire from galloping before I get catastrophically injured I have to have something else that’s making money to retire to (because people like me never really retire; if we did our nest eggs wouldn’t last two years).

Chas and I had some discussion about it Wednesday. Since he and I are at opposite ends of the political spectrum, my way of going about things runs counter to his style. At one point I was going to get a certificate to be a Physical Therapy Assistant but changed my mind on account of I already paid 12k for my B.A. so what do I need to spend 15 more for to get a certificate? (That’s what it cost).

Forgive me if I mislabel so many Republicans, but most of my conservative friends outside the track always say “you gotta have a job”, for they are the Party of entrepreneurship as a rule. But Charles believes in having a job as in; you trade your time for money and make so much every week, and They (capital T), take care of you (little y).
Can you tell where I’m goin’ with this? I won’t waste our time; I’ll just say counting on someone else for your security is more and more like gambling every day, and I’m not gonna do it. I’m gonna count on me producing whatever I need to produce on my wits and ingenuity alone so I don’t have to have a fixed income and an employer whose employer’s employer says “this sector isn’t producing. Downsize immediately”.

So for the last 5 years or so I have been putting my hands into everything that I think I can enjoy doing to see what takes off. This is very time-consuming and also requires me to maintain a higher level of mental concentration than I’m accustomed to mustering after a hard day beguiling my animals into thinking I might have better ideas than they.
Most of the stuff I am putting together is Internet-based. Someday maybe this BLOG will make me enough dollars to support my website; that’s been up (though not populated or advertised yet) since ’05. Also, hopefully, to put back the roughly 10k that I’ve spent on “tools” and “learning experiences”.

I know, I digress, but this is a hint, like “hint, hint”…. Someday please populate my website and buy stuff that’s advertised in the margins so I can pay my bills, finance my crazy inventions and also do something good for the racing industry, especially retired race horses and disabled jocks. Oh yeah, and not have have moneymoneymoney on my mind 24-7.

And now for the heart of the matter; what I had intended to relate since I began this post.


Oops; looks like I no longer have time to relate that, because I have to get ready for work. I meant to remark about the utterly perpendicular downsizing here at Mountaineer Park. I’ll have to get back to this after I get home today; that is if I don’t have to work for Ed (we’ve got something like 500 St. Croix horseshoes coming in today, maybe. If they do get here, well, I’ll catch up mañana. But anyway -- cuts are flying so fast it feels like we might crash, like a 747, and not just for a 2 hour nap!

Later.

And They Think the Reality Show, "Jockeys" is Exciting...

I think I’m through for a bit on the no-pay owners, but the story probably won’t end anytime soon. In the meantime, I misplaced my billing records and couldn’t bill anybody. Now that I have recovered them I won’t have time to write statements and a post, but I’m gonna try.

The day before yesterday I took out one of my two-year-olds that Chas says that at my age I should stay off of. He hadn’t been out for a week on account of sore feet. I expected him to be a little hawky and sure enough he was ready for action, so we only backed up to the three-eighths pole. (If you have checked out my website, The Far Turn, that photo on the home page was taken at the three-eighths pole. The gap, or chute where you com eon to the track is just past the quarter pole, obscured by the huge maintenance shack in the right-portion. If you haven’t been to my website, maybe you would consider doing so now, hint hint…)

He seemed to be traveling fairly well and there was no question in my mind that we were gonna gallop, because I wasn’t going to gamble on my chances of staying aboard for anything less strenuous, and anyway, he wasn’t going to do anything less strenuous no matter which direction or what gait we went. And the gallop began smoother that I expected except for a little stiffness in the left front. I was determining that to be perhaps the slightly more sore foot when my equine buddy was energized by a horse on the inside fence breezing past.

We’ve nicknamed the colt Tommy, after his owner. Tommy took up the chase behind the breezer. WE discovered though, that Tommy’s left front, though sound enough to gallop on, was still painful enough to cause Tommy to thrust his bulk to the right at the same time in effort to bear more weight on the right side. I was already on one line (the left, with the right one dangling around Tommy’s knees) as we bolted out of the turn in a straight path to the outside fence. I jammed all my weight into the left iron in a panic to brace myself against the only time I can think of that he didn’t rubberneck on me.

Then the saddle slipped to the left. I remembered how the billets were torn just below where I wanted to snug the girth (there is a nylon strip that prevents them from breaking, but unfortunately this keeps people using them long after they would if they were only made of leather). On the way to the track I gave up trying to get to the hole above with the off hand summation; “I don’t need to cut him in half, anyway. They should be fine.”

There we were; him flying across the chute and me listing perilously acey-ducey thinking nothing but ****ing billets”, when he suddenly changed his mind and altered his course back to straight (dynamite!) only faster (****!). He ducked back inside slower traveling horses ahead of us, and took off. I really wanted to bail but the last 20 years have taught me that letting go is the easy part; safely hitting the ground is something we avoid practicing.

Thanks to many a day on Harry Hurd’s farm, where one learns never to take any situation too seriously, and turning a catastrophe into an opportunity is only a thought away; “If it slips to the left, it slips to the right”. Sure enough a thick hunk of mane and a few pumps on the right stirrup put us back in the middle and looking none the worse. By this time Tommy had either loosened up the soreness or else forgotten about it and was traveling at a medium clip, so after ascertaining my security I tried to feel him out.

A little caution on his part still, it seemed to me. I just sat quietly to see if he would tell me more, and down the backside he began to slow down. “ Maybe I’ll pull him up then, and jog back from here. Enough to take the edge off without too much pounding.”

Another breezer interrupted us and we finished strong at the wire.

So today when I took him out, he was again, just a bit sore, but feeling way too high to leave in the barn. At this point I have to scribble some statements out and go hit all my buddies up for money.

Happy trails to me!

Instead of Doing My Statements this Morning...

I related the story about the trainer whose owner had not paid the vet bill and the retributive (or compensatory depending on whose eyes you’re looking through) action taken by the vet. The first reply I got was “well, ya know what just happened to me? I made two installment payments of one-fourth of my personal vet bill, then I received a statement saying, essentially, that I only made one. So I asked the vet, and he checked his records. He told me; “Well, you’re owner didn’t pay his bill and it was about the same as your second installment, so I applied it to that.”

The vet paid the owner’s bill with the trainer’s money.

When the owner gives the trainer the money to pay the bill with, that’s fine and dandy. But where else in the world would someone solve the matter of an unpaid bill using someone else’s payment? That’s not only ludicrous; it’s probably illegal.


The second reply I got was -- and this was without my unsolicited prompting, which I realize is often not my nature to resist -- “Well, the owner is the one who should’ve paid up; because (note) the horse is the one that suffers. He just should’ve paid.” Actually, when the woman said “the horse” I synchronously offered that it was ‘the guy betting on the horse’ that ultimately suffers. I tend ot agree with her out of my gut, but since the horse cannot call for justice, I said the bettor, and I am informing you of this for a reason I will talk about further down the page.

So I rest my case so far on dealing with unpaid bills. If the name on the bill is Joe Schmoe, that’s who is responsible for seeing to it that the bill is paid, not Joe Schmee, Schmeye or Schmum. IF Joe Schmum is the Siamese Twin of Joe Schmoe, it’s still Schmoe’s bill to pay. No vet has the right to pay one person’s bill with another’s money.

We all know why the vet did what he or she did; because the trainer is there looking at the vet every day, and it is the avenue of least resistance to promote action of the bill-paying sort. If the vet has to collect from the owner, it’s just more work and more phone calls and more time out if his busy day collecting, and there isn’t a person who would want to deal with that. Better to simply be a physical reminder to the trainer to do the collecting. “No dinero, no servicio…”

It’s like a default state of not handling: Because what’s really happening is, nobody wants to ask for money. And here is the one fact that every owner surely has come to realize if they don’t have billions of dollars; that is, owning a horse is f***ing expensive (and owning a racehorse is so expensive it’s out of the range of all but the most committed.

You’re asking a living, breathing being with feelings and a personality to perform at 100% without ever getting a yes or no answer. On top of knowing that there is no such thing as the horse being aware that all the feeding shoeing, grooming, conditioning is expected to be repaid, is the trainer, the vet, the groom and the Industry knowing that if the horse doesn’t repay, the owner won’t own. This industry is starved for owner participation, but nobody says it out loud, and especially not to a potential owner. Too many people get into the business thinking it will cost perhaps the larger fraction of what it actually does, but when the bill comes in and the horse isn’t covering it, reality hits hard. Being an owner must be worse than having a gambling addiction; the thrills are fewer and farther between.

Not surprisingly, nobody wants to ruffle the owner about his pocketbook because when the frying pan gets too hot, the owner might get out of the pan but he’s not jumping into the fire like the trainer, to whom burning, one way or another is a familiar condition of life.

I’m getting the sense that just because I’ve been sitting here thinking and writing about this for the last hour or so doesn’t mean I should feel obligated to tie of any loose ends. This is one of those topics for discussion, and I have appropriately given the story a forum thread. I hope in doing so I might lure a few people to what might become a familiar site to them; that is, my website called the far turn (if you don't like my crappy popup hit the "x" at the top right where it says 'esc'.

But to close; yes, the horse is the one who suffers ultimately; not only its performance, but its care as well. For the same reason that the horse can’t answer yes or no to the simple question, “can you win, and if so, will you try?” for they have no voice, I’ve said ultimately the bettor suffers.
It doesn’t matter what the past performance lines look like if the beast gets its pre-race medications too late or too early, or not at all (say it can’t happen….?) The answer then is a foregone conclusion; “not today”. That puts the racing industry in a state of no integrity with the people it is charged with protecting, as I said before. Those with the voices can count for now, in lieu of the noble and playful and beautiful creatures we never get enough of looking at..

Oh, and finally, I was gonna do my statements this morning so I could give them out at work. But now I don't have time. Oh well; they probably don't have money anyway.

Who Owes Who?

This scenario didn't happen to me, but the other day I heard (yet another) story about a veterinarian who began regularly ignoring one of his clients. I don't know if that's the best way to put it; maybe not ignored; maybe prioritized the client further down on his scale so that the client observed that he was being ignored.

The client, a trainer, discovered that [i]HIS client, the owner[/i], was not paying the vet bills. In this case, as in most cases, the owner is billed directly for veterinary services. Apparently, the vet feels that the trainer is responsible for seeing to it that the owner forks over the dough. In this particular situation, the trainer was completely unaware of the status of the owner's account with the vet.

The vet will do what he wants; he chooses whom he will visit and in what order. The only exception is the window of opportunity for administering certain pre-race I.V. medications, and even then less- valued clients will be on the fringe. The trainer with the deadbeat owner will get his lasix after the one whose owners' accounts are in good standing. In the meantime, all of this is going on unbeknownst to the fellow in the stands who has squeezed out ten bucks for a Racing Form, a Program, a gallon of gas, a quart of coke and a meal of mustard-covered pork castings* on a roll. Maybe fifteen bucks. The point is, the horse could be that patron's choice.

Never mind the other factors involved in the race; we don;t know if he won or lost; the person that racing is charged with protecting and to whom we owe our livelihood has been ignored, and that's unnacceptable to me. If that seems unreasonable, I agree. But 'reasonable' is always slippery to define.

This is all hypothetical anyway, except for my opening scenario, which is real. All I am attempting to do is create an awareness for a higher level of integrity. For me there is no difference between obtaining and maintaining one's privilige to participate in racing. You have to demonstrate some level of integrity to obtain a license; you must demonstrate your committment to that integrity by paying your bills.

If you fall on hard times, is it your province to take down everything else with you? Your trainer, your vet, your blacksmith, their employees and associates? These people are within your sphere of stewardship when you take on the responsibilities of owner. If you do not maintain them you need to get out.

Notice I said 'do not' instead of 'can not'. Here's the difference: Nobody else "can" pay the owner's bills (especially if the owner's not payin' em!). They have their own bills to pay. Like the feed man and the straw man and the groom, the hotwalker, the gallop boy and so on and so forth. Someone else 'may' pay the bill for the owner, but then it's not about ability - it's a question of there.

The owner can always sell the horse to pay the bills, so there's never a 'can't' as far as I can see. It's always a question of willingness, with an owner. So sell the Nag, pay the bills, and return to the game when the money's good again.

Join a partnership and split the bills if that's your level, but don't ruin the game and leave the beast unshod and untreated and everyone else with empty pockets and a bad reputation because you want more prestige than you are willing to pay for.

*c'mon, it's a HOT DOG!