Horses of Unbridled: Valentine’s Day ledger: Racing’s debt to a dark brown mare

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By Susan Kayne

For Capital Region Independent Media

Autumn companions, best friends Angie and Touching My Toes share the season’s golden light.Courtesy of Holly Scism

In the early morning hours at Unbridled Sanctuary, when the world is still quiet and the frost makes diamonds of the grass, a dark brown mare named Time for Angie makes her rounds. She moves with the deliberate grace of one who has known both triumph and despair, checking on each member of her herd with the patience of a mother who understands that safety comes only through vigilance.

Angie was born on Valentine’s Day 2011, at a place called Loveacres Ranch in California. It was a working farm of 500 acres where the business of making racehorses occupied every corner, every thought, every action. Fifty to a hundred foals arrived each year, each one destined for the same path Angie would travel. The humans there said they loved horses, but it was the kind of love that measures worth in dollars and counts value in speed.

Life has a way of teaching its hardest lessons to those least deserving of them. For Angie, the lesson began early. At the training track, where young horses learned what humans expected of them, she discovered that approval came only through obedience, and rest was a reward that had to be earned through pain. Six furlongs of dirt stretched before her each morning, and like the other young horses, she ran because running was the only choice she was given.

After rain, Angie emerges luminous, her dark coat glistening with renewal. Courtesy of Holly Scism

The humans who controlled Angie’s destiny were many, and they passed her between them like a token in some great game of commerce. Twelve owners claimed her as their own: The Scalcione Family, Drawing Away Stable, Barry Ostrager, Mike Repole, Robert D. Bone, and others whose names appeared on papers but whose hands never touched her coat. Seven trainers directed her days: Robert Barbara, Paul Barrow, Michelle Nevin, Gary Gullo, Keith Nations, Mike Puype, and Walther Solis. Fourteen jockeys rode her in races: Kent Desormeaux, Fernando Perez, Rafael Bejarano, and 11 others who asked for her speed but offered nothing in return.

Thirty-two times Angie ran in races, earning $344,830 for the humans who bought and sold her future. Each race took something from her that could never be replaced – not just the strength of her muscles or the soundness of her legs, but something deeper, something that lived in the space between trust and betrayal.

When her tendons finally gave way at Belmont Park on July 16, 2016, it was not a surprise but an inevitability, like winter following fall.

The humans who had profited from her speed disappeared faster than morning mist in summer sun. They moved on to newer, sounder horses, leaving Angie and her companion, Touching My Toes, to face the slow death of starvation in Columbia County. The two mares stood together in their misery, their bodies consuming themselves to stay alive, their faith in human kindness as hollow as their sunken flanks.

Freedom finds its pace, Angie and Indy race through summer meadows, remembering joy. Contributed photo

But life, which teaches hard lessons, sometimes offers mercy too. Unbridled Sanctuary found them in March 2019, two shadows of what they had been. In the care of Unbridled, Angie and Toes have regained 700 pounds, their coats now gleaming with health instead of the dullness of malnutrition. Yet some deep wounds never fully heal. You can see it in the way they protect their food, in how they cling to their stalls in the colder months, and in the watchful wisdom in their eyes that says they know too well how quickly abundance can turn to emptiness.

Trust rebuilt, Time for Angie accepts a child’s gentle touch, bridging past and present. Contributed photo

As Angie approaches her 14th birthday this Valentine’s Day, she leads her herd at the Sanctuary with the gravity of one who has survived what others did not. She remembers everything – horses do, you know. They remember kindness and cruelty with equal clarity, carrying these memories not in bitterness but as a lived truth.

The faces from Angie’s past – the owners, trainers and jockeys who built their success on her speed – continue their work at racetracks across America. They celebrate new champions, pose for new photographs, profit from new young horses who trust them as completely as Angie once did. The industry that made millions from her labor has forgotten her name, but she has not forgotten theirs.

Guardian of the fields, Time for Angie stands sentinel over her Sanctuary domain. Contributed photo

This is not a story about forgiveness, for some debts can never be repaid. It is instead a story about memory – about how remembering can be both wound and weapon, testimony and truth. When Angie makes her morning rounds across the Sanctuary fields, each deliberate step carries the weight of racing’s betrayals, her graceful movements a living testament to an industry that demanded everything of her while offering nothing but abandonment in return.

The true miracle lies not in Angie’s survival, though that alone defies understanding. The real wonder is that this mare, who learned so brutally what humans are capable of, still lifts her head at the sound of approaching footsteps, still offers her trust like a gift unearned. She greets each new caretaker with a grace that stands in stark judgment of those who abandoned her, her generous spirit allowing fresh kindness to bloom in the same heart where old wounds live. It is a nobility that should keep racing’s power brokers awake at night, this capacity for forgiveness in one who has every right to turn away.

As winter softens toward spring, and another Valentine’s Day approaches, Angie’s story asks us to consider what we owe to the animals whose lives we shape for our profit and pleasure. It asks us to look beyond the gleaming surfaces of racing’s glamour to see the broken bodies and betrayed trust that lie beneath. Most of all, it asks us to remember, as Angie remembers, that every horse is more than the sum of its earnings, more than its speed, more than its ability to make humans rich.

Time for Angie in autumn, her dignity restored, her spirit unbroken. Courtesy of Holly Ann Impressions

In the end, this is a story about time – time for remembering, time for reckoning, time for change. Time for Angie, who gave everything she had and asked only for care in return, to be more than another forgotten casualty of an industry that measures love in winnings and worth in speed. Time for all of us to remember that the true measure of humanity lies not in how we treat our champions at their peak, but in how we care for them when they can no longer serve our purposes.

Time for truth. Time for change. Time for Angie.

Time for Angie stands sovereign against winter’s white canvas. Courtesy of S. Spohler Photography

Susan Kayne is the founder and president of Unbridled Sanctuary, an equine rescue on the border of Albany County and Greenville.

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