UNDERDOG ON THE MEND
Former racehorse healing after nearly going to meat market
SHILOH, N.C. — Rockstar, the former racehorse, walked up to his new owner and put his head on her shoulder as if to say thank you for saving me from certain death, feeding me special food to help my digestion and making sure I take my ulcer pills.
Daniella Gaughan of Camden County reached over the fence and wrapped her arms around him for a big hug.
“He loves me, and I love him,” she said.
The 8-year-old thoroughbred lives with a gentle horse friend named Pedro. Rockstar gets plenty of hay, green grass to graze, a special food mixture with beet root to help him gain weight and 16 pills a day to heal his ulcers. He gets regular veterinary care and the farrier is coming this week.
Experts rate horse health on a scale of one to nine with a nine being too fat and a one or two being near starvation. Six is just right. Rockstar was a two.
“I didn’t realize the extent of how sick he really is,” Gaughan said. “It’s going to take more than I thought.”
Rockstar’s care costs several hundred dollars a week. She created a GoFundMe campaign to help her raise money. The mother of four plans to take on extra work, if necessary.
Gaughan has loved horses since
she was a child when she visited her grandfather’s Arabian horse ranch.
“It’s always been my thing,” she said.
The beauty of Rockstar’s long legs and muscular frame is still evident despite his bony angles. His chocolate colored coat and the reddish hue in his dark mane still
shine after a good brushing. He just couldn’t run very fast. Rockstar was a racehorse with a track name of Selfish Pleasure. Rockstar was his barn name, she said.
On June 22, 2017, Selfish Pleasure lined up in lane seven on a
track in Louisiana entering his first and only race, according to equibase.com, a horse racing website. He was a little small and a bit old for racing and it showed.
The dirt track was considered fast despite showers during the day. The purse was $8,000. When the gates opened, the other horses bolted away.
Selfish Pleasure instead ran “sluggishly” throughout the race, starting and finishing in last place, according to the account of the race.
His owners sold him in January 2019, and he ended up in a kill pen where unwanted, abandoned and discarded horses are held until they can be shipped to a slaughterhouse in Mexico, said Alicia Mahar, executive director of the nonprofit Circle A Home for Horses in Virginia Beach.
The horses are loaded from the kill pen into a big trailer for a 19-hour trip south, she said. About 70,000 horses a year go to slaughterhouses where the meat is sold for human consumption in countries around the world.
“The whole thing is so inhumane,” she said.
Rockstar was kept in a kill pen with a larger stallion who bullied, bit and kicked him causing serious injuries. The stallion had already knocked out the eye of another horse.
Mahar has a reputation for saving horses from kill pens. She received a video of Rockstar, saw his terrible condition and decided to save him.
“I’m a person who goes for the underdog,” she said.
She paid about $2,000 for the horse including his veterinary bills, a procedure to turn him from stallion to gelding and his care during a required quarantine. He finally arrived at her farm in the fall of 2019.
He was underfed, suffered from ulcers and had developed an anxiety to the point he presses his teeth on fence boards, a condition known as cribbing. It can wear teeth down to nubs.
She and her staff cared for him until he was adopted. His health conditions kept him from gaining much weight. The new owner could not afford to keep up the regimen of medicines and special foods and returned him still in rough condition.
Meanwhile, Gaughan was volunteering at the farm and became attached to Rockstar. She was determined to take care of him. She and her husband, John, a Navy retiree, moved from Virginia Beach in October to their new
Camden County home on 10 acres along a wind-blown rural road.
Last week they put up a fence around their pasture. Rockstar arrived on Saturday.
“The first day he got off the truck he hugged me,” Gaughan said. “Food and attention, he loves them.”
She began the daily, expensive process of nursing him to health and in a few months he could be back to full weight.
Rockstar was not such a good racehorse, but he is gentle and will become an excellent trail horse, she said.
Mahar was relieved when Gaughan adopted this not very fast thoroughbred horse who suffered so much.
“What a great outcome for him,” she said.