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‘We Can’t Keep All Of Them’: Where’s The End Of The Line For The Bail Pen Economy?
This is the fourth and final piece in our series on bail pens. For more information about how the economy works, read part one here; for its impact on rescues, click here, and for a how-to guide for racing connections on how to deal with a bail pen situation, click here.
Lynn Sullivan, founder and CEO of the non-profit rescue group Thoroughbred Athletes, says she tries really hard not to look at bail pen posts on social media when she makes her morning scroll.
It’s too hard on her, knowing that in the big picture, bailing horses from those pens keeps their revenue flowing, but in the small picture, horses are suffering while being caught up in the system.
“Fortunately, I do have friends that go to the pens and take pictures and scan microchips,” Sullivan said.
In mid-August, Sullivan heard from someone who had scanned microchips on three 3-year-old colts at the Lockhart Auction in Lockhart, Texas, and was surprised that the numbers came back to Thoroughbred Athletes.
That was because Sullivan had already scrambled once to save them. The trio were part of a group of 27 horses she had pulled from a Kemp, Texas, bail pen in October 2023. The story she was told was that the herd had come from the farm of a Texas breeder who had fallen ill and left the horses loose, breeding and unhandled in a pasture. When the man died, Sullivan said the children sent the horses down the road to a livestock auction, and they ended up in the pen with a metaphorical gun to their heads – pay up, or they’re going across the Mexican border to a slaughterhouse.
Some rescues focus exclusively on “mass bails,” in which they fundraise to get large groups out of a broker’s pen, while others like Thoroughbred Athletes usually prefer to work on one or two horses at a time because of the huge budget needed to pay for bail, transport, and quarantine, and what are usually significant medical bills.
“We did a mass bail one time and it was a total disaster,” she recalled. “I’ll never do it again. They were all in bad shape and most of them were sick, and they were all scared.”
In this case, many of the younger horses were uncastrated and unhandled.
Sullivan had thoroughly vetted the colts’ adopter, and offered to pay for half the cost of their gelding surgeries. She later learned the adopter had taken the castration money, left the colts intact, and eventually gave them away. Sullivan was able to scrape together enough money to buy them from the Lockhart Auction, where they were set to run through loose (meaning they would be herded like cows due to not being halter or saddle-broke). Loose horses are cheap and preferred by dealers who sell into the slaughter pipeline. Thoroughbreds are in demand, and preferred by bail pens who can get top dollar for them on social media.
“I found out the morning of the auction and we had the money raised in time … but it was one of the most stressful things I’ve ever done,” she said.
The three colts are now gelded and slowly becoming halter-broke through Sullivan’s organization. But it’s hard not to wonder – how do we stop this cycle?
Think before you donate
If you poll people who work in the rescue world, racing industry stakeholders, or the general public about any given social or welfare problem, you’ll run into the same philosophical division Sullivan navigates – is it better to focus on the greater good, or the individual?
Bail pens make a profit on the public’s outrage at seeing a horse trapped in one of them. That’s especially true if that horse is a Thoroughbred, who had a publicly-accessible value or earnings total attached to them at one point. The obvious answer would be for industry stakeholder organizations to tell the public to stop paying the pens’ ransom.
But the cat is likely out of the bag on that one. In the past few years, kill pens have amassed such huge followings on social media that it’s hard to imagine their ability to reach new customers can be stopped. The Stroud Oklahoma Kill Pen Horses page on Facebook has 128,000 followers as of this writing; the Kaufman Kill Pen page has 47,000, and Last Chance Direct Ship Horses (a Louisiana-based pen) has 47,000. There are dozens more. On platforms where content is throttled unless users engage with it, kill pen posts get thousands of reactions, shares, and comments, racking up organic impression numbers advertising executives could only dream of. For every reader of this series, there will be many more users who encounter bail pen posts for the first time in the coming weeks and months and have no context for their claims that the horse in the photo is days away from being rendered for its meat. The newcomers will probably pay the pen to get the sweet, sad-looking horse out of there, and the cycle continues.
Even the rescue advocates we spoke to who were against spending the public’s money to bail horses from pens had to admit that if a prior owner or breeder of a horse is tipped that it’s in a bail pen, it’s their responsibility to help.
“The attitude some people have is not to ever give a kill pen money for a horse; but what if it was a horse that you knew or loved at some point?” asked Sullivan. “Would you just let it suffer? Everybody wants to say, ‘Well, they’re not going to slaughter, the pen’s just trying to make money off of it.’ And no, they may not go to slaughter, but they will go to another auction and another until they’re so depleted, they’re skin and bones. They just keep going through the cycle.”
Regardless of your personal philosophy on whether paying a pen is a necessary evil or part of the problem, you can probably find a horse rescue that aligns with your beliefs. The trick in the modern era is to make sure the organization you’re giving to is actually a well-run rescue and not an individual posing as one.
Check to make sure the group’s EIN is available and validate its status as a 501(c)3 with the IRS, check its record on watchdog groups like GuideStar, and read social media reviews of the group before you donate. Look for follow-up communications from the group showing outcomes for rescued horses, updates on funding needs for long-term cases, and adoption or sanctuary information.
Or, use the system the racing industry has already put in place to do that vetting for you.
The Thoroughbred Aftercare Alliance puts non-profit rescue groups through a rigorous process, auditing finances, welfare policies, facilities, and stocking rates before providing accreditation. It does not prevent groups from working with bail pens, or from accepting horses that someone else has bailed from a pen.
(Note: The TAA requires a group be in operation for three years and assist a minimum number of Thoroughbreds to qualify for accreditation and financial assistance through their program.)
The TAA also helps to fund the organizations it accredits, although its donations are only a portion of any group’s budget. While it is fully in command of its original mission to oversee Thoroughbred rescue groups, industry donations have not kept up with its hope to provide those groups financial stability – in the face of an endless stream of horses coming from bail pens or any other source.
Besides considering a rescue’s credentials and their policy on bail pens, consider standing in the funding gap. Executive directors of all the non-profits we spoke to said that one of their biggest challenges is people lose interest in donating to sustain a horse who’s already safely in a rescue’s hands. Many groups allow donors to set up recurring monthly donations which can lower financial stress and give them a predictable income stream to feed and care for rescues between intake and adoption.
Keep horses out of the pipeline
The most effective way to keep horses out of the bail pen spin cycle is to keep them from entering it in the first place. For horses exiting the racetrack or breeding shed, that means having a plan for where they will go before the day of their retirement dawns. That may mean sending horses to a non-profit or selling them privately; if it's the latter, that entails making sure potential homes are vetted, having the purchaser sign a contract, and making sure the person is charged a high enough price they couldn’t make a profit turning the horse around to a trader or a bail pen.
Obviously, rescue organizations are built to do this, and many of them come with the added benefit of a no-questions-asked return policy and frequent check-ups on the horse’s well-being after adoption. It’s easier for them to find quality homes for horses who are reasonably young, sound, and in good health, and their jobs become even easier when an owner is willing to send a horse with a donation to facilitate their care prior to adoption.
Private individuals can also vet potential buyers. (Skip doing this only if you’ve forgotten the Kelsey Lefever scandal of 2012.)
Tessa Walden is a longtime horsewoman and assistant trainer and is accustomed to doing this for horses leaving trainer Brad Cox’s string. For Walden, it becomes all about asking the right questions. How many horses does the interested buyer have already? Where are they kept? Who will be riding this horse? Will they be working with a professional trainer? Is this their first experience with Thoroughbreds?
“If they can’t tell you specifics on how it’s going to go for this horse in its life, what their plan is as far as if the horse doesn’t work out for their family … I feel like a lot of people don’t understand that you need to hear that from someone,” said Walden.
Someone who doesn’t have answers for basic questions like this may not have thought out the purchase fully and could be more apt to give the horse away quickly if they get over-faced.
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Suzie Oldham/TAA Photo
If there’s not likely to be a commercial market for a horse, there’s the alternative no one wants to think about. People who have worked in rescue for years will tell you that there’s a maddening discomfort in this country with the idea of euthanizing an animal who isn’t in immediate medical distress.
“There’s this idea that slaughter is the problem,” said Kyle Rothfus, co-founder of Mareworthy Charities. “The problem is that people are afraid of end-of-life for an animal in general. If people were more okay with making end-of-life planning for their animals, we wouldn’t have the problem that we have. But people want to pass the buck. Everyone wants someone else to be the person who fixes it.”
As it is, Colby's Crew Rescue, which specializes in mass bails from a Pennsylvania bail pen, estimates around 20 percent of the horses it takes in are euthanasia cases – but they’ve had to endure the stress of auction and transport for days or weeks before that is provided. And a non-profit has had to put out funding to bail, transport, and quarantine the horse before that eventuality comes.
Legislative options
For more than a decade now, some version of a bill called the Safeguard American Food Exports (SAFE) Act has been kicking around Washington, which would formally illegalize the “shipping, transporting, possessing, purchasing, selling, or donating” of horses for commercial slaughter, and would be designed to include an end to legal export of horses for slaughter in other countries.
The Thoroughbred Daily News’ Dan Ross took a look at the challenges the bill has faced earlier this year. Despite having large animal welfare non-profits like the Humane Society of the United States, American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and Animal Wellness Action fighting for the act, it has encountered opponents, largely in Western states.
“No one has any money in the welfare space,” said Caroline Howe, founder and executive director of the Horse Welfare Collective. “That’s why we don’t get anything passed in Congress. It’s not a lack of involvement – people call. There’s a huge amount of engagement. It’s not having the money to get in the door, and people are just giving money to rescues instead.”
It hasn’t helped that there isn’t uniformity on the issue.
The American Association of Equine Practitioners and the American Veterinary Medical Association have written letters to legislators expressing their organizations’ opposition to the SAFE Act, largely citing concerns that without a legal avenue toward slaughter, horses that would normally have been exported will be subject to neglect. HSUS says that in the time since American exports of horses for slaughter have dropped, so have the reports they’ve been seeing of neglect – though that conflicts with a 2011 Government Accountability Office report which showed a rise in horse neglect investigations in some states immediately after American slaughter plants shut down.
At least one bail pen operator has gone on the record in a Facebook live video (which was later deleted), saying that even if the SAFE Act was passed, she’s convinced exporters could just mark horses as riding horses on their USDA paperwork and get them across without much issue.
Still, rescues are hopeful that if the practice of exporting for slaughter became illegal, it could at least take some wind out of the sails of the pens.
“If the racing industry took a position that they demanded the borders to slaughter be closed at the legislative level, federally, it will topple this system,” said Tinia Creamer, founder and executive director of the West Virginia rescue Heart of Phoenix. “If the rescues are going to be who the industry relies on to take care of disadvantaged horses, I really think the industry should look critically at how important it is that we have funding. And we can’t do it as long as broker lots operate. And as long as the broker lots operate, owners that can be traced from a tattoo or microchip, I mean, they’re going to hear from those [lots].
“We were holding 178 horses in 2021 and now we’re holding about 100 – almost 100 horses less. And it’s 100 percent because of how broker lots are thriving. Yet we’re the organization being begged to take the horses that run through the broker lots after people want to throw them away.”
(It's worth noting that in 2021 The Jockey Club has publicly expressed its support for the SAFE Act, as has the National Thoroughbred Racing Association.)
Creamer figures that even if actual horse traders could lie to cross horses over the border, the passage of the SAFE Act would be national news and would reduce the pens’ ability to successfully threaten to ship horses, unless they wanted to document their intent to break the law.
What are horses?
Besides opposition within the horse world, a central theme that has stopped the SAFE Act from being passed is the same thing that allows horse traders and bail pen operators to do their jobs day in and day out without either being wracked with guilt or maintaining a sociopathic lust for death. It’s that for some people, horses aren’t pets, as the desperately sad social media posts about their terror and sadness would have you believe. They’re livestock, no different than the cows who become our hamburgers. And people who farm cattle (or pigs or chickens) aren’t eager to see a type of slaughter export suddenly made illegal, no matter what species it deals with.
Fundamentally, for many people who own backyard horses, people who run rescues dedicated to horses, and people who have never touched a horse before, horses have started to become something closer to pets than livestock. You don’t spend thousands of dollars on an emergency surgery to save a Black Angus. You don’t expect your neighbor’s Christmas card to include the pig that will become the holiday feast. And you wouldn’t be all that likely to donate to a Facebook fundraiser to bail a chicken out of the coop.
Hall of Fame owner/breeder John Hettinger pondered this question in a 2003 article in The Blood-Horse.
“How do we as an industry feel about our horses?” he wrote. “Are we horse lovers? Are these animals, who work for us in one way or another throughout their entire lives, sensitive and capable of trust, courage and generosity of spirit? Or are they fast cows without horns?”
Two of the three colts rescued by Thoroughbred Athletes from a Texas livestock auction enjoy some turnout time. They have been dubbed Waylon and Willie and, four months after their second rescue, are still being rehabilitated.
Thoroughbred Athletes Photo
For Jesse Bell, an Arizona-based horse trader, the same species can oscillate between “pet” and “livestock.” Bell prides himself on representing the horses he sells honestly, even when they have medical problems, and does most of his buying and selling privately or through local livestock auctions. He’ll send a load of horses to Texas for slaughter export now and then if he can’t find another option for them, but says that’s a minute part of his business these days. To do his work, Bell has to simultaneously see what a bleeding heart will want to see in a horse, along with the clinical practicality of what the animal in front of him is worth.
“Some horses you walk up to and think, ‘You’re just livestock,’ but others … it’s just different,” said Bell. “Pets, you love, but in the end, a horse is livestock. But most people don’t understand what I’m saying because they just wager on their heart.”
“Heart value,” is what he calls it when someone overpays for a horse.
One bail pen owner who spoke to this publication on the condition their identity not be used in print said much the same.
“I grew up with horses and I love horses,” the person said. “It’s not that I hate horses. I love horses, but I know we can’t save them all. Is it better to let them stand around and starve to death and suffer?
“I ship horses to slaughter, but I don’t want to eat one. I don’t want to see one dead, hanging on the hook. I don’t want to eat no horses. I can’t watch anything being killed, I’m just that kind of person. I can’t hardly kill a fly on my desk, I just know we can’t keep all of them. They’re not pets. No. My dog’s asleep by my feet. When I no longer want her or can have her or something’s wrong with her, I’m going to put her to sleep. I’m not going to take her to an auction and see who will give me $5 for her.”
And with that, the pen owner has to get off the phone. They have paperwork to fill out. Horses are coming in, horses are leaving. Just like every week.
