You know the old saying about there being two sides to every story with the truth lying somewhere in the middle? That’s probably important to keep in mind when reading today’s post. Some readers are going to be pissed off at me for it and I really don’t care. I’ve mulled this over for quite awhile. I’ve done a lot of digging. I’ve had it sitting around marinating for months and keep coming back to it. While HiCaliber is the common denominator in this situation, it only minimally involves them beyond the old birds of a feather deal, but there are a few familiar `birds’ in this flock besides HiCaliber. If you’re looking for snark, this probably isn’t the post for you. If you’re tacking up for another long campaign, I really hope this isn’t it either. I just felt the need to document a few things that have bothered me (and others) for quite some time. In light of the recent shit show out of Kaufman regarding the 25 yearlings from Bartons this is timely and now the whole CERF situation, it is indicative of an elephant in the room with Thoroughbred aftercare. I’ll get to that in a bit though. For now, put on your thinking caps and follow along. This is gonna get weird.
Rented Cop had a rather undistinguished racing career, never recovering his purchase price or even winning out his conditions . Still, he toiled away at various SoCal tracks between 2009 to 2012. While he started off in Maiden Special Weight company racing at tracks like Hollywood Park and Del Mar, he wound up his career racing for a $2000 tag at Los Alamitos. Looking at his form, it is clear he likely had some issues as there are large gaps between some of his races with one of those spanning 15 months, not even racing at all in 2010 before being brought back by the same connections. All this is easily looked up by anybody. What happened to Rented Cop since his last start on January 29, 2012 is where things get a bit complicated. It’s obvious he broke down to some degree that day as he was vanned off. The next time he is traceable was the above post which was made on April 2, 2012.
Rented Cop, soon renamed `Pepsi’ ended up at Premier Equine Rehab within days of being rescued. There was mention of a fractured sesamoid in one post and he appeared in remarkably good condition for a horse that allegedly came from a feed lot situation. Obviously a cute horse, he generated a fair amount of interest according to Jenny Earhart aka Premier Equine Rehab and was adopted out within a month. I should probably note that PER was not a 501c3 at the time but did take in OTTBs for rehab/rehoming. In a perfect world, this should have been Pepsi’s happily ever after and the most anybody should have heard of him from there on out should have been cheery updates, if that. I wish that was the case.
Even though Pepsi’s adoption was announced all the way back in May of 2012, he was pictured still at Jenny’s ranch and listed as `in rehab’ September. I do not know if his original adoption went through or if he was returned due to soundness issues. It would be easy enough to give the benefit of doubt if this was all there was on Pepsi. Sadly, the plot thickens.
By October of that same year, Pepsi was announced as being adopted again. I guess the fact that he was adopted as a trail horse means whatever landed him in rehab earlier was no longer an issue or at least patched over.
In January 2014, Pepsi was still alive and well, even if not quite in the same shape as he was upon intake. Again, it’s easy to give the benefit of the doubt as horses fresh off the track are usually in peak physical condition as far as coat, weight and fitness. Even injured horses like Pepsi are still going to look good fresh off the track and they will look much different when they fall out of fitness. I am not entirely sure where he was when this pic was taken or if he was still with his adopters. Sadly, the next time Pepsi showed up on the radar, there would be no benefit of the doubt as to his condition.
The next time Pepsi shows up on the radar he is emaciated and part of the Fallen herd. For those of you that haven’t been following the HiCaliber shitshow for years, the Fallen `rescue’ happened in February of 2015 and was a large scale rescue of mostly OTTBS out of Nevada. It was also the beginning of the end for HiCaliber as it seemed to be the turning point of where greed took over. However, that’s another issue for another day…or not. From what I am told, he was only at HiCaliber long enough for Jenny Earhart to pick him back up and HiCaliber merely transported him or her. So, a bit of a number fudge for them to count him as one of their rescues, but that shouldn’t surprise anybody.
Barely a few months later, Pepsi is adopted out once again. Surely, this would be the one that stuck and gave this horse a soft landing. Nope…
Yet again, Pepsi shows up in trouble. In December 2016 Pepsi showed up at Mike’s Auction. Auction Horses listed him as an `Appendix type’. Thankfully, he was spotted by another rescue and Ms Earhart arranged to have him bought back…AGAIN.
Once Pepsi was back in her possession, Jenny did a bit of damage control and assured her followers he was finally safe. However there are a few red flags in this little post not the least of which is that she slid in there that he had actually run through auction prior to showing up at Mike’s. Rather than enforce her contract, she elected to let him go for $800 to an alleged good home with no contract. Wow. The other problem with her post was the whole broken ankle excuse and saying he had been gone out of her possession since 2012. The above screen shots show that is clearly not the case. That horse bounced back and forth between adoptive homes several times according to her own posts. I’m not sure if this post was intentionally vague, but it almost shifts some of the blame to HiCaliber as `the other rescue that seized’ the Fallen horses. She neglects to mention she picked the horse up from them the very same day and it was she, not HiCaliber that adopted him out. For once, and only this once, they actually don’t have any blame in this situation. (we’ll return to their habitual fuckery on the next post). Let’s also not forget that back in 2012, when Jenny now says she turned Pepsi over to Fallen, her earlier posts had said he had been adopted out as a trail horse. So where is Pepsi now? Sadly his ending was not a happy one.
Pepsi’s next stop was a sanctuary/rehab place in Mount Shasta. The above communication is from their founder (No, the email was not to me) and tells us that Pepsi was put to sleep and the condition he was actually in. Hardly surprising given the number of homes this horse cycled through after falling through the cracks on a regular basis. I get that mistakes happen and that some adoptions don’t work out, but how many times does one horse have to hit a bad home from the same rescue? I wish I could say this is an isolated issue with Premier Equine Rehab but that does not seem to be the case.
Remember how I mentioned that at any given time I have several posts rattling around my draft folder in various states of doneness? This is one of those posts. I have literally been following up on this stuff for years as the odd disturbing things hits my radar. The above screen shots were the first thing about Premier Equine Rehab and Jenny Earhart that lifted my eyebrow. Michael Gipson is a POS kill buyer. For whatever reason, he went all in on the fact that Jenny sent horses to him in the past and he made them disappear. I don’t know if that is true or not. One one hand, Jenny denies this, but on the other hand Gipson insists it’s true. Neither one of them are well blessed with integrity so it’s tough to say. I’m merely laying this out for other people to make up their own minds on it. Maybe something more current will help them with that?
I am told that PER operates out of three, possibly 4 locations. The above pictures were taken at her Norco location in March. This is in line with what I have been told from more than one source about the level of care the less than high profile `saves’ get up until they vanish. What generally happens is that pictures are taken when the horses are fresh off the track and looking great and that’s it. Many of them disappear. I’m sure some are placed in adoptive homes or flipped or whatever. PER doesn’t really do a lot of updates on horses after intake. I’ve already posted about PER offering up a rescue horse as a broodmare all the way back in September of last year. I said then that there were some things bothering me about them and it seems to just keep piling up.
Does anybody remember this old buckskin stud that Manson manifested last June? He appeared to come from Salvador’s place or one of the usual suppliers anyhow. The village idiots dutifully handed over their lunch money for him (there was another fundraiser showing close to $500 for him) even though he promptly went to Premier Equine Rehab. Naturally they asked for money for him as well which is totally normal for a rescue to do. The only problem is where is that horse now? He’s dead and he was dead very shortly after arriving at PER. Was he one of the trailer corpses? I have no way of knowing, but apparently that’s a thing with PER.
I’m sure most of you have seen the horrible publicity racing has been getting lately. Actually racing always gets more than its fair share of bad publicity and it’s not always deserved. Right now, aside from the breakdowns at Santa Anita, there is a a lot of propaganda going with the slaughter issue at racetracks. If you were to believe the mainstream media, horses are walking straight off the track to slaughter and that’s rarely, if ever the case. Thoroughbreds actually make up a very small percentage of horses shipping to slaughter and the ones that show up in kill pens have often been off the track for years. The problem is that they are easily identifiable due to their tattoos. Because they are a higher profile breed and stir up a lot of emotion in people they can often make it rain as far as funding when you do pluck one from a kill buyer. What many people fail to realize is that the race industry takes an anti slaughter stance and many tracks have anti slaughter policies in place. Such is the case in southern California. All Magna Entertainment owned tracks have adopted an anti slaughter policy that states: ” any trainer or owner stabling at an MEC facility who directly or indirectly participates in the transport of a horse from a MEC facility to either a slaughterhouse or an auction house engaged in selling horses for slaughter will be prohibited from having stalls at any MEC facility.” You can read article about it at this link. This is all well and good as far as being able to say that the industry is taking an anti-slaughter stance, but it’s all just for show in some ways. The people that are ethical and would never send a horse to slaughter or a flipper don’t need those policies to do the right thing. They do the right thing because they care. The ones that don’t care find a way around it and this has created racetrack rescuers/ horse launderers.
I’m not saying that every person or organization that takes in OTTBs or even specializes in them are shady. They aren’t. There are a lot of really good organizations that deal with aftercare for OTTBs. Then there are the ones that are the middlemen. The ones that exist to launder OTTBs. They take in a lot of OTTBs and aren’t as discriminate where they go. If they can rehome them, great, if not…well, there are ways to make them disappear and they are the layer between the racing connections and the `bad home’. That way if the horses do turn up in a kill pen or on a truck that flipped over, they don’t trace back to the track connections. The `rescue’ takes the blame and creates a plausible explanation for how that happens and makes sure the next lot they send, direct ships. Trust me, this happens and nobody wants to admit it or talk about it. How I’m told this happens is these horses are `retired’ with supportive funds. I’m told that this may or may not be the case with PER. I don’t know myself with 100% certainty. I do know that where there is smoke there is usually fire, or at least a spark smoldering, and for some reason I get inboxed about this rescue with increasing regularity. I am by no means saying burn them at the stake, but I am saying to ask questions. People should be able to ask respectful questions to any rescue and if 2 + 2 isn’t giving you 4 then ask more. The HiCaliber mess was years of inconsistencies and red flags for so many people and got so far out of control. We’re still putting out those fires and will be for the foreseeable future. I know that you can usually judge people by the company they keep and this seems to apply to PER. No, I’m not talking about Maggot because she’s nobody, but I am talking about the track connections, the trainer that signed Jenny’s license and the smoke around him. I’m talking about the HiCaliber connection which would be a whole other post just for that. She takes in a lot of horses all the time. She just participated in that large rescue of CERF horses. Where is the follow up on every horse? Where is Kenny from HiCaliber and so many others? Why is PER listed with Guidestar in Colorado instead of California? All I’m saying is ask questions and make up your own minds. There is a bigger story here that has little to nothing to do with PER, but this is a start. Somewhere in the middle of all this lies the truth.