Kathy Stevens in 2001, co-founded Catskill Animal Sanctuary, where her love of teaching, her belief that education has the power to transform, and her love of animals come together. Kathy is the author of Where the Blind Horse Sings and Animal Camp, two critically and popularly-acclaimed books about the work of Catskill, and a frequent contributor to books, podcasts, and articles on animal sentience, animal rights, and veganism. She takes her message of kindness to all beings and the urgent imperative of veganism to conferences and colleges in the US and Canada. Kathy lives on the grounds of Catskill in Saugerties, New York, with her dogs Chumbley and Scout, and kisses many critters every day.

Where The Blind Horse Sings

Love and Healing at an Animal Sanctuary

By Kathy Stevens

Skyhorse Publishing

Copyright © 2009 E. Kathleen Stevens
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60239-669-2

Contents

Title Page,
Copyright Page,
Dedication,
Acknowledgments,
Foreword,
Introduction,
Part One - First Steps,
- 1 - - A Diamond in the Rough (One),
- 2 - - A Diamond in the Rough (Two),
- 3 - - Angry Man,
- 4 - - One Cold Bitter Night,
- 5 - - Boys, I Need Your Help!,
- 6 - - St. Francis of CAS,
- 7 - - All in the Family,
- 8 - - Welcome, Buddy,
- 9 - - Dino Finds a Friend,
- 10 - - Buddy's Big Day,
Part Two - The Journey Continues,
- 11 - - The Doctor Is In,
-12- - Every Day is Pigs' Day,
- 13 - - Paulie Comes Home,
- 14 - - Hey, Teach!,
- 15 - - Lunchtime,
- 16 - - Paulie the Yogi,
- 17 - - Road Rage,
- 18 - - Add Water, Stir With Love,
- 19 - - Where the Blind Horse Sings,
- 20 - - 207 Happy Endings,
- 21 - - Saying Good-Bye,
- 22 - - Welcome to CAS,
Epilogue: - The Journey Continues,
Bookshelf,

CHAPTER 1

A Diamond in the Rough (One)

A year after we moved into our temporary residence, we began in earnest the search for a permanent home. Our criteria were simple: seventy-five acres or more, a few pre-existing shelters, and a house on the premises. For our own convenience and sanity (and that of future volunteers), we also hoped to be closer to either Kingston or New Paltz, two small cities that were both thirty minutes from our current home. The area where we lived was nearly twenty miles from the interstate. One small, foul-smelling grocery store sold junk food and rotting fruit, and the only restaurant was a diner: hardly an option for vegetarians.

Much to our alarm, a million dollars or more was the going rate for farms of that size. No matter our early success at fund-raising, that kind of price tag was way out of reach. We quickly learned, too, that much of the value at that level was in the home that came as part of the package: wonderful eighteenth-century stone houses with six-hundred-square-foot living rooms, or nineteenth-century, five-bedroom clapboards with deep farmers' porches. There were only two of us. We didn't need a four-thousand-square-foot home. We kept looking.

Jim Nimal and his wife became members of Catskill Animal Sanctuary not long after we opened. Like everyone else in the community, Jim knew we were looking for a place to hang our shingle. Even so, I didn't expect what I heard when he called one June morning.

"I investigate welfare fraud," he explained, "and one of my cases is in Saugerties, near a former racehorse farm." I perked up. A training farm would probably have a huge barn ... now, that would be a bonus.

"I've gotten friendly with the owner, a guy named Charlie. He's pretty desperate to sell."

"Oh, really?"

Jim wasn't sure of the details, but he knew Charlie was anxious. With the next words out of his mouth, I was in my car and on my way:

"Kathy," Jim said cautiously, "it's in rough shape."

We'd seen quite a few places that were a little rough around the edges, so the comment didn't faze me. In fact, I was heartened, because I hoped that an eager seller plus a farm in disrepair would equal a reasonable asking price.

I pulled to a stop at the bottom of a winding, downhill drive and blinked for a long, long time. A mound of used tires — scores of them — sat directly in front of me. Behind them, a rusted horse van, an ancient excavator, a school bus on its side, an old camper, and cars from a bygone era had been brought to Fortune Valley Farm to die. The hill sandwiched between the top and bottom of the downward-sloped, serpentine driveway was evidently a massive burn pile, judging by the assortment of rusted, charred metal on its face. Box springs, metal chairs, paint cans, air conditioners, defunct lawnmowers, appliances of every stripe, including several stoves and refrigerators, had been dumped over the years by Charlie and his friends.

"Yeah," Charlie would later explain in his gravelly voice. "No sense paying to dump it."

But what a setting for a farm: gently rolling hills and an expanse of flat meadow — perhaps fifty acres — were flanked by wooded cliffs. Over thirty weeping willows surrounded a pond of about an acre, which was a mere hundred feet from a huge barn.

"Mind if I walk the property?" I asked Charlie, who sat in a blue vinyl chair perched outside the end of the barn.

"Go ahead," he said between long drags on his Kool cigarette.

The land itself was wildly overgrown with burdock, nettle, thistle, and loosestrife. The grass reached to my waist, making it impossible to judge the terrain. Though the fencing was rotten and largely collapsed, enough was standing to reveal how Charlie and his brother Frank had fenced the farm when they began a Standardbred training business in 1970. (In fact, the brothers had hand-sawed hundreds of the locust posts for their property after suppliers could no longer provide what they needed.) Thirty years later, however, this land would require far more work than a vacant piece of land would: months of cleanup by a small army, some serious demolition, and the rebuilding of roads would have to take place before we could think about construction. The pond was choked with algae. I surveyed the desolate scene, and was willing to bet that the well was seriously contaminated.

I hadn't even entered the barn. Why wasn't I driving away from this place?

Twenty stalls, ten on each side, flanked the wide center aisle of the big barn. Two large rooms, both roughly 25' by 40', had been extended from the middle, so that from the air, the barn looked like a giant plus sign. Though it lacked a hay loft, the barn had all the other prerequisites: spacious stalls still lined with rubber matting, a hay storage room, and an area large enough to double as a kitchen and feed room. But it took some doing to imagine that horses had once inhabited this building. El Caminos on cinderblocks, their hoods wide open, lined the aisle. Engines and tool boxes, tires and big metal hulking things that only car mechanics could name, thirty-gallon drums and barrels with assorted metal dotted the walkway. In fact, every step down the 135-foot aisle was impeded: walk around a rusty car, crawl under a group of planks on the four-foot aisle walls of the stalls. And then there were the stalls themselves.

"That's Jack's stall," Charlie said, pointing to the one that was jammed floor to ceiling with everything from framed prints to boxes of tools to cans of nails. Old mail and older clothing were strewn about. Everyone who knew Charlie knew the size of his heart, one that extended to people who needed to dump or discard old goods or to store the bits and pieces of a lifetime. Why rent a storage place, after all, when there were plenty at Fortune Valley?

Saddles and bridles, moldy horse blankets, and buggies were tossed into some stalls. "The Latrine, Past and Present" was the theme in other stalls: twenty toilets of various shapes and shades were tossed haphazardly in them. ("You need a toilet?" Charlie asked me at one point. Evidently he had been the recipient of dozens of new toilets when a local home-supply store closed. I declined his offer.) It was a toss-up as to which was thicker: the layer of dust that blanketed everything in the barn or the cobwebs in every...