I am speaking up on the belief that selfish wealth cannot safely view itself as the only indispensable item in today’s world, and that animals should not suffer because of the laziness and arrogance that comes with placing one’s own self-worth above that of another living beings’, to such an extent that one trivializes the lives of creatures that few people are lucky enough to owe their entire career to.
I was a working student at Rockwall Hills Equestrian Center for a little less than six months. RHEC, as you might know, is operated by Ellen Doughty-Hume and the home of her Pegasus Eventing. Initially, the opportunity to work and train under a 4* rider was something I was optimistic and excited about, but after my time there, I’ve seen something very different from what I expected.
My original wish for 100% anonymity comes from how I have been told Ellen “handles” those who confront or contradict her, but after Ellen received a call from Rockwall Animal Services on Tuesday (which was not of my initiation, despite how she chose to react), she began to blow up my phone and declined my request to communicate via text (I was at the vet with my dog at the time and wasn’t going to answer a phone call), and then began to say things like, “I’m sure you know what it’s regarding”, and then, before she could say anything additional or threaten me, I blocked her number. I later learned that Ellen’s suspicion of me came from the egging on of her cronies (I’m sorry, this is where I’m going to be graceless. Cronies = blindly-loyal boarders), who know no more about horses and equine management than whatever Ellen has told them.
All of that aside, I’ll go on by explaining the first thing I witnessed that I knew wasn’t handled properly.
There is a dead horse rotting in one of the back pastures on the property*.
*Whether or not this horse is still there is unknown to me, as on Tuesday (8/15), Ellen caught wind of the investigations in action (again, not reported by myself) and could’ve removed the corpse by now. Regardless, photos are attached, and although the exact location of the decaying animal cannot be seen from the road, the field in which it is dumped can be.
This horse was a young OTTB, owned by Ellen, in the care of Ellen, named Real Beauxdean. While Ellen was introducing him to side reins (the side reins were irresponsibly tight according to those I’ve spoken to who witnessed the incident), “Beaux” reared, and flipped over backward, shattering his skull. Ellen did not call the vet. She let him bleed out (this is what bothers me—I understand accidents happen, I understand horses can be unpredictable, but what should go without a second thought is that you do not standby while a doomed animal suffers until it’s died, so you can save a few hundred bucks. That is despicable). When someone went to cut the bridle and reins off of Beaux, Ellen stopped them on the premise that the bridle was too expensive to cut (the bridle is a schooling bridle Ellen still uses on other horses today). Not cutting the bridle jeopardized the person who had attempted to cut Beaux free, by forcing the individual to unhook the bridle and side reins while Beaux thrashed, ultimately, until he went into shock and died in Ellen’s indoor arena.
Beaux was then dumped in one of the back pastures and poorly covered by a tarp.
This happened, from what I’ve been told, in late February/early March 2017.
The way I found out about Beaux and what happened to him was when myself and a few other working students were walking down to the lowest pasture (a pasture known to flood), to feed Ellen’s 1 – 2 year-old colts.
I could smell the decaying horse as we walked past and asked another student if I’d really just seen what I thought I’d seen, and they assured me I wasn’t imagining things. [edit]
Ever since then, I’ve continued to ask questions about Beaux, and only recently did I get the full story.
I have been told by Ellen to “ride through lameness”, which is something I refused to do and immediately got off the horse I was on when she told me to “push him, he’ll work through it”. I have witnessed Ellen riding her own horses while lame, and even competing with them.
Please let it be known that I have nothing against Ellen and she has always been very cordial and friendly with me. I’ve never had a confrontational or unpleasant interaction with Ellen, prior to the texting incident earlier in the week. It’s the treatment of the horses that I disagree with. (I never received a lesson from Ellen, either, as a working student, but that’s another matter altogether.)
I am not disillusioned, by any means, either. I don’t look at every animal and shriek about its beauty or how it may be “abused” because its ribs can be felt. I’ve been in this business for as long as I can walk, and I’ve done everything from exercise ride Thoroughbred colts as a teenager, to grooming in hunter barns, to rehabbing for rescues, to living on farm property as a barn manager. What I’m saying is that I have seen horses in the worst situations, as well as the best, and have been responsible either rehabbing or maintaining the care of horses on either end of the spectrum.
About two weeks ago, Ellen posted a photo of herself riding a filly named Zara over fences. Zara is three-years-old and should not be asked to jump a vertical. Not by anyone’s standards. The caption on the photo was: “<3 this one! #2ndtimeoverfences #firstshow #ottb #3yo #futureeventingsuperstar #BreakinAllTheRules #babyZara”
More unsettling than taking a three-year-old over a vertical, to me, was after I read the hashtags and saw “2nd time over fences”. The fact that no three-year-old should be pushed over fences—especially not with a rider on their back—is not opinion, it is fact, as most horses are still growing at this age.
Three weeks ago, Ellen brought three new OTTBs to RHEC. One of them was a young chestnut who was colicking for four days in RHEC care before Ellen called the vet. The vet, after evaluating the colt, suspected him having strangles. Ellen does not quarantine her horses, and simply moved him to the farthest stall on the left, in the barn where she keeps her Rolex mount, Sir Oberon. She did not medicate or treat the colt in any way. When another working student asked her about him, Ellen said she would euthanize the colt before she paid for treatment. She continued with, “This is a business, not a vet’s office*. You have to think about the money.”
*A vet’s office is a business, but I digress.
On Saturday (8/12) morning, while picking stalls, a working student discovered a filly standing on three legs, and they called me over to look. The filly was in such a tight standing wrap that it was cutting off the circulation in her leg. We cut the wrap off, and the only visible injury was what was initially a small puncture, but due to being treated incorrectly, had escalated into proud flesh. The filly’s leg was cold to the touch. I instructed the student to leave the wrap off after we’d hosed it, and walk the filly for a while to help bring circulation back to her leg (we called a personal vet, and she recommended the same, and the vet, as well as the student and myself, agreed there was a strong possibility that the filly bowed a tendon in the process).
As of Monday (8/14), the filly’s leg had swelled up considerably, from her hock to her fetlock, and despite reaching out to Ellen regarding how to proceed, neither myself nor other working students had received any instruction from Ellen other than: “Poke it and see if anything comes out.” Luckily, and logically, no one obeyed.
Saturday, it was only myself to care for the barn in the morning, and by 10am, I had made it to what we call “Ellen’s barn” (the barn where her Rolex mount lives) to clean. It was then that I saw the stall belonging to the chestnut colt whom was suspected of having strangles.
As if it wasn’t bad enough that Ellen had a horse in the close proximity of other horses, that was suspected of having strangles—he was living in an absolute slum. His stall was atrocious.
I’ve only seen worse conditions in neglect situations I’d been sent out on when I worked at a rescue. The poor colt was standing and sleeping in his own excrement. He had diarrhea at one point, and it was running down the walls. Without hesitation, I stand by the fact that the colt was neglected. His body condition was neglected. His living conditions were neglected. The stall looked like it had not been bedded in days, and cleaned in just as much time. He had about a cup of water left in each of his buckets, and no hay. On his left side (the side I’ve learned he likes to sleep on), including his face, he had pee stains, as well as bits of remaining shavings and poop, from laying in the stall.
The condition of the stall was disgusting. The mats were uneven, torn, and improperly lain, as there were feet of exposed clay—enough of which caused the colt to pull a shoe while in his stall.
Knowing he was suspected to have strangles, but not having any designated location for quarantine, I tied the colt outside as far from the barns as I safely could, while still keeping him within sight. Before tying him up, I washed the filth off of him.
It took me a total of five hours, but I eventually removed all of the mats, scrubbed those that could be salvaged and threw away those that could not be. I removed three wheelbarrows full of waste from the stall before I could begin breaking up the uneven ground and leveling it. There was a family of rats living underneath one of the mats, and a number of bugs and spiders that came exploding from the largest bubble you can see in the right-hand corner of the stall. It required four wheelbarrows full of sand, brought from the arena, to level the ground. I replaced the mats with the help of a working student—now clean, and some new—placed a fan in the stall until the mats were completely dried, and then laid shavings for the colt. After replenishing his water and leaving hay, I returned him to his stall.
That afternoon, I texted Ellen and asked her what she would be willing to part with the chestnut colt for, “as is” (colicky, strangles, untested). She replied with “3k” and then proceeded to ask me how he was doing on the ulcer treatment he was on; naturally, I played along and said he was doing well. Make no mistake, the colt was not on any treatment whatsoever. Due to him still being colicky, he was getting about a scoop of pellets and a half flake of alfalfa a day. Nothing supplemental.
I had an emergency that required me to leave the barn relatively earlier than usual, on Sunday, and I did not return until 9:00am Monday. Attached are seven photos of two stalls (as well as the bay geldings in them) that were in avoidably-poor shape. One of the geldings was obviously lying down in his stall, as you can see the filth on his face. I stripped and bedded these stalls.
The chestnut was the first thing I checked on Monday morning, and I found him lying down in his stall. When I checked on him again, he was standing, and attached are photos of his body condition, as well as numerous sores on his elbows, hips and hocks, which come from lying in a less than-satisfactory stall for an extended period of time.
In addition to the aforementioned, Ellen does not vaccinate her dogs. That’s fine, that’s her personal decision—there is no law requiring it. But where it becomes a problem is when her dogs contract kennel cough and she brings them to the barn to contaminate the working students’ dogs and the boarders’ dogs. The working students’ dogs are vaccinated, as well as the boarders’, but as kennel cough is constantly mutating, the strain that Ellen’s dogs brought to RHEC was not in the vaccine. Ellen was aware of the fact that her dogs were sick and still made the decision to bring them to the barn to infect healthy dogs.
Three weeks ago, Ellen answered a Craigslist ad and brought kittens back to RHEC to grow into barn cats. Barn cats have a high mortality rate, I understand. Because of this, the working students were keeping the kittens in the tack room, in a large dog crate, until they got a little bigger. One day when the kittens were allowed to roam around the tack room, Ellen let her dogs in. Jesse, her merle collie mix, attacked one of the kittens and broke its back. The kitten was paralyzed. The working students moved the kitten to Ellen’s tack room, which was separate from the main one. They explained to Ellen that the kitten was paralyzed, and she insisted it was “just in shock”, then in an act of hubris, proceeded to grab the kitten’s back legs and pedal them back and forth, back and forth. Obviously, the kitten could not react and had to spend the remainder of the day and entire night in avoidable pain, until Ellen’s husband, Alistair, announced he would take the kitten to be euthanized, and left with the animal.
I understand a full time stable hand job is hard work, and for that reason alone I feel Ellen would run a much more efficient and care-oriented business if instead of accumulating working students aged 22 and younger, and then failing to pay them, she had a full time adult staff that was responsible for managing the barn and not allowing things like the situation with the chestnut colt to occur, despite the shortcomings that are Ellen’s. People so young can easily get exhausted and burnt out with the eighteen-hour days that comes with a responsibility like running an understaffed farm—especially when they’re owed hundreds of dollars and haven’t had working air conditioning in their apartment(s) in weeks. Ellen takes advantage of young kids in the vulnerability of their late teens to early twenties, and she reels them in with the prospect of free rent and free board for their horses. Ellen takes advantage of innocence and passion and squeezes as much work out of them as she can before their mandatory six months is up.
As I’ve now learned, Ellen does not want to pay any more than she absolutely has to in order to scrape by on bare minimum because the care of the horses and the legitimate operation of her business is not paramount.
Whether or not you agree with me and the comments I’ve had, or you do or don’t love Ellen—you have to look at it this way: Would you want the same for your horse? And what is keeping her from treating boarders’ horses in her care any differently than she’s treated the aforementioned animals? Money? What happens when that goes away; what happens when someone loses a job or accumulates more than they can handle in medical bills? How will the horses that Ellen once put on her Pegasus Eventing’s #ThoroughbredThursday and sang the praises of then be treated? They won’t be sleeping in bedded stalls with full hay nets, I’m willing to bet.
Ultimately, it’s unfair to the horses. The horses deserve better; and we, as equestrians, horsemen and –women, are responsible for making others aware of self-proclaimed trainers like Ellen so they can avoid the same mistakes, and their horses can avoid the same fate as not only the horses I’ve spoken of, but Stormy’s horses, and any horses who are unknown, but could’ve also fallen victim to such treatment at the hands of someone who cares not for the animals and the future of the sport, but rather for an excessive use of hashtags and nothing if not what can only be of her personal benefit.
The Photobucket link included is where all of the photos can be found.
