May 18, 2024 • 60 mins
In this compelling episode of Inscape Quest, host Trudi Howley and renowned attorney Fred M. Kray delve into animal law, and the ongoing fight for animal welfare - especially within the horse industry. Listen in as Kray passionately recounts his experiences on the frontline of animal justice and explore his award-winning true crime book, Broken.
This engaging episode uncovers realities and stark truths hidden behind the glamorous facade of the horse industry. From overbreeding and the tragedy of the celebrated racing stallion, Alydar, to pressing issues concerning animal rights and legislation, Kray's insights will challenge your perspectives. More than just a discussion, this episode is a call to action - to stand for stronger industry standards and a shift to prioritize animal welfare over financial gain.
Despite existing concerns, this episode resonates with hope for a future in sports that assures safety and justice for all animals.
Finally, submerge into Alydar’s intriguing life story that uncovers an explosive mix of intimacy, secrets, and scams which serves an unsparing expose of the horse racing industry. As our guest shares insights about the enigmatic occurrences surrounding Alydar’s life A heart-rending tale of resilience, injustice, and redemption unfolds.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome to InScape Quests, where insightful conversations redefine perspectives.
I'm your host, Trudy Howley. Join me as together we delve into discussions about
relationships, work, and passions, unlocking profound insights that may shape our lives.
This is InScape Quests, where the journey within meets the quest for understanding.
(00:25):
In this episode, our special guest is Fred M. Cray, an animal law attorney and author.
Fred has penned the award-winning true crime book titled Broken,
where he meticulously investigates the mysterious case of Aladar,
the renowned racing stallion who broke his leg under suspicious circumstances.
In Broken, Fred uncovers key evidence from the trials surrounding the horse farm Calumet.
(00:51):
Beyond Aladar's compelling story, we also delve into a wide range of animal
welfare issues and the latest topics in equestrian sports.
Please join us now for a thought-provoking conversation.
Hello, Fred. It's really wonderful to have you here today. Thank you so much
for being on this podcast.
(01:11):
Thank you for having me. I would love to talk to you about what really is animal
law in general. all, we can think about animals as companion animals,
wildlife, domesticated animals.
And I know you've probably been asked this question many times,
but I think it would be helpful to start with an idea of what animal law actually is.
(01:34):
Animal law is a very interesting topic, and it really covers a lot of different kinds of cases.
Cases to give you an example of cases let's
say you have a dog or a horse that gets loose and hurt somebody you're going
to get sued and if you have a dog the animal control authority will be called
(01:58):
and they may try to put your dog to death over whatever it is that happened depending on,
either a how serious the bite is or b whether it killed another animal i've
had cases where a dog got out by accident and killed a cat.
And in that particular jurisdiction, that is a death offense.
(02:18):
And so I would come in and defend your dog from the death penalty.
It requires the lawyer to know about administrative hearings.
It requires you to know about due process.
And you really need to know about trials because these are trials that take
place in an administrative setting.
Horses, you have cases where horses are not properly fed or sheltered.
(02:43):
Animal cruelty cases where the horses are actually taken from the owner.
And then the animal control authority will have a hearing to divest the owner of ownership,
so that the horses don't stay in this limbo of not being taken care of,
but they're not really owned by the people who take them to the animal control.
(03:05):
There are cases involving puppy mills where you buy a dog and the dog has a
heart defect and it was supposed to have been inspected or examined by a veterinarian and they don't do it.
I've had cases where puppy stores have stolen the veterinarian's stamp and stamped
the veterinarian's certificates with his stamp, and he didn't know it.
(03:30):
And so all those dogs that got their OCVIs stamped were never looked at by a veterinarian.
And so when they were sold, they were defective. And so that brings into play
deceptive and unfair trade practices.
You have, let's say you and your partner buy a horse and you get divorced. Who owns that horse now?
(03:50):
And if you're not divorced now, that's a whole separate case because in the
divorce, that would be involved.
But if you were just dating and you live together, then the question would be who owns that horse?
Cases in horses, involving horses where they're sold and there's fraud involved,
where they're overpriced or their pedigree is not really accurately given to
(04:15):
the buyer and those cause lawsuits. suits.
And it's a really wide area. I once had a case where somebody stole a Great
Dane of all things to steal.
And we had to get it back. We had to hire a SWAT team to break into the guy's
house to get the dog back.
(04:35):
And that was crazy. We had police cars and sirens and we're battering rams. We did get the dog back.
That's good to hear. That was a successful outcome. Moving to your book that
you published recently called Broken,
which was about the suspicious death of Aladar, who was a very well-known racehorse in the 70s.
(04:59):
I'm wondering if you could tell us a little bit about Aladar and why he was
such a special horse and what kind of legal aspects ended up being involved in his story.
I'll say, first of all, that I wrote the book because in 1978,
I had just become a lawyer and was really overwhelmed.
(05:20):
And I went to see him race in the Florida Derby and the Flamingo Stakes,
there's actually flamingos in the infield at Hialeah.
I've watched him come from behind with such determination and such beautiful artistry in his gait.
That I took it as a message to me, a subliminal message to me.
You've got to keep with this. Keep going. You spent seven years in school.
(05:43):
Yes, it's overwhelming, but it'll get you. And so I continued all of my career for 25 years.
And I always felt like I owed him something for that message,
even though I didn't really know him.
And in 2018, I decided to go and see the grave of a horse named Dr.
Fager, who was a very famous, fiery sprinter.
And his grave was in Ocala. Cala and I was living in Gainesville.
(06:06):
And while I was on this tour, there was a lady on the bus who was at Calumet
where Aladar was kept in bread.
And I was told that she was there the night he was injured. And when I asked
her to tell me about it, she said, no, I won't tell you about it because I'm
afraid for my family and my children. And I thought, hey, this is 35 years later.
(06:26):
How is that a normal response to a question about?
It really piqued my interest. So that is when I started investigating what happened to him.
And I read everything on the internet, and there were trials in Houston.
And I went to Houston and got the trial transcripts. And when I read all that
stuff, I was convinced that this wasn't an accident.
(06:48):
And then I started to do my own investigation. And I was able to talk to the
two guys who represented the insurance companies and were there the night of
his injury and the next day.
And they took pictures of his stall and the guy from Lloyd's of London,
he gave me the pictures and gave me all his records.
(07:10):
And when I looked at the pictures, it just convinced me that a horse could not
break their right cannon bone kicking the stall door and leave no mark at all anywhere.
I interviewed 25 people and put all that together in this book,
Broken, and wrote it as a...
Equine true crime book the idea was
(07:33):
to make it something that you wouldn't know the ending until you got to it so
it would be page turner and my goal was to introduce this horse's legacy to
everyone that had never heard of him and to give him a legacy that he deserved because he,
was known before my book of coming in second in the 1978 triple crown to affirmed
(07:58):
actually i have I saw him in 1977 as a two-year-old. I'm 78.
But in 78, he ran the Triple Crown in the Kentucky Derby Preakness in Belmont.
And he came in second in all three races. And so he was known as that guy who always came in second.
And his career was much more nuanced than that.
(08:19):
And he became one of the greatest stallions.
His bloodline still will be in Mystic Dan, who's in the Preakness this coming weekend.
And who won the Kentucky Derby. His bloodline is still in horse racing today.
And the year that he was injured, he was the top sire of 1990.
(08:39):
And he was a horse who did everything that he could do, that he was asked to do.
And he deserved better for all the things that he did for people that were,
that made money from him.
And so my purpose in writing the book was to get that story out there and have a book.
There have been books written about the duel for the triple crown between he and Affirm,
(09:01):
but no book just really about him that went into what happened to him after
he got injured and what the facts were surrounding his death that came out in the trial,
and in some of my interviews, because I had the trial transcripts and I could
go to people and say, look, they said this, what do you have to say about that?
So in the trial, they painted him as this really mean horse who would kick and bite and all this.
(09:26):
And I talked to his, of course, they never had in the trial, his grooms.
So I got his grooms. And that picture was really not, it was created for the
narrative of the trial, not because it was true.
I was glad to go. And it was great to talk to all these people.
I talked to, the Belmont was his most famous race where he lost by a nose.
(09:47):
And talked to the writer of Affirmed who basically said, you know what?
We were out of gas. we were going to lose and I just happened to.
Pushed to the rail, and I had hit a fern with my left hand, and that shocked him.
So he had that one nose ahead of Aladar, and that's what won the race.
I guess my favorite quote is a piece of fan mail that was written to me that
(10:08):
said, I never heard of Aladar before your book, and now he'll be forever in my heart.
And that's really what I was trying to achieve with this book.
Having also read your book, I think you've definitely accomplished your goal
of bringing Bringing his legacy to many others who aren't necessarily immersed
in the horse racing industry.
(10:29):
And what I also love about the
book is you've written it in this way of it being a cold case, true crime.
And then you also invite the reader to give their own verdict at the end.
Yeah, that is that was something that I'm a trial lawyer.
So I know that when you go to trial, you just don't go back in the jury room
and go, hey, what do you think?
What do you think we should do back here? In every trial, you're given a piece
(10:53):
of paper called a verdict form, and your verdict is to answer those questions.
So it gives a structure to what you're doing back there.
And in my cases, I would always take the verdict out in my closing argument
and say, look, you're going to go back there. You're going to get this verdict form.
What are you going to do? You're going to go over these questions.
And I'd go over with them and say, look, this question involves these issues.
(11:15):
And I would give my summation of what the evidence showed.
I don't know of any book that's done it. So I thought it would be interesting.
And there have been a lot of people that have given their verdict.
And right now, the verdicts are 400 to 1 that it was an intentional act.
So I guess I was persuasive. what i'm
curious about as well in terms of animal welfare
(11:36):
in a broader perspective there's this invitation for readers to explore for
themselves was it an intentional killing of this beautiful famous racehorse
or was he a victim of tragic circumstance but there's this.
Idea that he was overbred his stud
(11:59):
book was full he was 15 years
old and he was still breeding four times a
day do you consider that animal abuse
in some way i don't know i mean it depends on as the statutes in every state
basically say what define what animal abuse would be And some of the states
(12:23):
have exclusions for horse racing, horse training.
And it's mainly the states where those things happen, where they think,
hey, I don't want somebody getting sued over training a horse,
which has never happened, by the way.
I have never and I have searched for a case where somebody was training a horse
and it was felt that the training was too harsh or there's never been an arrest
(12:46):
and conviction in the history of the United States that I can find.
Where that's happened. And there's many reasons for that. One is the exclusion
in some of the statutes for that very behavior.
The second is it typically when you have something like that happen,
there will be people in that industry, whether it be horse racing or hunter
jumping or whatever it is, that will come in and say, look, what he was doing, whatever it was.
(13:12):
Is an accepted form of training in our business.
And so I talk about in Aladar's case, he had a exercise rider that was trained
on the king ranch and the king ranch was a cowboy,
dominate the horse at any you know cost
training and charlie rose basically said i evolved from that when i trained
(13:33):
when i ran with ali dar we abandoned that and we became it became a partnership
with the horse and i could ride that horse with no reins i could he would do
whatever i want and And we didn't do anything to him that was untoward.
And there are some courses, Dr. Fager's one, where they would dare not hit him
(13:54):
with a whip because he hated it and you would get bad results.
You would just have to raise the crop up and the horse would see it and say,
okay, you want me to run fast now? And he would do it.
And the problem is that, and it's true in everything where there's animals,
whether it be dog training with Cesar Millan versus other people.
Or dresigen or whatever it is, where you have the traditional training,
(14:19):
maybe harsh and old-fashioned, and then you have the animal welfare guys who
think that you can only use positive reinforcement.
The truth is that it would be very hard to convict somebody of something where there is a.
Tradition of that kind of training being okay
(14:39):
and i talk about i would raise the idea
of bullfighting where you have in spain you have
traditionalists who say i can't believe that you're you're against bullfighting
it's been a tradition in spain forever and there was i guess the state the spain
decided they're not going to award a trophy for bullfighting anymore because
they don't want the state to sponsor this kind of behavior and they're mad about
(15:03):
it the traditionalists are mad about it.
And on the other side, the people who are against it are saying,
that's how it ought to be.
And to me, I feel like particularly horses are a sore subject for me because
horses have done things for the man that I don't think any other animal has done.
They've been killed in countless battles that they had nothing to do with, knew nothing about.
(15:27):
They pulled plows. They They pulled us out of the agrarian society,
and they deserve the best stewardship that we can give them.
They deserve that. They have done things for us, and in return for that, we owe them everything.
And I feel like that's where you start. And they're dying for something that
they don't even know what it is.
(15:49):
We owe them, and I really feel strongly about that. I
feel the same way that they are such amazing animals
and we do owe them as stewardship and consideration and care like you have said
they literally dragged us out of medieval times as it were and I have talked
also about the history co-evolution with horses and just going back to.
(16:17):
Aladar as a breeding stallion and how he was considered as a maxed out credit
card or the golden goose because he was such a prolific breeder i saw a picture
today on one of my facebook pages.
And it was a picture of aladar and i looked at him and he looked tired and he
(16:38):
looked worn out and i felt so bad because i'd never seen that picture before
and i thought to myself he's tired And the story from his groom,
Paul Pryor, is that he went to JT London and said, look, you're overbreeding.
He's tired. He's getting sore in his hind end. And the Calumet on-site veterinarian
(17:01):
said the same thing. And after Paul brought that up, he was fired.
And I think that the problem with the horse industry is that's where all the money gets made.
And so you can have, it used to be horses ran five years, six years.
You've got Kelso and John Henry running, have incredible careers.
(17:21):
And now a horse will run three races and retire and go breed.
And that's where all the money is. At one point, Aladar was making $200,000
per time that he covered a mare.
And there were people that said, one guy that I interviewed who was his groom
around the year that he was injured said, hey, we could call up at night to
(17:42):
come in and breed him off the books.
And so it was pretty well known that he was overbred, but they controlled that.
And it's a sad commentary that here's a guy who is running Calumet and this is his only stallion.
There's no other stallion that he owns that is making, even breaking even to
(18:04):
breed. They had Affirmed.
Coincidentally, his rival Affirmed was in the stall right next to him in 1990. They had Socreto.
They had Capote. They had Mogambo. And none of those horses made any money breeding.
And so Aladar carried that entire farm.
And you would think as a, what I've heard about Lundy is he was in it for the
(18:26):
money and that's all he cared about. And there's a famous statement by Lundy
himself where he says, I don't even know if that horse likes me every time I
get around him, he bites me.
And I asked Paul Pryor about it and I said, did you hear this?
And he goes, oh yeah, Lundy was afraid of Aladar.
And so with that, my conclusion is he didn't love Aladar. are.
If you're saying those things about him, you don't really know much about him.
(18:50):
And you're just, you're in it for the money. And I think that is winning and
money are at the root of all these problems with failure to take care of horses as they should be.
You've got the equestrian scandal of the 80s where Tommy Burns is hired to kill 15 to 20 horses.
For the insurance money, you've got the soaring in the Tennessee walking horses,
(19:14):
and you've got all these things.
And what you find is that people are really concerned about making money in the end and winning.
There's really no other explanation for the equestrian deaths because most of
the people that own those horses had a lot of money.
And they would pay Tommy Burns $5,000 by check to kill their horse.
(19:36):
And now they want to say, I didn't do it, but there's their check.
And there's Tommy Burns saying, I got your check. Most of those people pled guilty.
But some of them were very wealthy. And you wonder, why are you doing this?
The only thing I can think of is that the horse didn't work out the way you
wanted to. And you want to just not look at that horse because it reminds you
of that mistake. And so you want to get rid of it.
(19:57):
But while the law treats animals as property, they are sentient beings.
You can argue about, do they think, do they do this?
But they can feel, and they know pain, and they know to stay away from it, and they react to it.
And I don't see how anyone who is good enough to be training a horse doesn't
know when a horse is being hurt.
(20:17):
That's a really important point. I know in England as well, just recently,
they did pass a new law, animal welfare law, saying that animals have legal
rights as sentient beings.
And you also mentioned earlier when we were talking that different states have
different animal cruelty statutes in the US.
(20:41):
And also there's this issue of animal welfare legislation being under-enforced generally.
It seems very complex. We're looking at Aladar as a cash cow,
but JT Lundy's wondering when
can he get back to breeding, having broken his right hind cannon bone.
(21:04):
That says it all. He's not saying, we're so happy Aladar survived.
He's saying when he could get back to breeding. I think the whole idea that
an industry can police itself, how many times do we have to learn that doesn't work?
It's never worked in the history of man, whether it be the financial industry
(21:25):
or banks or whatever industry you want to talk about. It can't regulate itself.
And it's interesting that the USDA in the United States is tasked with a lot
of these inspections of different places.
And I know when we had that pet store case where the vet, his stamp was stolen.
(21:45):
We wanted to know, well, where did these dogs come from? And where they came from was puppy mills.
Where there are 300 puppies in a place, and the USDA is tasked with enforcing
the standards of these puppy mills that are along the United States.
And what we found was there is not enough USDA inspectors.
(22:08):
And when they do go someplace, they never do anything.
So, for example, in one situation, we got the records from the USDA,
USDA and the inspector came to a puppy place and said, listen,
I was here last time and you had 250 puppies and now you only have 200.
What happened to the other 50? And the guy said, we shot them. We euthanized them.
(22:30):
And the guy said, you can't shoot dogs. That's not proper under animal welfare laws.
But they didn't do anything. They didn't shut them down. They just said, don't do that again.
And the standards that the USDA has promulgated as the low bar for what how
you can keep a dog is you can have two dogs in a crate all day as long as they
can turn around. And that's okay.
(22:52):
If they come and see, that meets the standards. So there's not only a dearth of USDA inspectors,
there's also what I think is industry influence low standards that make it impossible
for USDA to do anything, even if it could, because the standards are so low.
So you've mentioned some really important points.
(23:15):
And so separating out what's a felony crime, what's a misdemeanor.
And also, you mentioned about governing bodies and self-policing. thing.
So if we look at the legal aspect, what's the definition of a felony crime?
(23:37):
Like if Aladar had his leg intentionally broken with a crowbar,
is that animal cruelty or is that a different kind of crime?
I have to say that would rely, again, we've got all these states and they all have different laws.
And I really have to confess, I did not look at Kentucky's animal cruelty to
statutes nor to what I know what they were in 1990, but they can be anywhere from very vague,
(24:02):
they can be very low bar, they can be, if you give the animal food, shelter and water.
If they have that, it's not animal cruelty. And then you get into starvation
and how much does that have to be? And how do you prove that?
It just depends on each state.
And I would say my opinion would be, without knowing any more,
(24:25):
would be that if you killed a horse with a crowbar, that would probably be a felony.
But I know, for example, I rescued a dog from a hoarder that had 200 dogs.
And they had a trial for that, for the woman who was the hoarder,
and she was convicted. but that they were all misdemeanors and she'll probably get probation.
That's the usual because there is again in animal cruelty, this problem of resources
(24:51):
and animal control is usually understaffed, underpaid and overworked.
And they usually try to settle most of their cases so they don't have to go to court.
There's just a dearth of money that it's given to these entities.
And so that's when you have the humane society come in a lot of times.
(25:13):
And a lot of times people will make, have a contract with them to come in and
help rescue dogs or horses.
When there's a huge, a county or city animal control place is not going to be
able to have 200 dogs come in there, their place.
And so typically you'll see a HSUS come in or some other entity to hold those dogs.
(25:38):
And, and, then they get dispersed. There has to be a hearing where the dogs are taken away.
And that's a big problem because if somebody has got 50 horses and they get
arrested, they can say like, I want those horses or my horses.
And you have to have a trial about that before you take away their property.
And you get the typical excuses of, I took them to the vet, it wasn't that bad.
(26:00):
In the case where with the collies, I fell down and broke my shoulder,
I couldn't take care of them. Very difficult thing to prove. Preston Pyshko,
And it takes a lot of resources to do it. You just don't go in and say,
well, they didn't look like they were taken care of.
You have to have forensic people come in and say, this is an old scar.
This is not something that happened in the last month of this person's having the worst dog.
(26:23):
The starving took place over a long period of time. And it just takes a lot
of effort. There are dog fighters that get probation.
There's a lot of outrage about it. But in the end, the courts,
sometimes they don't take it seriously. And sometimes a sentence is not as we
would like it to be. It's not as severe.
And part of it is because there are misdemeanors versus felonies.
(26:45):
And the other part of it is that the legal system is more person-centric than it is animal-centric.
I read yesterday about these horse races that take place where they're not sanctioned.
They're just somebody has a lot and they have a quarter horse race.
There's some people bet on it, but it's just for that minute.
And then they leave. There's no animal welfare there.
(27:07):
Guys do whatever they want because it's not sanctioned by anybody.
It's like a dog fight where you say, hey, we're going to have it tomorrow night at nine o'clock.
And then we change the location five times.
And then when people come in, we make sure we know who you are.
And this happens with these unsanctioned horse racing.
What I would say is wherever there's money and animals involved,
(27:30):
human ingenuity will find a way to take advantage of it.
So it's an interesting state of affairs now,
if we think about this under-enforcement of criminal law and under-enforcement
of actually prosecuting things and how animal welfare legislation came about,
(27:54):
and that there's cross-reporting with child protection laws as well.
There are a lot of stakeholders that you wouldn't expect in animal welfare.
A lot of times, the American Veterinarian Association and other groups like
that, they are not in favor of, let's say, having vets report what they think is animal abuse.
(28:18):
Their position would be, hey, I'm going to lose clients if I say,
hey, I think your dog is starved or I think your horse is not being fed properly
or whatever it is that he finds.
And I think there's some truth to that because veterinarians work at the whim of the owner-trainer.
And we talked last time about this horse, LeBowen, who was at Windstar Farm
(28:41):
and all of a sudden he had a heart attack and it came out, oh,
we're sorry, he had a heart attack, what a terrible incident.
And then it comes out that some of the owners of the horse sue the insurance
company for mortality insurance.
And it comes out that a vet gave the horse a shot of supposed to be a B12 shot,
but they used a cocktail of different vitamins that were out of date.
(29:02):
And the horse had an anaphylactic shock and died.
And none of that came out from the owners of the horse or the veterinarians
or anything until this lawsuit was filed.
And the insurance company said, hey, this was not an oops, this was an accident.
This was a shot and the approximate cause of the death was that shot.
(29:23):
And the farm had an on-site veterinarian who apparently didn't know anything about it.
And they kept that on-site veterinarian. And I guess the veterinarian who gave
the shot admitted fault.
If you ever try to get a vet's license suspended for animal cruelty,
there was a vet who shot a cat with a bow and arrow here in the States.
And it was a big and whether she would keep her license or not.
(29:47):
And the vets are governed by a board that's comprised of vets.
The legal profession is governed by a board that is lawyers.
And so I think those groups are more concerned about the person losing their
income and their license than they are.
(30:08):
There's got to be something really astounding for them to say,
we're going to sanction this person.
There's a friend of mine who's complained to the Florida Veterinarian Association
about numerous malpractice cases she's had, and nothing's ever happened.
So you not only have the USDA involved, but you would think that if an owner
(30:29):
complained about a vet doing something wrong, that there'd be another level
of scrutiny by the Veterinarian Association.
That's rare. And a few minutes ago, when you'd mentioned about Kentucky,
which is where Calumet was,
I'd looked it up in the Animal Legal Defense Fund rankings that Kentucky was
(30:51):
way at the bottom of the annual rankings for their animal protection laws. And that's why.
Because the trainers and owners and veterinarians are a huge part of whether laws get passed.
And it's taken horse racing 40 years and just last year to create the Horse
(31:13):
Safety Act. They had a Horse Safety Act, and now it's HISA, Horse Implementation and Safety Act.
It's a central set of laws that govern horse doping and all these things that
are involved in horse racing.
And so you had this patchwork of things where you could race in Louisiana and
have all these drugs, and then you would go to New York, and you could.
(31:35):
Bob Baffert is not allowed, who's a very famous race trainer,
has been suspended from one jurisdiction, but he can still race in another. other.
And it's these other stakeholders who are not.
Necessarily interested in animal welfare and interested in veterinarians,
for example. There's a really big hypocrisy in the veterinarians because I take
my dog to the vet and there's all these signs, treat your pet like a family.
(31:58):
But if they commit malpractice and you say, okay, now I've got pain and suffering
because I love that dog and he was with me for 10 years and he's my service animal.
They'll say, sorry, your dog's property and here's $10. You can get that dog in a rescue for that.
And they're against that. And yet they're proponents of that in their office
(32:18):
when they're talking to you.
Everything in their office is about the highest standard of care you can give your family member.
And yet when it comes to the legal system, they don't want it to be a family
member and they don't want animals to have those rights.
And that's a perfect example where stakeholders are the reason that those laws don't get passed.
(32:41):
It's similar to the issue of dignity and dying. You want to be able to have
control over how you die.
And the Catholic Church and all those guys are against that.
And that's why it's so hard to pass those laws.
So the stakeholders that are involved are really difficult to bring to the table.
And it wasn't until in horse racing that all these deaths occurred.
(33:07):
It's Santa Anita and then Churchill Downs and in Saratoga that people and there
was just in the last month, there was a show on FX called, incidentally, Broken was this broken.
I thought, hey, that's the title of my book, Broken Horse Racing.
And they had this whole expose about drugs and horse racing and how they finally got a conviction.
(33:31):
The FBI came in. And so what happened was they decided, you know what,
we want somebody who's independent of horse racing to go in and look at what's going on.
And these independent guys went in there and they got tapes of guys saying,
yeah, we're going to give this horse this.
And they got vials of stuff. And the FBI came in and they prosecuted these guys.
And I think they pled guilty and there was no way to get out of it.
(33:54):
And this was just on TV. And I think this persuaded some of the reluctant shareholders
in horse racing to say, you know what, this is a crossroads for horse racing. This is coming out.
People are seeing horses die on the track. And not just one, not just two, tens.
And animal welfare is changing. When I was growing up, dogs would be put outside
(34:18):
and that was it. Now they're sleeping in your bed.
They're getting billions of dollars are being spent.
And you can see it with bullfighting. you can see people are getting more sensitive
to the sentient being of animals.
And now more research is being done than ever showing birds are smart, apes are smart.
(34:38):
All manner of octopuses, all manner of animals are being shown that they have
problem-solving skills.
They're not just to be at man's beck and call. And they have a right to live,
and they have a right to be treated with dignity.
Absolutely. There seems to be much work that needs to continue to be done here in the US.
(35:02):
And I know I've talked about the whistleblower hotline in horse racing that's
available for people to report behavior.
And also with the U.S. Equestrian Federation,
we have a program called Safe Sport, where as part of your membership,
you have to do this mini course to recognize abuse in human athletes by training. It's so hard, though.
(35:29):
It's so hard because for lawyers, we have a duty to report.
So if I'm with somebody and they fall asleep in a deposition,
position i'm supposed to report that to the bar and there's a reluctance to do that because you.
Are turning somebody in who's a fellow attorney and
nobody wants to do that there's a disincentive to do that i think as a normal
(35:52):
thing and so what i think has to happen particularly in the equestrian dressage
and all that there has to be the governing body has to take action
I think the governing body has to have,
I know there's something going on with it now about where the question was,
if the person is off the premises, can they do anything?
(36:12):
And they went, oh, we can't. And so now they've had to change that.
As lawyers, if you broke into a house as a lawyer, even though you're not doing
a bar activity or representing somebody, we can be thrown off out of the bar for doing those things.
I feel like that's what has to happen. I think there has to be,
(36:35):
and particularly in equestrian sports like that, because there are so many things
that those horses are being asked to do. It's not new.
This problem of the line between abuse and training has been going on for decades in equestrian sports.
And you see the horses with their heads pulled down and you see some of the
(36:57):
training techniques that are done.
And you've got to say at some point that the people who are in charge have got
to say, we're suspending you and you cannot be involved in this sport until
we feel that you've been, if you can be, rehabilitated.
And look what happened to Bob Baffert. They said, there are a lot of people that love Bob Baffert.
(37:18):
There's a lot of people that think it's political just because he wins a lot
of people are jealous. And you're going to get that narrative of that.
They said, you're not racing here in this jurisdiction anymore.
And I think that sends a message. And I think particularly with a guy who's that famous.
And so I think in the sports that you're familiar with, I think that's something that has to happen.
(37:40):
That's the start. It starts with that.
But the guys in dressage and these other, they know.
And the guys who are doing it no and the horse is hurting and they know if it's
kicking or it's it's trying to flee or whatever it is they do they and the people
watching it no and the people who are paying the guy no,
(38:00):
the problem is again if you're paying this guy to train your horse and he's got great results,
and you're not as smart as he is or you don't have the resume he does you're saying i'm trusting him.
And so that's why I say, then the people that are in charge of the sport need
to say, it's not acceptable. We're not going to let you train horses.
And if you do, we're not accepting them into our place.
(38:21):
Then that sets the tone and it starts to send that message.
And what I see is it may be starting to happen.
And they should say, even if you're not on premises, we have the right to say,
hey, you can't bring that horse in here.
Because where does all this happen most of the time? in their training
facilities and if that's exempt i don't
(38:44):
think there's any teeth you say i'm not doing it at the event
of course you're not there is
a lot of scrutiny at the actual events and
you've made mention of the governing bodies
of horse sports and this idea of them
needing to set enforceable standards and
actually taking action rather than just
(39:06):
being seen to be doing something thing i'm all
for those things happening and change happening
quickly but we also need change happening in a
smart way as well the question is
with horse racing you've got gambling so
the government is involved but the government's not really involved in other
(39:26):
equestrian sports and do they need to be or can the governing sports bodies
police themselves my answer to that my My answer is no governing body can police themselves.
And this is where you get in democracy, you get places like PETA,
and a lot of things happen because of them.
(39:47):
I'm not a PETA fan in terms of how they do things and how extreme they are.
Some of their policies are, to me, unethical.
So far, we move from common sense and frankly, for what's good for animals.
But a lot of times, they send people in to record stuff that,
and there's no other stakeholder that's willing to do that.
(40:08):
And that's how these things come out. This is why we have in the United States
a movement to ban guys coming on to agricultural places and recording what they're doing.
They're called ag gag laws. And the farmers are stakeholders,
all the stakeholders who are in commercial feedlots and all these kinds of things.
They don't want that because there is more animal cruelty in that part of our
(40:33):
society than any other part in agricultural slaughter, putting all the things
that they do to get the meat to the store.
I used to teach animal law and one of my things was to have people watch one
of these, a movie about what happens. to get your meat to the table.
It's just horrible. It makes the things we're talking about seem a lot less worse.
(40:56):
These problems can't be solved until, I think you're right, there's a certain
amount of education that has to happen from the bottom up.
And it takes people who are very passionate about it and willing to expose that
stuff and have it come out.
Because if it's not exposed, people will not know.
It's just like Aligarh. Nobody knew about what was going on about all this.
(41:18):
People thought he was being overbred. You hear the groom say,
I told him to stop and they fired me.
If that came out now on social media, things would happen.
People would be up in arms and maybe nothing would get done,
but it would hurt the reputation of the farmer.
Like Windstar Farms, I don't know how they're handling this,
but it's a public relations nightmare for them with this horse,
(41:39):
LeBowen, who dies of a shot by a vet on their property, and then they want to
get the insurance money.
That's not a good look for them. If you look at anything, we've been trying,
the lawyers have been trying to get rights for chimpanzees for decades,
and they've tried multiple ways to get personhood.
If they're in a cage for 24 hours and they're never let out,
(42:02):
somebody can sue for them.
And they haven't been able to do it. And so the law is always behind everything.
The law evolves after things happen.
We're still not there. But for animal rights, this educational process is a
very slow process. And in this case, animal cruelty has been low on the list of things.
(42:25):
And it takes people saying the horses deserve this and I'm going to report this
or I see that and it's wrong.
And I feel like we need the help of something else to push that forward.
Word, whether it be the law of animal cruelty or the stakeholders getting together
and saying, you know what, as all these things are coming out,
(42:49):
it's not a good look for us.
And it would take, it wouldn't hurt if people who were in the sport, who were famous, who,
would come out and say these things. Or say there's an Olympic rider or somebody who's famous who says,
you know what, I'm for this, and I won't let my horses be trained by people
(43:09):
who have this training method, or I don't agree with it.
And I haven't seen that. That's why I'm saying anybody who has a platform,
who's in dressage or in equestrian sports, come out and say, you have to take a stand.
We have to be behind the training methods that are humane.
Horses deserve that. That it's the only humane way to. I think some people are
(43:29):
saying things for the sake of being seen to say things.
I think. Performative. Yeah. So I think there's this tendency to be very defensive,
which doesn't move things forward.
And I think it's important to continue these conversations because people who
(43:51):
are actively engaged in animal abuse, animal cruelty, neglect.
Unethical criminal practices, they're not in the majority.
And it's important to be effective in weeding out the bad characters from the industry.
(44:11):
And money is a factor. I've talked about it in other episodes as well.
Well, and you mentioned about the insurance money.
That was obviously a big factor in the case of Aladar that you wrote about.
That was in the heyday of when Tommy Burns was active in killing horses for insurance money.
(44:36):
I did watch the Netflix episode Bad Sport with him.
I'm wondering what it was like for you to actually interview him.
It was horrible. The one thing that was missing from the trials,
from the whole case of what happened to Aladar was somebody who knew the business of killing horses.
(44:58):
And he knows. And so my thought was...
I hate doing this, but I have to do it for the story. And I have to tell you,
I felt like he was remorseful.
I felt, and he has horses in his barn.
And he was honest.
I felt like he had redeemed himself. And I felt like he had paid the price.
(45:20):
He had to go through the criminal process.
And at the end of the day, much like in bad sports, the FBI agent who was his
handler and who had him testify in court against all these guys.
He went to pick him up after he got out of jail.
And so I felt there are times when people do things like this.
And I know there'll be people critical of me saying this, but I feel like he
(45:43):
had redeemed himself and that he had paid his price and that he was now trying
to do the right thing by horses. and then the experience with him was different than I thought.
And he said many times that he was sorry and he was a terrible thing to do.
And I felt in a different setting, he might have turned out differently.
He left home at 15, he got into drugs and alcohol.
(46:05):
And he had that whole sad story with Barney Ward.
And when I was talking to him about Barney Ward, Barney Ward was his father
figure. He got him a job, he got him into the equestrian world.
And he was basically the guy who told him, look, this is the guy who's paying, go kill the horse.
But he loved this guy. It was like his dad. And so when he got caught,
he didn't want to give up Barney Ward.
(46:27):
And one day, the FBI calls him in and said, look, we know Barney Ward's involved,
and we know you're not giving him up, but let me play this tape for you. And they play this tape.
And there's Barney Ward saying, he's never going to get to the courtroom.
We're going to take care of him. Now, that's his father figure saying that on the tape.
And when we talked about that, he broke down in tears as if it had happened yesterday.
(46:49):
And I felt bad for him. This was not a, this was like something,
an unhealed wound that would never heal.
And it's part of the reason why I felt like this relationship and the things
he did were related to what he thought was family.
It was part of what happened. And part of the reason he did what he did was to please this guy.
(47:11):
I just felt, I felt differently about him after that interview.
It sounds like he's dealt with what we call psychologically moral injury,
like he's made atonement and he's repaired and paid his dues.
And there seems to be a missing piece from my perspective when I read the book
(47:33):
about who could be this person that could possibly have broken Al-Adda's.
Yeah, well, the FBI thinks it was Lundy and or someone else.
What's really strange is those three guys that came to the funeral.
Why were they there that night? It was Robert Fox, Alan Crutchfield, and John Secura.
(47:55):
I'm not saying they had anything to do with it. I'm just saying,
how could they be on the farm when they all lived in different places?
New Jersey, Canada, all these places. And they're there the day Aladar's euthanized.
How could they get there?
And when I interviewed Alan Krutchkoff, he admitted, hey, we were there the day he was hurt.
And so when I asked Tommy Burns about it, and you'll remember in the book,
(48:17):
he said, there's always that guy.
There's always that guy. And if you're in this business, who that guy is.
Is it possible that JT Lundy did it? It is, but I don't believe he did.
I don't think he had the wherewithal to do it.
And I'm not sure that he wanted it done. If you follow the money,
it was the bank guy that needed the money. He was the one who was owed the $50 million.
(48:40):
And he was the one who would suffer losing that $50 million if they went into
bankruptcy and he was just another creditor because there were $120 million worth of creditors.
And it's possible Lundy did it, but I think it's more likely that the bank guy
arranged it and said, look, you're going to do this because you owe us this
money and you have no money.
(49:02):
The only thing he was paying was his water and electricity. And there's no way out for you.
And this way, there's some theory that if the bank gets paid off their 50 million
from the insurance money, that maybe the Japanese will buy the farm at the last
minute, which I thought was, you never know what the deal's Lundy's doing.
And there are a lot of stuff going on that was off the books and verbal.
(49:26):
And John Ward, who took over the farm, ran into that. One guy had five different
breeding rights, and they were all verbal. He didn't know who had one and who didn't.
And so there had to be, you had to have a piece of paper for the back ropes.
And when John Ward got into it, he thought, I don't know, 50,
60 million, we can come back from that.
But within a couple months, he went, hey, this is 120 million.
We're never coming back from that. And part of the reason was,
(49:48):
as you said, is that they were breeding Aladar's breeding rights in advance.
So let's say he dies in 1990. In 1998, you give me $2.5 million to breed a horse to them every year.
So every year, 88, you breed a horse, 89, 90, and as long as he's breeding,
you get that breeding right.
(50:08):
The problem with that is that Calumet gets that money in advance, and they spend it.
And like you said, now when he gets to 1990, all those breeding rights are sold
in advance. He doesn't have enough money to run the farm.
And it sounded like J.T. Lundy just literally ran the farm into the ground in the space of 10 years.
They were in the black when Mrs.
(50:31):
Markey died and J.T. Lundy took over. And 10 years later, they're 120 million in debt.
The circumstances around the insurance payout, that the insurance policy was
about to lapse in about two weeks after Al-Adha's and Lloyd's.
Well, that's a crazy thing because actually Calumet had not made their insurance
(50:52):
premiums pay. They hadn't paid them.
And I said to Tom Dixon, who was a Lloyd's insurance investigator,
if I don't pay my car insurance and I have an accident after I don't pay,
the insurance company doesn't say, okay, we'll pay your claim and we'll subtract
what you owed in the premium from our pay.
That never happens. But apparently, from what these guys said,
(51:12):
is that that was allowed in Kentucky because it was an agrarian economy and
people didn't get their money until they brought their tobacco in or their crops
in. And so they would let that go.
The other thing is, and we talked about it earlier, was insurance companies
were not really designed to investigate and not pay claims.
(51:34):
Terry McVeigh thought this claim was bogus.
They wouldn't let him in the day that he was supposed to go in there to take
pictures of the stall. And when he got in there, it was fixed.
And so they destroyed the evidence and fixed the stall so he couldn't get any pictures of it.
And that would have taken the knowledge of Calumet to do that,
which is why I say Lundy was involved. He had to know that.
(51:56):
And also, the light watchman was told to take the night off a week before.
That had to take Calumet's knowledge because the guy who did it was in their car.
So the insurance companies, from what I was told by Terry McVeigh,
who represented Golden Eagle, who did not want to pay the claim,
And by Lloyd's, who did pay the claim, that Lloyd's had made maybe $3 million a year for 10 years.
(52:20):
So that's $30 million that Calumet had paid them.
And so they don't want to miss out on the next 10 years of $3 million a year.
And so they're wanting to show the horse farms to get their money,
to get their premium money. We're going to pay if you have a claim.
And I was also told that when you have a big client who's paying $3 million
(52:41):
a year, like Calumet or any of these other big Kentucky farms,
they would actually go out of their way to try and pay those claims.
Even if the circumstances surrounding it weren't ideal, they would say,
look, we're not going to investigate any further.
We want to be We want to be seen as paying these off.
And in Loy's case, Terry McVeigh told me that he believed about 5% of all these
(53:03):
mortality claims were bogus and that they were insurance money.
The problem is proving it. And the other thing is that the insurance company
is in charge of how much investigation is done.
So even if Tom Dixon said, look, I want this to happen. I want to take statements.
They can say, no, we're paying it.
And it's not Tom Dixon's fault that they paid. He didn't say pay this claim.
(53:24):
Tom Dixon just, you can go on my website and see all of his reports.
And his reports aren't great. And he doesn't investigate very far.
But Lloyd's had the opportunity to say, we don't have enough.
Let's not pay this at 30 days. Let's slow down.
They didn't do that. Yeah. And Terry McVeigh, he and his boss,
Brian Chambers, thought it was a setup.
(53:47):
But now they're in the position of they can't share information with because
the lawyers get involved right after this and they can't share information.
But now they're in a situation in a case, a court case, where Lloyds of London
has already paid $36.5 million.
How are you going to justify to five, not paying your 5 million.
(54:07):
I've been in cases like that where somebody's paid 30 million and I have 5 million and they settle.
Are we going to go and contest and spend all this money to defend the claim
for a 10th of what the other people paid?
It puts you in a very difficult position that it's very hard to defend.
And that's what happened.
And Lloyds of London also paid out very quickly in the case of the kidnapping
(54:31):
of the famous racehorse Shergar when I was a young person growing up in the
UK and this racehorse was retired and was going to be bred,
a stud farm, and he was kidnapped.
And a bunch of people in the ownership syndicate, they were reimbursed by Lloyds
(54:53):
very quickly. but I know some of them weren't covered for theft.
So the horse was covered for mortality. And to this day, I believe that they
still haven't been paid.
Who hasn't been paid? One of the shareholders in Shergar, he had not taken out
(55:13):
insurance coverage for theft, only mortality.
So he was one of the driving forces behind trying to get information as to was
the horse killed and where is he buried?
And they still haven't found the horse's body. But from what you're saying,
it sounds like Lloyds of London are wanting to pay out these big tens of millions
(55:38):
of dollars claims because they want to show that their policies were...
They want more clients.
They want more premium money. And apparently Terry McVeigh said that you'd pay
something out today, it wouldn't come up in their books for two years.
That whole Lloyds of London insurance thing is very strange.
But yeah, there's a book written by a guy named Milt Tobey about Shergar.
Maybe that cold case can also be solved at some point.
(56:04):
The subtitle is Thoroughbred Racing's Most Famous Cold Case. There you have it.
I want to touch on what you said about Cowboy Kip.
Yeah. The identity of this person in Calumet's Crown Victoria drove up,
told Cowboy Kip, the regular night watchman, to take the night off.
(56:24):
So there was no security or there wasn't regular security the night that Aladar was injured. Yep.
Identity of that person and whether it's
found they the fbi actually i
don't know if i don't think this made it into the book the fbi got
all the guys they could think of that worked at calumet that would come to the
(56:47):
office and they did a photo array and they showed it to cowboy kip and he couldn't
identify anybody so it's not like they didn't follow up a lot of people said
why didn't they follow they did follow up on it but it came to nothing and cowboy
kip as far as i know he He testified before the grand jury.
He testified in trial, and he's never talked to anybody.
I tried to talk to him. He wouldn't answer my calls, and his wife was very stern
(57:09):
when I talked to her that he would not be talking to me.
And then I was on a radio show in Lexington, and the sound guy came up and said, hey, I know Cowboy Kip.
I said, you should get him to talk to me. He goes, he'll never talk to you.
Maybe through your website as well, Fred, you could poke for further leads or
tips or bits of information.
(57:30):
I've had some people call me,
but nobody's called me with anything that I didn't really already know.
I've gotten some calls about what happened to certain people afterwards.
And Robert Fox died with no money. He was one of the guys involved with Aladar.
And he was there at the grave that day.
He would have been a great guy to interview, but he had passed away before I
(57:51):
started writing the book.
I've already written an epilogue because I was able to get on Calumet in February,
which I wasn't able to do when I was writing the book.
And I was able to visit Aladar's grave, and it was a very emotional moment.
And so I wrote an epilogue, which I think in July, it'll go back in the book if you order it.
And I'm trying to figure out a way to get it to people who've already ordered
(58:12):
the book and want to read it.
If you have the audio book, it'll be re-recorded. If you have the e-book,
it'll be automatically updated.
But if you bought the paperback or hardback, I'm trying to figure out a way
to get that out. I'm still thinking.
I don't know whether to put it on my social media or what, join my newsletter.
Well, look out for that, and I will be sure to put your website in my show notes.
(58:34):
All the evidence is there, and you can look at the pictures,
look it for yourself and say, does a 7,000-pound cannonball break its leg and leave no mark?
I even asked Tom, where's the mark? And he said, I don't know.
So all the evidence there and readers and listeners to the book can also fill
out the verdict form as well.
(58:56):
But you need a certain code for that.
Would you like to share the code? The only people who are going to get it are
the people who are listening to this.
So it's Aladar Calumet, capital A, capital C.
And that will give you, I didn't want just everybody and his brother to go to
the verdict form and spam me out.
So we decided it would be best to have it password protected.
(59:16):
And it's been good. I haven't gotten any spam. It's all been legitimate.
People have actually filled it out, 400 people. So that's pretty good.
That's terrific. I really appreciate you taking us on this amazing journey today
and touching in on the story of Aladar and remembering his legacy and also expanding
(59:37):
the conversation into other areas of animal welfare.
Thanks for having me on. It's been a great discussion.
Thanks for joining us for this episode of
the inscape quest podcast please don't forget to share this episode with a friend
and hit that follow button we're excited to reconnect with you on our next adventure
(59:57):
be sure to find us on instagram at inscape quest for more content until next
time keep exploring the inner realms.
Welcome to InScape Quests, where insightful conversations redefine perspectives.
I'm your host, Trudy Howley. Join me as together we delve into discussions about
relationships, work, and passions, unlocking profound insights that may shape our lives.
This is InScape Quests, where the journey within meets the quest for understanding.
(00:25):
In this episode, our special guest is Fred M. Cray, an animal law attorney and author.
Fred has penned the award-winning true crime book titled Broken,
where he meticulously investigates the mysterious case of Aladar,
the renowned racing stallion who broke his leg under suspicious circumstances.
In Broken, Fred uncovers key evidence from the trials surrounding the horse farm Calumet.
(00:51):
Beyond Aladar's compelling story, we also delve into a wide range of animal
welfare issues and the latest topics in equestrian sports.
Please join us now for a thought-provoking conversation.
Hello, Fred. It's really wonderful to have you here today. Thank you so much
for being on this podcast.
(01:11):
Thank you for having me. I would love to talk to you about what really is animal
law in general. all, we can think about animals as companion animals,
wildlife, domesticated animals.
And I know you've probably been asked this question many times,
but I think it would be helpful to start with an idea of what animal law actually is.
(01:34):
Animal law is a very interesting topic, and it really covers a lot of different kinds of cases.
Cases to give you an example of cases let's
say you have a dog or a horse that gets loose and hurt somebody you're going
to get sued and if you have a dog the animal control authority will be called
(01:58):
and they may try to put your dog to death over whatever it is that happened depending on,
either a how serious the bite is or b whether it killed another animal i've
had cases where a dog got out by accident and killed a cat.
And in that particular jurisdiction, that is a death offense.
(02:18):
And so I would come in and defend your dog from the death penalty.
It requires the lawyer to know about administrative hearings.
It requires you to know about due process.
And you really need to know about trials because these are trials that take
place in an administrative setting.
Horses, you have cases where horses are not properly fed or sheltered.
(02:43):
Animal cruelty cases where the horses are actually taken from the owner.
And then the animal control authority will have a hearing to divest the owner of ownership,
so that the horses don't stay in this limbo of not being taken care of,
but they're not really owned by the people who take them to the animal control.
(03:05):
There are cases involving puppy mills where you buy a dog and the dog has a
heart defect and it was supposed to have been inspected or examined by a veterinarian and they don't do it.
I've had cases where puppy stores have stolen the veterinarian's stamp and stamped
the veterinarian's certificates with his stamp, and he didn't know it.
(03:30):
And so all those dogs that got their OCVIs stamped were never looked at by a veterinarian.
And so when they were sold, they were defective. And so that brings into play
deceptive and unfair trade practices.
You have, let's say you and your partner buy a horse and you get divorced. Who owns that horse now?
(03:50):
And if you're not divorced now, that's a whole separate case because in the
divorce, that would be involved.
But if you were just dating and you live together, then the question would be who owns that horse?
Cases in horses, involving horses where they're sold and there's fraud involved,
where they're overpriced or their pedigree is not really accurately given to
(04:15):
the buyer and those cause lawsuits. suits.
And it's a really wide area. I once had a case where somebody stole a Great
Dane of all things to steal.
And we had to get it back. We had to hire a SWAT team to break into the guy's
house to get the dog back.
(04:35):
And that was crazy. We had police cars and sirens and we're battering rams. We did get the dog back.
That's good to hear. That was a successful outcome. Moving to your book that
you published recently called Broken,
which was about the suspicious death of Aladar, who was a very well-known racehorse in the 70s.
(04:59):
I'm wondering if you could tell us a little bit about Aladar and why he was
such a special horse and what kind of legal aspects ended up being involved in his story.
I'll say, first of all, that I wrote the book because in 1978,
I had just become a lawyer and was really overwhelmed.
(05:20):
And I went to see him race in the Florida Derby and the Flamingo Stakes,
there's actually flamingos in the infield at Hialeah.
I've watched him come from behind with such determination and such beautiful artistry in his gait.
That I took it as a message to me, a subliminal message to me.
You've got to keep with this. Keep going. You spent seven years in school.
(05:43):
Yes, it's overwhelming, but it'll get you. And so I continued all of my career for 25 years.
And I always felt like I owed him something for that message,
even though I didn't really know him.
And in 2018, I decided to go and see the grave of a horse named Dr.
Fager, who was a very famous, fiery sprinter.
And his grave was in Ocala. Cala and I was living in Gainesville.
(06:06):
And while I was on this tour, there was a lady on the bus who was at Calumet
where Aladar was kept in bread.
And I was told that she was there the night he was injured. And when I asked
her to tell me about it, she said, no, I won't tell you about it because I'm
afraid for my family and my children. And I thought, hey, this is 35 years later.
(06:26):
How is that a normal response to a question about?
It really piqued my interest. So that is when I started investigating what happened to him.
And I read everything on the internet, and there were trials in Houston.
And I went to Houston and got the trial transcripts. And when I read all that
stuff, I was convinced that this wasn't an accident.
(06:48):
And then I started to do my own investigation. And I was able to talk to the
two guys who represented the insurance companies and were there the night of
his injury and the next day.
And they took pictures of his stall and the guy from Lloyd's of London,
he gave me the pictures and gave me all his records.
(07:10):
And when I looked at the pictures, it just convinced me that a horse could not
break their right cannon bone kicking the stall door and leave no mark at all anywhere.
I interviewed 25 people and put all that together in this book,
Broken, and wrote it as a...
Equine true crime book the idea was
(07:33):
to make it something that you wouldn't know the ending until you got to it so
it would be page turner and my goal was to introduce this horse's legacy to
everyone that had never heard of him and to give him a legacy that he deserved because he,
was known before my book of coming in second in the 1978 triple crown to affirmed
(07:58):
actually i have I saw him in 1977 as a two-year-old. I'm 78.
But in 78, he ran the Triple Crown in the Kentucky Derby Preakness in Belmont.
And he came in second in all three races. And so he was known as that guy who always came in second.
And his career was much more nuanced than that.
(08:19):
And he became one of the greatest stallions.
His bloodline still will be in Mystic Dan, who's in the Preakness this coming weekend.
And who won the Kentucky Derby. His bloodline is still in horse racing today.
And the year that he was injured, he was the top sire of 1990.
(08:39):
And he was a horse who did everything that he could do, that he was asked to do.
And he deserved better for all the things that he did for people that were,
that made money from him.
And so my purpose in writing the book was to get that story out there and have a book.
There have been books written about the duel for the triple crown between he and Affirm,
(09:01):
but no book just really about him that went into what happened to him after
he got injured and what the facts were surrounding his death that came out in the trial,
and in some of my interviews, because I had the trial transcripts and I could
go to people and say, look, they said this, what do you have to say about that?
So in the trial, they painted him as this really mean horse who would kick and bite and all this.
(09:26):
And I talked to his, of course, they never had in the trial, his grooms.
So I got his grooms. And that picture was really not, it was created for the
narrative of the trial, not because it was true.
I was glad to go. And it was great to talk to all these people.
I talked to, the Belmont was his most famous race where he lost by a nose.
(09:47):
And talked to the writer of Affirmed who basically said, you know what?
We were out of gas. we were going to lose and I just happened to.
Pushed to the rail, and I had hit a fern with my left hand, and that shocked him.
So he had that one nose ahead of Aladar, and that's what won the race.
I guess my favorite quote is a piece of fan mail that was written to me that
(10:08):
said, I never heard of Aladar before your book, and now he'll be forever in my heart.
And that's really what I was trying to achieve with this book.
Having also read your book, I think you've definitely accomplished your goal
of bringing Bringing his legacy to many others who aren't necessarily immersed
in the horse racing industry.
(10:29):
And what I also love about the
book is you've written it in this way of it being a cold case, true crime.
And then you also invite the reader to give their own verdict at the end.
Yeah, that is that was something that I'm a trial lawyer.
So I know that when you go to trial, you just don't go back in the jury room
and go, hey, what do you think?
What do you think we should do back here? In every trial, you're given a piece
(10:53):
of paper called a verdict form, and your verdict is to answer those questions.
So it gives a structure to what you're doing back there.
And in my cases, I would always take the verdict out in my closing argument
and say, look, you're going to go back there. You're going to get this verdict form.
What are you going to do? You're going to go over these questions.
And I'd go over with them and say, look, this question involves these issues.
(11:15):
And I would give my summation of what the evidence showed.
I don't know of any book that's done it. So I thought it would be interesting.
And there have been a lot of people that have given their verdict.
And right now, the verdicts are 400 to 1 that it was an intentional act.
So I guess I was persuasive. what i'm
curious about as well in terms of animal welfare
(11:36):
in a broader perspective there's this invitation for readers to explore for
themselves was it an intentional killing of this beautiful famous racehorse
or was he a victim of tragic circumstance but there's this.
Idea that he was overbred his stud
(11:59):
book was full he was 15 years
old and he was still breeding four times a
day do you consider that animal abuse
in some way i don't know i mean it depends on as the statutes in every state
basically say what define what animal abuse would be And some of the states
(12:23):
have exclusions for horse racing, horse training.
And it's mainly the states where those things happen, where they think,
hey, I don't want somebody getting sued over training a horse,
which has never happened, by the way.
I have never and I have searched for a case where somebody was training a horse
and it was felt that the training was too harsh or there's never been an arrest
(12:46):
and conviction in the history of the United States that I can find.
Where that's happened. And there's many reasons for that. One is the exclusion
in some of the statutes for that very behavior.
The second is it typically when you have something like that happen,
there will be people in that industry, whether it be horse racing or hunter
jumping or whatever it is, that will come in and say, look, what he was doing, whatever it was.
(13:12):
Is an accepted form of training in our business.
And so I talk about in Aladar's case, he had a exercise rider that was trained
on the king ranch and the king ranch was a cowboy,
dominate the horse at any you know cost
training and charlie rose basically said i evolved from that when i trained
(13:33):
when i ran with ali dar we abandoned that and we became it became a partnership
with the horse and i could ride that horse with no reins i could he would do
whatever i want and And we didn't do anything to him that was untoward.
And there are some courses, Dr. Fager's one, where they would dare not hit him
(13:54):
with a whip because he hated it and you would get bad results.
You would just have to raise the crop up and the horse would see it and say,
okay, you want me to run fast now? And he would do it.
And the problem is that, and it's true in everything where there's animals,
whether it be dog training with Cesar Millan versus other people.
Or dresigen or whatever it is, where you have the traditional training,
(14:19):
maybe harsh and old-fashioned, and then you have the animal welfare guys who
think that you can only use positive reinforcement.
The truth is that it would be very hard to convict somebody of something where there is a.
Tradition of that kind of training being okay
(14:39):
and i talk about i would raise the idea
of bullfighting where you have in spain you have
traditionalists who say i can't believe that you're you're against bullfighting
it's been a tradition in spain forever and there was i guess the state the spain
decided they're not going to award a trophy for bullfighting anymore because
they don't want the state to sponsor this kind of behavior and they're mad about
(15:03):
it the traditionalists are mad about it.
And on the other side, the people who are against it are saying,
that's how it ought to be.
And to me, I feel like particularly horses are a sore subject for me because
horses have done things for the man that I don't think any other animal has done.
They've been killed in countless battles that they had nothing to do with, knew nothing about.
(15:27):
They pulled plows. They They pulled us out of the agrarian society,
and they deserve the best stewardship that we can give them.
They deserve that. They have done things for us, and in return for that, we owe them everything.
And I feel like that's where you start. And they're dying for something that
they don't even know what it is.
(15:49):
We owe them, and I really feel strongly about that. I
feel the same way that they are such amazing animals
and we do owe them as stewardship and consideration and care like you have said
they literally dragged us out of medieval times as it were and I have talked
also about the history co-evolution with horses and just going back to.
(16:17):
Aladar as a breeding stallion and how he was considered as a maxed out credit
card or the golden goose because he was such a prolific breeder i saw a picture
today on one of my facebook pages.
And it was a picture of aladar and i looked at him and he looked tired and he
(16:38):
looked worn out and i felt so bad because i'd never seen that picture before
and i thought to myself he's tired And the story from his groom,
Paul Pryor, is that he went to JT London and said, look, you're overbreeding.
He's tired. He's getting sore in his hind end. And the Calumet on-site veterinarian
(17:01):
said the same thing. And after Paul brought that up, he was fired.
And I think that the problem with the horse industry is that's where all the money gets made.
And so you can have, it used to be horses ran five years, six years.
You've got Kelso and John Henry running, have incredible careers.
(17:21):
And now a horse will run three races and retire and go breed.
And that's where all the money is. At one point, Aladar was making $200,000
per time that he covered a mare.
And there were people that said, one guy that I interviewed who was his groom
around the year that he was injured said, hey, we could call up at night to
(17:42):
come in and breed him off the books.
And so it was pretty well known that he was overbred, but they controlled that.
And it's a sad commentary that here's a guy who is running Calumet and this is his only stallion.
There's no other stallion that he owns that is making, even breaking even to
(18:04):
breed. They had Affirmed.
Coincidentally, his rival Affirmed was in the stall right next to him in 1990. They had Socreto.
They had Capote. They had Mogambo. And none of those horses made any money breeding.
And so Aladar carried that entire farm.
And you would think as a, what I've heard about Lundy is he was in it for the
(18:26):
money and that's all he cared about. And there's a famous statement by Lundy
himself where he says, I don't even know if that horse likes me every time I
get around him, he bites me.
And I asked Paul Pryor about it and I said, did you hear this?
And he goes, oh yeah, Lundy was afraid of Aladar.
And so with that, my conclusion is he didn't love Aladar. are.
If you're saying those things about him, you don't really know much about him.
(18:50):
And you're just, you're in it for the money. And I think that is winning and
money are at the root of all these problems with failure to take care of horses as they should be.
You've got the equestrian scandal of the 80s where Tommy Burns is hired to kill 15 to 20 horses.
For the insurance money, you've got the soaring in the Tennessee walking horses,
(19:14):
and you've got all these things.
And what you find is that people are really concerned about making money in the end and winning.
There's really no other explanation for the equestrian deaths because most of
the people that own those horses had a lot of money.
And they would pay Tommy Burns $5,000 by check to kill their horse.
(19:36):
And now they want to say, I didn't do it, but there's their check.
And there's Tommy Burns saying, I got your check. Most of those people pled guilty.
But some of them were very wealthy. And you wonder, why are you doing this?
The only thing I can think of is that the horse didn't work out the way you
wanted to. And you want to just not look at that horse because it reminds you
of that mistake. And so you want to get rid of it.
(19:57):
But while the law treats animals as property, they are sentient beings.
You can argue about, do they think, do they do this?
But they can feel, and they know pain, and they know to stay away from it, and they react to it.
And I don't see how anyone who is good enough to be training a horse doesn't
know when a horse is being hurt.
(20:17):
That's a really important point. I know in England as well, just recently,
they did pass a new law, animal welfare law, saying that animals have legal
rights as sentient beings.
And you also mentioned earlier when we were talking that different states have
different animal cruelty statutes in the US.
(20:41):
And also there's this issue of animal welfare legislation being under-enforced generally.
It seems very complex. We're looking at Aladar as a cash cow,
but JT Lundy's wondering when
can he get back to breeding, having broken his right hind cannon bone.
(21:04):
That says it all. He's not saying, we're so happy Aladar survived.
He's saying when he could get back to breeding. I think the whole idea that
an industry can police itself, how many times do we have to learn that doesn't work?
It's never worked in the history of man, whether it be the financial industry
(21:25):
or banks or whatever industry you want to talk about. It can't regulate itself.
And it's interesting that the USDA in the United States is tasked with a lot
of these inspections of different places.
And I know when we had that pet store case where the vet, his stamp was stolen.
(21:45):
We wanted to know, well, where did these dogs come from? And where they came from was puppy mills.
Where there are 300 puppies in a place, and the USDA is tasked with enforcing
the standards of these puppy mills that are along the United States.
And what we found was there is not enough USDA inspectors.
(22:08):
And when they do go someplace, they never do anything.
So, for example, in one situation, we got the records from the USDA,
USDA and the inspector came to a puppy place and said, listen,
I was here last time and you had 250 puppies and now you only have 200.
What happened to the other 50? And the guy said, we shot them. We euthanized them.
(22:30):
And the guy said, you can't shoot dogs. That's not proper under animal welfare laws.
But they didn't do anything. They didn't shut them down. They just said, don't do that again.
And the standards that the USDA has promulgated as the low bar for what how
you can keep a dog is you can have two dogs in a crate all day as long as they
can turn around. And that's okay.
(22:52):
If they come and see, that meets the standards. So there's not only a dearth of USDA inspectors,
there's also what I think is industry influence low standards that make it impossible
for USDA to do anything, even if it could, because the standards are so low.
So you've mentioned some really important points.
(23:15):
And so separating out what's a felony crime, what's a misdemeanor.
And also, you mentioned about governing bodies and self-policing. thing.
So if we look at the legal aspect, what's the definition of a felony crime?
(23:37):
Like if Aladar had his leg intentionally broken with a crowbar,
is that animal cruelty or is that a different kind of crime?
I have to say that would rely, again, we've got all these states and they all have different laws.
And I really have to confess, I did not look at Kentucky's animal cruelty to
statutes nor to what I know what they were in 1990, but they can be anywhere from very vague,
(24:02):
they can be very low bar, they can be, if you give the animal food, shelter and water.
If they have that, it's not animal cruelty. And then you get into starvation
and how much does that have to be? And how do you prove that?
It just depends on each state.
And I would say my opinion would be, without knowing any more,
(24:25):
would be that if you killed a horse with a crowbar, that would probably be a felony.
But I know, for example, I rescued a dog from a hoarder that had 200 dogs.
And they had a trial for that, for the woman who was the hoarder,
and she was convicted. but that they were all misdemeanors and she'll probably get probation.
That's the usual because there is again in animal cruelty, this problem of resources
(24:51):
and animal control is usually understaffed, underpaid and overworked.
And they usually try to settle most of their cases so they don't have to go to court.
There's just a dearth of money that it's given to these entities.
And so that's when you have the humane society come in a lot of times.
(25:13):
And a lot of times people will make, have a contract with them to come in and
help rescue dogs or horses.
When there's a huge, a county or city animal control place is not going to be
able to have 200 dogs come in there, their place.
And so typically you'll see a HSUS come in or some other entity to hold those dogs.
(25:38):
And, and, then they get dispersed. There has to be a hearing where the dogs are taken away.
And that's a big problem because if somebody has got 50 horses and they get
arrested, they can say like, I want those horses or my horses.
And you have to have a trial about that before you take away their property.
And you get the typical excuses of, I took them to the vet, it wasn't that bad.
(26:00):
In the case where with the collies, I fell down and broke my shoulder,
I couldn't take care of them. Very difficult thing to prove. Preston Pyshko,
And it takes a lot of resources to do it. You just don't go in and say,
well, they didn't look like they were taken care of.
You have to have forensic people come in and say, this is an old scar.
This is not something that happened in the last month of this person's having the worst dog.
(26:23):
The starving took place over a long period of time. And it just takes a lot
of effort. There are dog fighters that get probation.
There's a lot of outrage about it. But in the end, the courts,
sometimes they don't take it seriously. And sometimes a sentence is not as we
would like it to be. It's not as severe.
And part of it is because there are misdemeanors versus felonies.
(26:45):
And the other part of it is that the legal system is more person-centric than it is animal-centric.
I read yesterday about these horse races that take place where they're not sanctioned.
They're just somebody has a lot and they have a quarter horse race.
There's some people bet on it, but it's just for that minute.
And then they leave. There's no animal welfare there.
(27:07):
Guys do whatever they want because it's not sanctioned by anybody.
It's like a dog fight where you say, hey, we're going to have it tomorrow night at nine o'clock.
And then we change the location five times.
And then when people come in, we make sure we know who you are.
And this happens with these unsanctioned horse racing.
What I would say is wherever there's money and animals involved,
(27:30):
human ingenuity will find a way to take advantage of it.
So it's an interesting state of affairs now,
if we think about this under-enforcement of criminal law and under-enforcement
of actually prosecuting things and how animal welfare legislation came about,
(27:54):
and that there's cross-reporting with child protection laws as well.
There are a lot of stakeholders that you wouldn't expect in animal welfare.
A lot of times, the American Veterinarian Association and other groups like
that, they are not in favor of, let's say, having vets report what they think is animal abuse.
(28:18):
Their position would be, hey, I'm going to lose clients if I say,
hey, I think your dog is starved or I think your horse is not being fed properly
or whatever it is that he finds.
And I think there's some truth to that because veterinarians work at the whim of the owner-trainer.
And we talked last time about this horse, LeBowen, who was at Windstar Farm
(28:41):
and all of a sudden he had a heart attack and it came out, oh,
we're sorry, he had a heart attack, what a terrible incident.
And then it comes out that some of the owners of the horse sue the insurance
company for mortality insurance.
And it comes out that a vet gave the horse a shot of supposed to be a B12 shot,
but they used a cocktail of different vitamins that were out of date.
(29:02):
And the horse had an anaphylactic shock and died.
And none of that came out from the owners of the horse or the veterinarians
or anything until this lawsuit was filed.
And the insurance company said, hey, this was not an oops, this was an accident.
This was a shot and the approximate cause of the death was that shot.
(29:23):
And the farm had an on-site veterinarian who apparently didn't know anything about it.
And they kept that on-site veterinarian. And I guess the veterinarian who gave
the shot admitted fault.
If you ever try to get a vet's license suspended for animal cruelty,
there was a vet who shot a cat with a bow and arrow here in the States.
And it was a big and whether she would keep her license or not.
(29:47):
And the vets are governed by a board that's comprised of vets.
The legal profession is governed by a board that is lawyers.
And so I think those groups are more concerned about the person losing their
income and their license than they are.
(30:08):
There's got to be something really astounding for them to say,
we're going to sanction this person.
There's a friend of mine who's complained to the Florida Veterinarian Association
about numerous malpractice cases she's had, and nothing's ever happened.
So you not only have the USDA involved, but you would think that if an owner
(30:29):
complained about a vet doing something wrong, that there'd be another level
of scrutiny by the Veterinarian Association.
That's rare. And a few minutes ago, when you'd mentioned about Kentucky,
which is where Calumet was,
I'd looked it up in the Animal Legal Defense Fund rankings that Kentucky was
(30:51):
way at the bottom of the annual rankings for their animal protection laws. And that's why.
Because the trainers and owners and veterinarians are a huge part of whether laws get passed.
And it's taken horse racing 40 years and just last year to create the Horse
(31:13):
Safety Act. They had a Horse Safety Act, and now it's HISA, Horse Implementation and Safety Act.
It's a central set of laws that govern horse doping and all these things that
are involved in horse racing.
And so you had this patchwork of things where you could race in Louisiana and
have all these drugs, and then you would go to New York, and you could.
(31:35):
Bob Baffert is not allowed, who's a very famous race trainer,
has been suspended from one jurisdiction, but he can still race in another. other.
And it's these other stakeholders who are not.
Necessarily interested in animal welfare and interested in veterinarians,
for example. There's a really big hypocrisy in the veterinarians because I take
my dog to the vet and there's all these signs, treat your pet like a family.
(31:58):
But if they commit malpractice and you say, okay, now I've got pain and suffering
because I love that dog and he was with me for 10 years and he's my service animal.
They'll say, sorry, your dog's property and here's $10. You can get that dog in a rescue for that.
And they're against that. And yet they're proponents of that in their office
(32:18):
when they're talking to you.
Everything in their office is about the highest standard of care you can give your family member.
And yet when it comes to the legal system, they don't want it to be a family
member and they don't want animals to have those rights.
And that's a perfect example where stakeholders are the reason that those laws don't get passed.
(32:41):
It's similar to the issue of dignity and dying. You want to be able to have
control over how you die.
And the Catholic Church and all those guys are against that.
And that's why it's so hard to pass those laws.
So the stakeholders that are involved are really difficult to bring to the table.
And it wasn't until in horse racing that all these deaths occurred.
(33:07):
It's Santa Anita and then Churchill Downs and in Saratoga that people and there
was just in the last month, there was a show on FX called, incidentally, Broken was this broken.
I thought, hey, that's the title of my book, Broken Horse Racing.
And they had this whole expose about drugs and horse racing and how they finally got a conviction.
(33:31):
The FBI came in. And so what happened was they decided, you know what,
we want somebody who's independent of horse racing to go in and look at what's going on.
And these independent guys went in there and they got tapes of guys saying,
yeah, we're going to give this horse this.
And they got vials of stuff. And the FBI came in and they prosecuted these guys.
And I think they pled guilty and there was no way to get out of it.
(33:54):
And this was just on TV. And I think this persuaded some of the reluctant shareholders
in horse racing to say, you know what, this is a crossroads for horse racing. This is coming out.
People are seeing horses die on the track. And not just one, not just two, tens.
And animal welfare is changing. When I was growing up, dogs would be put outside
(34:18):
and that was it. Now they're sleeping in your bed.
They're getting billions of dollars are being spent.
And you can see it with bullfighting. you can see people are getting more sensitive
to the sentient being of animals.
And now more research is being done than ever showing birds are smart, apes are smart.
(34:38):
All manner of octopuses, all manner of animals are being shown that they have
problem-solving skills.
They're not just to be at man's beck and call. And they have a right to live,
and they have a right to be treated with dignity.
Absolutely. There seems to be much work that needs to continue to be done here in the US.
(35:02):
And I know I've talked about the whistleblower hotline in horse racing that's
available for people to report behavior.
And also with the U.S. Equestrian Federation,
we have a program called Safe Sport, where as part of your membership,
you have to do this mini course to recognize abuse in human athletes by training. It's so hard, though.
(35:29):
It's so hard because for lawyers, we have a duty to report.
So if I'm with somebody and they fall asleep in a deposition,
position i'm supposed to report that to the bar and there's a reluctance to do that because you.
Are turning somebody in who's a fellow attorney and
nobody wants to do that there's a disincentive to do that i think as a normal
(35:52):
thing and so what i think has to happen particularly in the equestrian dressage
and all that there has to be the governing body has to take action
I think the governing body has to have,
I know there's something going on with it now about where the question was,
if the person is off the premises, can they do anything?
(36:12):
And they went, oh, we can't. And so now they've had to change that.
As lawyers, if you broke into a house as a lawyer, even though you're not doing
a bar activity or representing somebody, we can be thrown off out of the bar for doing those things.
I feel like that's what has to happen. I think there has to be,
(36:35):
and particularly in equestrian sports like that, because there are so many things
that those horses are being asked to do. It's not new.
This problem of the line between abuse and training has been going on for decades in equestrian sports.
And you see the horses with their heads pulled down and you see some of the
(36:57):
training techniques that are done.
And you've got to say at some point that the people who are in charge have got
to say, we're suspending you and you cannot be involved in this sport until
we feel that you've been, if you can be, rehabilitated.
And look what happened to Bob Baffert. They said, there are a lot of people that love Bob Baffert.
(37:18):
There's a lot of people that think it's political just because he wins a lot
of people are jealous. And you're going to get that narrative of that.
They said, you're not racing here in this jurisdiction anymore.
And I think that sends a message. And I think particularly with a guy who's that famous.
And so I think in the sports that you're familiar with, I think that's something that has to happen.
(37:40):
That's the start. It starts with that.
But the guys in dressage and these other, they know.
And the guys who are doing it no and the horse is hurting and they know if it's
kicking or it's it's trying to flee or whatever it is they do they and the people
watching it no and the people who are paying the guy no,
(38:00):
the problem is again if you're paying this guy to train your horse and he's got great results,
and you're not as smart as he is or you don't have the resume he does you're saying i'm trusting him.
And so that's why I say, then the people that are in charge of the sport need
to say, it's not acceptable. We're not going to let you train horses.
And if you do, we're not accepting them into our place.
(38:21):
Then that sets the tone and it starts to send that message.
And what I see is it may be starting to happen.
And they should say, even if you're not on premises, we have the right to say,
hey, you can't bring that horse in here.
Because where does all this happen most of the time? in their training
facilities and if that's exempt i don't
(38:44):
think there's any teeth you say i'm not doing it at the event
of course you're not there is
a lot of scrutiny at the actual events and
you've made mention of the governing bodies
of horse sports and this idea of them
needing to set enforceable standards and
actually taking action rather than just
(39:06):
being seen to be doing something thing i'm all
for those things happening and change happening
quickly but we also need change happening in a
smart way as well the question is
with horse racing you've got gambling so
the government is involved but the government's not really involved in other
(39:26):
equestrian sports and do they need to be or can the governing sports bodies
police themselves my answer to that my My answer is no governing body can police themselves.
And this is where you get in democracy, you get places like PETA,
and a lot of things happen because of them.
(39:47):
I'm not a PETA fan in terms of how they do things and how extreme they are.
Some of their policies are, to me, unethical.
So far, we move from common sense and frankly, for what's good for animals.
But a lot of times, they send people in to record stuff that,
and there's no other stakeholder that's willing to do that.
(40:08):
And that's how these things come out. This is why we have in the United States
a movement to ban guys coming on to agricultural places and recording what they're doing.
They're called ag gag laws. And the farmers are stakeholders,
all the stakeholders who are in commercial feedlots and all these kinds of things.
They don't want that because there is more animal cruelty in that part of our
(40:33):
society than any other part in agricultural slaughter, putting all the things
that they do to get the meat to the store.
I used to teach animal law and one of my things was to have people watch one
of these, a movie about what happens. to get your meat to the table.
It's just horrible. It makes the things we're talking about seem a lot less worse.
(40:56):
These problems can't be solved until, I think you're right, there's a certain
amount of education that has to happen from the bottom up.
And it takes people who are very passionate about it and willing to expose that
stuff and have it come out.
Because if it's not exposed, people will not know.
It's just like Aligarh. Nobody knew about what was going on about all this.
(41:18):
People thought he was being overbred. You hear the groom say,
I told him to stop and they fired me.
If that came out now on social media, things would happen.
People would be up in arms and maybe nothing would get done,
but it would hurt the reputation of the farmer.
Like Windstar Farms, I don't know how they're handling this,
but it's a public relations nightmare for them with this horse,
(41:39):
LeBowen, who dies of a shot by a vet on their property, and then they want to
get the insurance money.
That's not a good look for them. If you look at anything, we've been trying,
the lawyers have been trying to get rights for chimpanzees for decades,
and they've tried multiple ways to get personhood.
If they're in a cage for 24 hours and they're never let out,
(42:02):
somebody can sue for them.
And they haven't been able to do it. And so the law is always behind everything.
The law evolves after things happen.
We're still not there. But for animal rights, this educational process is a
very slow process. And in this case, animal cruelty has been low on the list of things.
(42:25):
And it takes people saying the horses deserve this and I'm going to report this
or I see that and it's wrong.
And I feel like we need the help of something else to push that forward.
Word, whether it be the law of animal cruelty or the stakeholders getting together
and saying, you know what, as all these things are coming out,
(42:49):
it's not a good look for us.
And it would take, it wouldn't hurt if people who were in the sport, who were famous, who,
would come out and say these things. Or say there's an Olympic rider or somebody who's famous who says,
you know what, I'm for this, and I won't let my horses be trained by people
(43:09):
who have this training method, or I don't agree with it.
And I haven't seen that. That's why I'm saying anybody who has a platform,
who's in dressage or in equestrian sports, come out and say, you have to take a stand.
We have to be behind the training methods that are humane.
Horses deserve that. That it's the only humane way to. I think some people are
(43:29):
saying things for the sake of being seen to say things.
I think. Performative. Yeah. So I think there's this tendency to be very defensive,
which doesn't move things forward.
And I think it's important to continue these conversations because people who
(43:51):
are actively engaged in animal abuse, animal cruelty, neglect.
Unethical criminal practices, they're not in the majority.
And it's important to be effective in weeding out the bad characters from the industry.
(44:11):
And money is a factor. I've talked about it in other episodes as well.
Well, and you mentioned about the insurance money.
That was obviously a big factor in the case of Aladar that you wrote about.
That was in the heyday of when Tommy Burns was active in killing horses for insurance money.
(44:36):
I did watch the Netflix episode Bad Sport with him.
I'm wondering what it was like for you to actually interview him.
It was horrible. The one thing that was missing from the trials,
from the whole case of what happened to Aladar was somebody who knew the business of killing horses.
(44:58):
And he knows. And so my thought was...
I hate doing this, but I have to do it for the story. And I have to tell you,
I felt like he was remorseful.
I felt, and he has horses in his barn.
And he was honest.
I felt like he had redeemed himself. And I felt like he had paid the price.
(45:20):
He had to go through the criminal process.
And at the end of the day, much like in bad sports, the FBI agent who was his
handler and who had him testify in court against all these guys.
He went to pick him up after he got out of jail.
And so I felt there are times when people do things like this.
And I know there'll be people critical of me saying this, but I feel like he
(45:43):
had redeemed himself and that he had paid his price and that he was now trying
to do the right thing by horses. and then the experience with him was different than I thought.
And he said many times that he was sorry and he was a terrible thing to do.
And I felt in a different setting, he might have turned out differently.
He left home at 15, he got into drugs and alcohol.
(46:05):
And he had that whole sad story with Barney Ward.
And when I was talking to him about Barney Ward, Barney Ward was his father
figure. He got him a job, he got him into the equestrian world.
And he was basically the guy who told him, look, this is the guy who's paying, go kill the horse.
But he loved this guy. It was like his dad. And so when he got caught,
he didn't want to give up Barney Ward.
(46:27):
And one day, the FBI calls him in and said, look, we know Barney Ward's involved,
and we know you're not giving him up, but let me play this tape for you. And they play this tape.
And there's Barney Ward saying, he's never going to get to the courtroom.
We're going to take care of him. Now, that's his father figure saying that on the tape.
And when we talked about that, he broke down in tears as if it had happened yesterday.
(46:49):
And I felt bad for him. This was not a, this was like something,
an unhealed wound that would never heal.
And it's part of the reason why I felt like this relationship and the things
he did were related to what he thought was family.
It was part of what happened. And part of the reason he did what he did was to please this guy.
(47:11):
I just felt, I felt differently about him after that interview.
It sounds like he's dealt with what we call psychologically moral injury,
like he's made atonement and he's repaired and paid his dues.
And there seems to be a missing piece from my perspective when I read the book
(47:33):
about who could be this person that could possibly have broken Al-Adda's.
Yeah, well, the FBI thinks it was Lundy and or someone else.
What's really strange is those three guys that came to the funeral.
Why were they there that night? It was Robert Fox, Alan Crutchfield, and John Secura.
(47:55):
I'm not saying they had anything to do with it. I'm just saying,
how could they be on the farm when they all lived in different places?
New Jersey, Canada, all these places. And they're there the day Aladar's euthanized.
How could they get there?
And when I interviewed Alan Krutchkoff, he admitted, hey, we were there the day he was hurt.
And so when I asked Tommy Burns about it, and you'll remember in the book,
(48:17):
he said, there's always that guy.
There's always that guy. And if you're in this business, who that guy is.
Is it possible that JT Lundy did it? It is, but I don't believe he did.
I don't think he had the wherewithal to do it.
And I'm not sure that he wanted it done. If you follow the money,
it was the bank guy that needed the money. He was the one who was owed the $50 million.
(48:40):
And he was the one who would suffer losing that $50 million if they went into
bankruptcy and he was just another creditor because there were $120 million worth of creditors.
And it's possible Lundy did it, but I think it's more likely that the bank guy
arranged it and said, look, you're going to do this because you owe us this
money and you have no money.
(49:02):
The only thing he was paying was his water and electricity. And there's no way out for you.
And this way, there's some theory that if the bank gets paid off their 50 million
from the insurance money, that maybe the Japanese will buy the farm at the last
minute, which I thought was, you never know what the deal's Lundy's doing.
And there are a lot of stuff going on that was off the books and verbal.
(49:26):
And John Ward, who took over the farm, ran into that. One guy had five different
breeding rights, and they were all verbal. He didn't know who had one and who didn't.
And so there had to be, you had to have a piece of paper for the back ropes.
And when John Ward got into it, he thought, I don't know, 50,
60 million, we can come back from that.
But within a couple months, he went, hey, this is 120 million.
We're never coming back from that. And part of the reason was,
(49:48):
as you said, is that they were breeding Aladar's breeding rights in advance.
So let's say he dies in 1990. In 1998, you give me $2.5 million to breed a horse to them every year.
So every year, 88, you breed a horse, 89, 90, and as long as he's breeding,
you get that breeding right.
(50:08):
The problem with that is that Calumet gets that money in advance, and they spend it.
And like you said, now when he gets to 1990, all those breeding rights are sold
in advance. He doesn't have enough money to run the farm.
And it sounded like J.T. Lundy just literally ran the farm into the ground in the space of 10 years.
They were in the black when Mrs.
(50:31):
Markey died and J.T. Lundy took over. And 10 years later, they're 120 million in debt.
The circumstances around the insurance payout, that the insurance policy was
about to lapse in about two weeks after Al-Adha's and Lloyd's.
Well, that's a crazy thing because actually Calumet had not made their insurance
(50:52):
premiums pay. They hadn't paid them.
And I said to Tom Dixon, who was a Lloyd's insurance investigator,
if I don't pay my car insurance and I have an accident after I don't pay,
the insurance company doesn't say, okay, we'll pay your claim and we'll subtract
what you owed in the premium from our pay.
That never happens. But apparently, from what these guys said,
(51:12):
is that that was allowed in Kentucky because it was an agrarian economy and
people didn't get their money until they brought their tobacco in or their crops
in. And so they would let that go.
The other thing is, and we talked about it earlier, was insurance companies
were not really designed to investigate and not pay claims.
(51:34):
Terry McVeigh thought this claim was bogus.
They wouldn't let him in the day that he was supposed to go in there to take
pictures of the stall. And when he got in there, it was fixed.
And so they destroyed the evidence and fixed the stall so he couldn't get any pictures of it.
And that would have taken the knowledge of Calumet to do that,
which is why I say Lundy was involved. He had to know that.
(51:56):
And also, the light watchman was told to take the night off a week before.
That had to take Calumet's knowledge because the guy who did it was in their car.
So the insurance companies, from what I was told by Terry McVeigh,
who represented Golden Eagle, who did not want to pay the claim,
And by Lloyd's, who did pay the claim, that Lloyd's had made maybe $3 million a year for 10 years.
(52:20):
So that's $30 million that Calumet had paid them.
And so they don't want to miss out on the next 10 years of $3 million a year.
And so they're wanting to show the horse farms to get their money,
to get their premium money. We're going to pay if you have a claim.
And I was also told that when you have a big client who's paying $3 million
(52:41):
a year, like Calumet or any of these other big Kentucky farms,
they would actually go out of their way to try and pay those claims.
Even if the circumstances surrounding it weren't ideal, they would say,
look, we're not going to investigate any further.
We want to be We want to be seen as paying these off.
And in Loy's case, Terry McVeigh told me that he believed about 5% of all these
(53:03):
mortality claims were bogus and that they were insurance money.
The problem is proving it. And the other thing is that the insurance company
is in charge of how much investigation is done.
So even if Tom Dixon said, look, I want this to happen. I want to take statements.
They can say, no, we're paying it.
And it's not Tom Dixon's fault that they paid. He didn't say pay this claim.
(53:24):
Tom Dixon just, you can go on my website and see all of his reports.
And his reports aren't great. And he doesn't investigate very far.
But Lloyd's had the opportunity to say, we don't have enough.
Let's not pay this at 30 days. Let's slow down.
They didn't do that. Yeah. And Terry McVeigh, he and his boss,
Brian Chambers, thought it was a setup.
(53:47):
But now they're in the position of they can't share information with because
the lawyers get involved right after this and they can't share information.
But now they're in a situation in a case, a court case, where Lloyds of London
has already paid $36.5 million.
How are you going to justify to five, not paying your 5 million.
(54:07):
I've been in cases like that where somebody's paid 30 million and I have 5 million and they settle.
Are we going to go and contest and spend all this money to defend the claim
for a 10th of what the other people paid?
It puts you in a very difficult position that it's very hard to defend.
And that's what happened.
And Lloyds of London also paid out very quickly in the case of the kidnapping
(54:31):
of the famous racehorse Shergar when I was a young person growing up in the
UK and this racehorse was retired and was going to be bred,
a stud farm, and he was kidnapped.
And a bunch of people in the ownership syndicate, they were reimbursed by Lloyds
(54:53):
very quickly. but I know some of them weren't covered for theft.
So the horse was covered for mortality. And to this day, I believe that they
still haven't been paid.
Who hasn't been paid? One of the shareholders in Shergar, he had not taken out
(55:13):
insurance coverage for theft, only mortality.
So he was one of the driving forces behind trying to get information as to was
the horse killed and where is he buried?
And they still haven't found the horse's body. But from what you're saying,
it sounds like Lloyds of London are wanting to pay out these big tens of millions
(55:38):
of dollars claims because they want to show that their policies were...
They want more clients.
They want more premium money. And apparently Terry McVeigh said that you'd pay
something out today, it wouldn't come up in their books for two years.
That whole Lloyds of London insurance thing is very strange.
But yeah, there's a book written by a guy named Milt Tobey about Shergar.
Maybe that cold case can also be solved at some point.
(56:04):
The subtitle is Thoroughbred Racing's Most Famous Cold Case. There you have it.
I want to touch on what you said about Cowboy Kip.
Yeah. The identity of this person in Calumet's Crown Victoria drove up,
told Cowboy Kip, the regular night watchman, to take the night off.
(56:24):
So there was no security or there wasn't regular security the night that Aladar was injured. Yep.
Identity of that person and whether it's
found they the fbi actually i
don't know if i don't think this made it into the book the fbi got
all the guys they could think of that worked at calumet that would come to the
(56:47):
office and they did a photo array and they showed it to cowboy kip and he couldn't
identify anybody so it's not like they didn't follow up a lot of people said
why didn't they follow they did follow up on it but it came to nothing and cowboy
kip as far as i know he He testified before the grand jury.
He testified in trial, and he's never talked to anybody.
I tried to talk to him. He wouldn't answer my calls, and his wife was very stern
(57:09):
when I talked to her that he would not be talking to me.
And then I was on a radio show in Lexington, and the sound guy came up and said, hey, I know Cowboy Kip.
I said, you should get him to talk to me. He goes, he'll never talk to you.
Maybe through your website as well, Fred, you could poke for further leads or
tips or bits of information.
(57:30):
I've had some people call me,
but nobody's called me with anything that I didn't really already know.
I've gotten some calls about what happened to certain people afterwards.
And Robert Fox died with no money. He was one of the guys involved with Aladar.
And he was there at the grave that day.
He would have been a great guy to interview, but he had passed away before I
(57:51):
started writing the book.
I've already written an epilogue because I was able to get on Calumet in February,
which I wasn't able to do when I was writing the book.
And I was able to visit Aladar's grave, and it was a very emotional moment.
And so I wrote an epilogue, which I think in July, it'll go back in the book if you order it.
And I'm trying to figure out a way to get it to people who've already ordered
(58:12):
the book and want to read it.
If you have the audio book, it'll be re-recorded. If you have the e-book,
it'll be automatically updated.
But if you bought the paperback or hardback, I'm trying to figure out a way
to get that out. I'm still thinking.
I don't know whether to put it on my social media or what, join my newsletter.
Well, look out for that, and I will be sure to put your website in my show notes.
(58:34):
All the evidence is there, and you can look at the pictures,
look it for yourself and say, does a 7,000-pound cannonball break its leg and leave no mark?
I even asked Tom, where's the mark? And he said, I don't know.
So all the evidence there and readers and listeners to the book can also fill
out the verdict form as well.
(58:56):
But you need a certain code for that.
Would you like to share the code? The only people who are going to get it are
the people who are listening to this.
So it's Aladar Calumet, capital A, capital C.
And that will give you, I didn't want just everybody and his brother to go to
the verdict form and spam me out.
So we decided it would be best to have it password protected.
(59:16):
And it's been good. I haven't gotten any spam. It's all been legitimate.
People have actually filled it out, 400 people. So that's pretty good.
That's terrific. I really appreciate you taking us on this amazing journey today
and touching in on the story of Aladar and remembering his legacy and also expanding
(59:37):
the conversation into other areas of animal welfare.
Thanks for having me on. It's been a great discussion.
Thanks for joining us for this episode of
the inscape quest podcast please don't forget to share this episode with a friend
and hit that follow button we're excited to reconnect with you on our next adventure
(59:57):
be sure to find us on instagram at inscape quest for more content until next
time keep exploring the inner realms.
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