Plan to save old Illinois race horses would help rehabilitate felons

By Ken Roberts

COLLINSVILLE — Lanny Brooks watched his wife, Janice, find homes around the country for retired or injured Thoroughbreds from Fairmount Park Race Track and had an idea to save even more in an unusual way.

He wants to send them to prison.

With the help of Illinois state Rep. Ron Stephens, R-Highland, Brooks plans to set up a nonprofit organization called Racehorse Alternative Choice Environment. It would give a second chance to horses and inmates.

The Throughbreds would be spared the fate of a rendering plant; the prisoners would develop job skills and a bond with nonjudgmental animals.

"The beauty of this thing, there is no cost to the state. Zero," said Lanny Brooks, executive director of the Illinois Horsemen's Benevolent and Protective Association at Fairmount. The organization, representing horse owners and trainers, is offering to pay the bills. MORE ILLINOIS NEWS
 See stories, columns, photos and more about Illinois news
 Read Pat Gauen's columns about Illinois

"That's the remarkable thing about this, we can pull off a project which is a landmark thing in Illinois to not only benefit retired horses, but to benefit the inmates' lives. And, we can pull it off in a time when the state of Illinois is $12 billion in debt."

Stephens introduced a House resolution on Thursday, calling for the Illinois Department of Corrections to start a Thoroughbred horse groomer training program at the Vandalia Correctional Center, about 65 miles east of St. Louis. It is a minimum-security institution with about 1,500 inmates.

The prison has more than 1,300 acres for a dairy farm, with barns and fences that could accommodate horses.

"The grooming of Thoroughbred horses is a skill that can be taught to inmates and can lead them to a productive life after prison," the resolution (HR0309) says.

Stephens re-emphasized, "The Thoroughbred Retirement Foundation and the Illinois Horsemen's Benevolent and Protective Association will pay all of the costs." That would include feed, equipment and veterinary care.

Usually, racehorses that are injured or just too slow to run are euthanized. With the program in place, Brooks said, any trainer caught sending horses for slaughter would lose his stalls at the track in Collinsville.

Brooks said eight other states have similar programs and all have been successful. One of them uses the Blackburn Correctional Complex, a minimum security institution in the middle of horse country in Lexington, Ky.

"We teach natural horsemanship here," said Linda Dyer, 55, who has been the corrections farm manager at Blackburn for two years. "I've been around horses all my life, so I teach (the inmates) the right way. They learn that it's a better way to do it in a nice learning environment."

Dyer said local farms are "very happy to hire" the trained inmates.

Brooks said, "Funding is going to be a chore." But he said, "... instead of farming these horses out to individual places all over the country, I would like to take all of our horses to these prisons. We'd know where they all are."

He said retrained racehorses could be adopted for use as trail horses, dressage horses, polo ponies and other purposes.