Declan is honored to have been invited by the ASPCA to speak at the Horses on the Hill event, sponsored by Senator Landrieu, the ASPCA, HSUS, and AWI in Washington DC on April 25, 2012. He spoke out against horse slaughter along with Senators and Congressman, celebrities, and fellow horse advocates, and urged our government to pass the American Horse Slaughter Prevention Act H.R.2966/S.1176.

A Forever Moment
by Jeff Kirkendall

    
   I have become a sixty-year-old grandfather, and I am happy to report that I still sometimes see my life through the eyes of a boy. How much I have learned. How much I might still discover. As a student and therapist in the field of childhood sexualabuse for thirty years, I know some things, and “firsts” are monumentally important in life. For many of the children I haveknown, I was the first man they ever met in their lives who treated them with the respect every child is entitled to as a birthright.

    Now I have seen a lot of horses run. I grew up with the inventions of television and color movies. Children all over the world love to watch American cowboy and Indian films. In my lifetime I have seen thousands of horses run. But horses in the flesh are what stick with you. My beloved wife of twenty-six years Carol forever remembers a horse she saw from the window of a moving train when she was a young girl. Was the horse racing the train? What us Indians and cowboys know that is that horses can race with spirit winds and they talk with little girls and boys.

    January 1st of 2011, Paulden, Arizona. Carol had watched closely from our dining room window the five horses starving to death next door. She took me aside and gave me that look she used to give me when we were saving children for a living. As she pointed, she told me, “That one is not going to make it, it’s time to take him.” She was pointing to the faltering stud who had broken his penis two weeks before while trying to mount a mare through the pipe-fence. The end of his penis hung un-retractable like a heavy lump of raw hamburger.

  We knew we were making the sheriff and livestock officer’s lives more difficult, but as the antiquated livestock laws of Arizona are written, officers cannot intervene until the horses are inevitably at death’s door. As our daughter Mary has regularly reminded me in the over-quarter-century of my fatherhood to her, to do less than what is necessary in these circumstance would be to fail altogether. That girl has a lot of her mother in her.

   We all laughed about it then, and we laugh about it now. I told Carol and Mary, “If they take me away in handcuffs, Sweetheart, my dear wife, I will roll over on you in a heartbeat, get immunity, and testify that you were the ringleader!”

   Carol said her and Bob, the neighbor who stole the other three starving horses that night, she said that she and Bob were going to sit in jail playing cards, and when the other convicts asked what they were in for, the two of them would look up and say in unison, “Horse thievin’!”

    Our son I call Lame Wolf. Most people know him simply as Wolf. He is of the Choctaw tribe. His wife Tressa, my wife and I call Two Antelope. The four of us are of mixed bloods and varied personal life stories but we share the traditions of Native People and traditional Christianity. We are a family learning how to blend. We all participated in the saving of Sonny-the- rescue-horse.

    It was Two Antelope who used this thing they call the internet to put out a call that a couple of hundred strangers responded to and sent money and feed to the horses’ rescue. Until that time, I had little use for the technology. She showed us all that an ordinary person with a passion and a cause could save innocent lives. Now I want to know more about how to do this.

   It was Wolf who was inspired to invent the device that soaked Sonny’s fully-extended penis over sixty-five times over a five- month period. A flexible bladder inside the cut-off leg of a pair of jeans, neatly sewed together on the end, the top hemmed with a wide strap, suspended around Sonny’s waist by a soft three-inch strap, which could be fastened over his rump with a sturdy plastic version of a seat belt clip. We took pictures which are being just developed in which we documented our four-legged’s healing progress by holding a sign in front of Sonny’s genitals posting the date and number of the treatment. I think we stopped taking photos somewhere in the forties.

  It was Dr. Lane Kihlstrom that brought Sonny through this critical time. Great vets are amazing people to behold and make every encounter a teaching experience. It was he who sat on the ground under Sonny and used surgical scissors to cut away the dead tissue of the penis. Dr. Kihlstrom had people who we never knew who contributed funds to Sonny’s medical recovery. It was he and his assistant Kim who taught me how to pull a horse by the tail while applying diaper-rash ointment over Sonny’s abdomen.

    There were the countless people we met who brought out feed, offered encouragement, contributed dollars here and there at just the right time, and Sonny slowly came back from emaciation and infection, and it was time for him to be gelded and have his penile-amputation.

    It was Karen Pomroy of Equine Voices Rescue & Sanctuary who rode to the rescue. It was she who connected with Carol Grubb of Arizona Coalition for Equines and Dr. Taylor of Arizona Equine Medical & Surgical Center in Gilbert. It was Karen who connected with Ruthanne Penn in Flagstaff who transported Sonny from Paulden. It was Ruthanne who connected to Melissa and Paul Ambrose of Atlasta Ranch in Chino Valley who transported Sonny to his rehabilitation home with them.

    There was Susan Gonzales and all the folks at Warren’s Hay-N-More in Chino Valley who offered good guidance on nutrition and was the collection center for donations of hay and blankets. There were all the people who donated old bed-sheets, out of which I could construct a soft, porous horse-jock-strap which held Sonny’s penis up against his abdomen in a horizontal position, thereby maximizing blood-flow to his healing over the critical early months.

    Sonny has become a living, breathing symbol, or totem for our family, of what miracles can happen when a few people of like-spirit come together with many people of also-like-spirit and one-plus-one-equals three. We become greater than the sum of our parts. We are all transformed by something greater than ourselves.

    And so it was yesterday, March 29^th, 2012. I walked out into the arena at Atlasta ranch to greet my old four-legged friend, who Melissa had been preparing for this day. In the months I searched for a way for Sonny to have his operation and recovery, I persistently told people, “I just want to someday see him run like a real horse.” That was what the four of us of our family had  joined together with Melissa and her mother and colleague Doctor Karen to do — to see Sonny run like a real horse.

    It took a year and three months. Sonny carried a heavy pendulum of scar tissue underneath him while we lived with concern that if the poor boy had an erection, unable to retract his penis, the blood would pool, coagulate, and Sonny would die.

    All the fears of the year were gone yesterday. Our vision manifested in ways beyond our imaginations.

   Sonny began to run for the first time since before his trauma.

    I was mesmerized, lost in a dream, watching his flagging tail, his braided blonde mane, his entire body moving and flowing. Captivated in my own experience, I eventually looked back to Carol, arm-in-arm with our son, our daughter-in-law in wide-eyed awe beside them, tears of joy running down the face of my wife. It is now a forever memory.

    I shed the tears of a boy seeing a horse run for the first time.

    ”Wash-tay!” I say to you horse-savers. “Nicely done!” I shout to you. “It is an honor to meet you all!”

     From our family to yours,

     Many blessings, Jeffery Dreamer Kirkendall   jeff@writinginamerica.com

     The news report – aired July 20, 2011 on NBC Nightly News by anchor Brian Williams - won a prestigious Humane Society of the United States Genesis Award at a star-studded gala ceremony held March 24 in Beverly Hills, Calif.

     NBC featured Equine Voices Rescue & Sanctuary in detailing the severe abuse suffered by horses used in illegal drug smuggling across the US-Mexico border, and Equine Voices’ vital role in rescuing these animals. The Genesis Awards have been given annually for the past 26 years to spotlight outstanding efforts by news and entertainment media that raise public awareness of animal issues. “We pay tribute to an amazing array of works that address animal protection concerns, but the real winners…are the animals themselves, who rely on these invaluable voices to speak for them,” says Beverly Kaskey, senior director of The HSUS’s Hollywood Outreach program and executive producer of the annual Genesis Awards.

     After learning of the award highlighting Equine Voices’ work, Equine Voices founder Karen Pomroy said, “We were thrilled to learn that NBC won the award for the piece they produced on Equine Voices, and we were happy to know the topic of using horses in the illegal drug smuggling trade garnered national attention. After all, education is the key to change.”

     In introducing the award-winning report, NBC News anchor Brian Williams said, “We end our broadcast tonight with a story about people who are giving some magnificent creatures a second chance at a good life. We hear a lot about the human toll in the drug trade between the U.S. and Mexico. We don’t hear much about the animals who are pressed into this duty and this dirty business and then abandoned when smugglers no longer need their services. Our report tonight (is) about an organization that is making a difference for these noble creatures.”

     NBC News filmed the segment at the Equine Voices Rescue & Sanctuary in Amado – known as the Jumpin’ Jack Ranch – now the home of 48 horses rescued from slaughter or slow death due to neglect, starvation, abandonment and abuse. Equine Voices was formed eight years ago to save mares and foals used and discarded for slaughter in the manufacture of the hormone Premarin, made from the urine of pregnant horses.

     But as the world economy crashed and border violence and smuggling escalated, Equine Voices has expanded its mission to rescue horses crippled and discarded in the drug trade, as well as those suffering neglect and abandonment by owners who can no longer afford to care for them. Since 2004, more than 500 horses have been pre-placed and/or rescued, with 413 adopted to new homes.

Among other HSUS Genesis Award winners this year are:

     The feature film “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” for its examination of the ethics of using chimpanzees in   medical research.
   “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” for an informative interview with HSUS President and CEO Wayne Pacelle about dog fighting and puppy mills.
    The Morgan Freeman-narrated IMAX documentary, “Born to be Wild 3D” for its celebration of the people rehabilitating baby elephants and orangutans orphaned by poaching and habitat encroachment      .

     TV documentary “Gordon Ramsay: Shark Bait” for its fearless exposé of shark-finning, and “Animal Planet Investigates: Captive Hunting Exposed” for pulling back the curtain on the so-called sport of “hunting” tame animals trapped in fenced pens.

     ABC’s “20/20” for exposing inhumane conditions at an egg factory farm.

    The magazine Vanity Fair for an extensive look at the escalating ivory trade decimating African elephants.

     McClatchy Newspapers for a series of articles spotlighting the inhumane treatment of chimpanzees in scientific research, and The Atlantic.com forincisive reporting on the politics of wild horse management and round-ups.

                                                                            ***
The entire 26th Genesis Awards event will be broadcast as a one-hour special on Animal Planet on May 5 at 4 p.m.
                                                                         ***
  A clip of the NBC News report featuring Equine Voices is posted at  www.equinevoices.org  

  Contact Equine Voices founder Karen Pomroy at  karen@equinevoices.org

 Article Written By Carla McClain

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