Barbara Graham has always been a friend to horses, whether that meant stealing carrots for them as a child or keeping them from being eaten as an adult.
When Graham was young, people delivered goods by horse-drawn wagon in her poorer Lynn neighborhood. This was after the dawn of refrigeration, but before such expensive technologies became universal.
“We had a big Belgian, like her,” Graham says, tapping a newspaper photo of a similar Belgian mare on the table, “that used to deliver ice in an ice wagon for the ice boxes, and I loved her. The guy used to put me, when I was a little kid, 3 years old — he used to put me on top of her — Maisey, her name was — and I would ride up and down the street with him.”
That’s where her love of horses began, with the ice-delivering Belgian and the old draft horse who pulled the rag collector’s cart. She lived in an apartment and her parents could never afford to buy her a horse, but there were the neighborhood workhorses and some time spent at horse farms. She stole all her aunt’s sugar cubes and carrots for those horses.
The Belgian mare in the photograph on the dining room table is hers, a big horse now, 17 years old and living out back with a pony and three other horses, all of whom owe their lives to Graham, as do well over 100 other horses who had been destined for slaughter houses in Canada before she stepped in.
Graham, 71, runs Foal Haven. It’s an informal charity that is usually just her, though she has a strong supporting cast of local farmers and like-minded individuals who raise money for the cause through tag sales and such.
Since 2002, and whenever she has the money and the horse market can bear it, she heads up to Canada to visit PMU farms.
These are farms that specialize in the collection of pregnant mare urine for sale to the pharmaceutical industry for the production of premarin, a drug used to lessen the effects of menopause.
The mares are kept pregnant as constantly as possible, and the foals that result are an unwanted byproduct. They are sold at meat prices.
That makes a big foal like Jericho expensive. Jericho’s a Clydesdale, and at less than a year old, he’s now safely in Athol and already the size of the 11-year-old mare standing next to him in the paddock behind Graham’s house on Conant Road.
“Reba,” the Belgian, was out of sight Wednesday morning. She was among Graham’s first saves, bought in the womb with 56 pregnant mares after a farmer lost his premarin contract. The 56 mares and their 56 unborn foals were headed for a slaughterhouse.
Graham lists trips with numbers from a dozen to 57, totaling about 250 rescues over the years. The latest was this past spring, with the help of friend Andrea Balser.
Jericho crossed the border in that batch of 12. Like the rest, he sold.
Graham sells the horses she saves to recoup as much as she can of the astronomical cost — $400 to $1,000 per horse, plus $500 in transport costs if she elects not to undertake the 37- hour drive herself, and an expensive veterinary physical to cross the border — but sometimes they come back.
Jericho was sold to someone looking for a draft team, but developed a dragging hoof. He was too expensive to keep, so Graham took him back.
Graham calls this “coming home,” and says she will always take her horses back.
It turned out Jericho, not yet the hulking horse he will grow to be, was malnourished because the other horses were taking his food. Now he runs as he’s supposed to, but on one recent Wednesday morning, he barely raised his head from his food as vistors arrived.
Graham’s golden retriever, Sylvee, had the opposite reaction, flinging herself from the couch to have her stomach scratched. Sylvee is another hard-luck case, found wandering, and adopted by Graham from a shelter.
Graham began her foal rescue after retiring from General Electric in Fitchburg, having spent her career operating machinery, welding, and all manner of other work.
At 50, she moved to Athol and bought 27 acres for horses. She went online to find horses and found a woman in Ipswich with a PMU foal rescue.
Her first horses came from that rescue, and she soon began her own efforts. Most rescuers, all as far as she knows, buy the horses at auction. After seeing an auction, she decided to try something else.
“They use electric prods to get them in and out of the trailers, to get them in and out of the auction houses, and it’s just horrible, horrible. These babies are all screaming for their mothers and it’s just horrible,” Graham says.
She wanted to see the horses before auction. The veterinarian who performed the border crossing tests told her it would be very difficult, because the horse farmers are hated by activists and fear arson and other attacks.
He found three who would do it anyway, and they turned out to be nice people. Graham said she disagrees with what they’re doing, but sees they have to make a living in their remote part of the world, and their culture sees little distinction between horses and cattle, sheep and lambs more often slaughtered for food just south of the border.
“I just hate the thought of them ending up on someone’s dinner table or in a can of dog food,” Graham says.
During her first visit, the farmer drove her in a four-wheeler out to the middle of a seemingly endless Manitoba grassland, where the foals and their mothers were briefly out to pasture before the mares could be re-impregnated.
Seeing the parents, Graham was better able to judge which foals she could sell back home.
One farmer went so far as to buy stallions of the breed she recommended, producing foals more likely to sell.
People buy half-draft horses for trail riding, other breeds and mixes for dressage and competition, she says.
Some of the foals she has rescued have grown into beautiful horses, drawing their new owners purchase offers upwards of $20,000, she says.
Some of the owners keep in touch, and she has a stack of framed photos of her old charges.
One shows a horse strolling past flowers in Pennsylvania Amish community. The horses sell all over the country she says.
Even so, she had to stop for several years around 2006, when the market seemed to be saturated. She started again three years ago and is mulling another trip to Manitoba this year, but there are many factors to consider.
She isn’t certain her pickup is up to the task, and there are the four horses, one pony, one dog and one cat to consider. And, she’s also a foster parent.
Graham can be found on Facebook under “Barbara Graham” in Athol, and by email at foalhavenfarm@yahoo.com. Foal Haven has a website with photos and information, but the contacts are out of date.