Keeping Faith A Story of Loss and What Was Found
photos by Javan
by
Denise Hearst
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“I
loved Arabians from the day I was born,” says Lisa Gaudio. “I grew up in Southern California, and when I was about 13, my stepfather bought me a signed print of the painting, ‘The Pharaoh’s Horses.’ That’s when the thought entered my mind that one day I would have my own Arabian. “We used to get Arabian Horse World at the local feed store. And one day there was an ad for a mare for sale that Suzanne and Perry Perkins bred. I went to see them, and my whole life changed. I rode the mare and they said, ‘We don’t think this is the right horse for you. We’re going to find you the right one.’ We became
friends from then on because, hey, somebody tells you not to buy their horse? They were looking out for me.” About six months later Lisa bought the mare Choices (Barbary x Baskhemos Rochele), from the Perkinses – “My first horse and my foundation mare,” she says. “I bred her to the Saddlebred Harlequin Magic Maker and the result was Sherry Baby, the dam of Kyrie Elleison (by Allionce).” Kyrie is her own story, but it’s not the one we are telling here. However, it illustrates the lengths that Lisa will go to for love. In a nutshell, after a divorce early in life, Lisa had to sell her horses. Fifteen years
Hope and Faith — Anissa Moniet (Ras Muntayhe x Hayadah), and CLM Ali Mareekha (Prince Rex x BC Mari Mareekh by Ibn El Mareekh), rescued by Lisa Gaudio and Jimmy Kazanjian from the kill buyers, had a happy year together before they lost Faith.
later, she began to slowly buy them back. The last to come home was Kyrie, who arrived at Lisa’s and her husband Jimmy Kazanjian's idyllic Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, farm in 2013. But all was not well with Kyrie, who was suffering from laminitis. When all efforts to save her failed, Lisa, heartbroken, asked the veterinarians to retrieve her ovaries. The following year, three strapping foals of Kyrie’s
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// left : When efforts to catch the mares at the quarantine facility failed, Lisa’s husband, Jimmy Kazanjian, tried the old bucket of sweet feed ploy. Here’s “Hope” shortly after a vet assistant recommended the mare be put down, so volatile she had been. top right :
Later that same day, Hope and Faith arrived safely at their new home and began their new life.
bottom right :
The photo that started it all ... the two mares at the kill buyer’s auction pens.
were born – the result of ICSI procedures performed at Texas A&M. All three foals (sired by Vitorio TO) competed in the 2018 U.S. Nationals HalfArabian Yearling classes, with the colt “Biggie” winning the colt Championship, and his two sisters winning Reserve Champion and Top Ten in the fillies. “Breeding the triplets, the fourth generation of my breeding, was the greatest moment in my life with Arabians to date,” Lisa says. “It was so special – Biggie having that floral collar put around his neck, and it being unanimous, and of course his sister, Epona, going Reserve, and because my husband was there, and we had sacrificed so much for Kyrie. Leading up to the show, trainers asked which one is going to Nationals, and my husband said, ‘They’re all going.’ I was worried. ‘What if they’re all not ready?’ And he said, ‘Here’s the deal: all or none.’”
As a result of those three ICSI foals, Lisa and Jimmy now had three surrogate mares at the farm that they were reluctant to part with. And in a roundabout way, that’s how they became involved with a rescue organization. “These repro facilities lease surrogate mares,” says Lisa. “At some point I discovered that two of our three had come from kill pens. And when they can’t produce anymore, they end up back in the kill pens. I didn’t like the whole situation. So we kept them.” Omega Horse Rescue is one of the bigger rescue groups in Pennsylvania. They work hand-in-hand with the vets at the University of Pennsylvania. “They go to the big auctions around here and look for horses that seem nice enough and kind enough to be rehomed and they try to pull them. We donate to them,” says Lisa. “One day I got a call from Omega because they saw two
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Arabians in the kill pens and they had no room at their farm. They were so bonded you had to take them both, and nobody would take them because they had to take two. My vet sent me a picture of the two mares and asked me to post it on Facebook. They were supposed to go to Mexico for slaughter in three days. We donated $800 to the pot. We were all stressed out. The day was coming when they were going to be leaving and Jimmy said, ‘Let’s take them.’ “We bought them sight unseen and had them moved to a quarantine facility. Three weeks later, when it was time to bring the mares home, the vet assistant who works at the quarantine facility told me she thought I should put Hope down, she was volatile and making all kinds of strange respiratory noises.
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Hope and Faith at home.
And the other mare, ‘Faith’ was terrified.” Then there was the question of getting the mares caught and loaded. That’s when Jimmy asked for a bucket of sweet feed and eventually caught them. They were able to load Faith on the trailer, but not Hope. “She was really feral,” says Lisa. “We ended up calling this Amish guy who got her loaded. Then we took them to a quarantine facility. Turns out Hope had pneumonia. The money we spent trying to save these two! We had a Go Fund Me page and raised about $4,000, but we went through that in two weeks.”
THOUGHTS ON THE RESCUE SCENE
Lisa and Jimmy, perhaps now more then ever, don’t take breeding lightly. They know that they will be responsible for these foals for a lifetime if they are not sold to great homes. And they feel the weight of ensuring that all of their horses are functional, rideable, or at the very least, have a purpose in life. “I’ve seen what happens to the ones that don’t have a purpose,” Lisa says. “When I was away from horses for those 15 years, the Arabian business was not in this shape. We were often showing horses in halter and performance at the same show. Now we are so segregated. There are people who just breed for halter; no function. And on the flip side, there are performance horses held together with injections. And don’t get me started on shoe packages. The end game for such horses is not pretty. If we could pay attention and be responsible breeders and not think about the dollar at the end of this, this rescue scene would not be happening. So many people have dreams that they’re going to make a ton of money with Arabian horses. If you go into horse ownership thinking that way, you need to re-examine your motives, because that is not going to happen. “And another thing that nags at me: I wish stallion owners would be more selective about what mares their stallions cover. There is no shame in saying, ‘Sorry, I am not going to breed your mare. It’s approved mares only.’”
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// The next step was to identify them. “I knew they were purebred and that they deserved to be registered,” Lisa said. “It’s a detective game. You have to call everyone, go through all the chains of emails and ask everyone who was copied, or who made comments about knowing such and such a person. You have to be very diligent and very nice. You can’t chew them out. Because who knows what the circumstances were, or what the heck happened in their lives.
“I finally figured out who owned them and who dropped them off. I had the guy’s name and address and his brother’s name and address. A lot of misfortune had befallen him. Someone told me he was a dairy farmer who only picked up the phone at a certain time of day. He might not have even had a cell phone or voicemail. Or email. “The obvious question is why didn’t he ever try to sell them? I looked everywhere. He never attempted to sell them.
Maybe the mentality was that ‘somebody will buy them in the auction.’ I believe he took other horses to the auction up in New York, and I don’t know what happened to those horses, but these two, for whatever reason, ended up at this kill buyer down in Pennsylvania. Probably came down in a cattle truck, a six-hour drive. So they had been through a lot by the time we saw them. “I wrote a big, long questionnaire for the dairy farmer and mailed a copy to him and his brother with a stamped self-addressed envelope,” continues Lisa. “In my note I said, ‘If you need money for answering these questions let me know. I just need to know who these mares are. There’s two of them one is fleabitten, one’s not.’ “I hadn’t heard from them, and Jimmy tried calling them at all these weird hours and the phone just rang…until one day, the guy picked up the phone. Jimmy talked to him and found out that he had the papers for Faith, who we now knew was the straight Egyptian CLM Ali Mareekha (Prince Rex x BC Mari Mareekh by Ibn El Mareekh), 14 years old, but he had never transferred ownership. “Then he told Jimmy that Hope was an eight-year-old unregistered straight Egyptian mare by Ras Muntayhe out of Hayadah. He had the stallion paperwork, so thanks to the wonderful help from AHA,
Faith
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// a melanoma on her hip. I thought she had a mass on her udder, too. When she got well, we addressed it. Penn has developed a vaccine for melanoma. We made the decision to spend another $4,000-5,000 to get her on the vaccine. They remove the melanoma and use it to create the vaccine, and you have to keep them on it for a year. While she was on the table for the procedure, I got a call. The vet said, ‘Her udder will have to be removed, and I cannot guarantee that this has not spread to more organs.‘ “I thought to myself, ‘Oh dear God.’ Then I asked him, ‘Let’s just pretend for a moment that money is no object and that this is your horse. What would you do?’ He said, ‘I would not keep her. We don’t know how she’s going to react to chemo therapy. We can’t even touch her back legs, let alone treat her with chemotherapy every day.’
Bellator (Bellagio RCA x CLM Ali Mareekha), Faith’s colt foaled in July 2019. “His name means fighter, warrior, soldier in Latin,” says Lisa. “It seems apropos.”
we were able to register both mares. We named Hope Anissa Moniet.” In the months that followed the two mares settled in at the farm, catching up on all the lessons they had missed in their lives, becoming sociable and mannered. “They had gotten so much better,” says Lisa. “Faith was doing so well, we could bathe her, we had a bridle and saddle on her, we’d been doing ground work...my hope was to get them healthy enough and handled enough so they could be riding horses and perhaps even be sport horses. “Faith, especially, was beautiful. She had the most incredible movement and beautiful hooky neck. Perfect feet and legs. But I had noticed
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Hope is doing well and is in training for dressage. "She knows how to survive," says Lisa.
“So Kaity and I had to go in and kiss her good-bye on the table.” But Lisa wasn’t ready for a final good-bye. Instead, she asked the team to remove Faith’s ovaries. “We took the oocytes late in the afternoon, and we had to get them out quick and shipped to Texas A&M. They don’t do the ICSI procedure at Penn. I was in a panic about who to breed her to. I didn’t want to breed her to a grey.
*Intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) is an in vitro fertilization (IVF) procedure in which a single sperm cell is injected directly into the oocyte. The resulting embryo may then be implanted into a mare.
This melanoma thing was enough for me. I had done her DNA so I knew that she could produce any color. “Turns out, the famous black Egyptian stallion Bellagio RCA was 45 minutes down the road. The program coordinator at Texas A&M, Kindra Rader, wanted this to work so badly. She had followed Faith’s journey, and when she knew I was losing her and that I was sending Faith’s oocytes to them, she was on it. She went and picked up the fresh semen at Arabians Ltd. I got a text from her, ‘Starbucks in one hand, semen in the other.’ “They had five oocytes. That
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is not good odds. Ideally you’d have 10-15. Three oocytes made it to the embryo stage, and of those, one survived and was shipped to Penn. All four of my surrogates were cycling and waiting, including Hope. Ultimately, the one who settled is my favorite surrogate mare, Grace, who carried Kyrie’s filly ‘Elle.’ When we tried to separate Faith and Hope to get them unbonded, Grace is the one who took care of Faith. So it was fitting that Grace carried her foal.” The pregnancy was not without its scary moments. “Everything was going great until one day when Grace was out in pasture, she just dropped to the ground and started sweating,” recalls Lisa. “Our farrier, Dominic Tibideau, was at the farm, along with Kaity, and they got her to Penn in 20 minutes. “She had a uterine torsion. They operated and she was fine. She can carry again. They don’t think she’s a risk at all. The baby was not affected. She just had to be hand-walked for two months. But about six weeks later she started sweating again so we took her back to Penn and this time it was dehydration. It was a day where it went from really cold to really hot really fast. I have a suspicion that she was overdosing on her salt out of boredom. “When the delivery date neared in late July, we were getting ready to take Grace to Penn for foaling. At 6:30 am the next morning Kaity called
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Bellator (by Bellagio RCA and out of CLM Ali Mareekha), with his surrogate dam, Grace.
from the barn and said, ‘We have a baby. He’s here!’ We hurried to the barn, and there he was, up and whinnying and nursing.” The chestnut colt, a little more than a month old at the time of this writing, is, says Lisa, “Pretty headed, good moving, with a beautiful neck. He’s very sweet and he has great legs. He’s running around, doing flying changes. And he’s enrolled in all the Pyramid Society Futurities.” He has been recently named Bellator, but since he joins two
other colts born at the farm this year–a Half-Arabian by Exxalt out of Beni TG, and a SF Veraz colt out of PA Appolonia Dancer–they’ve been calling him “Moe” for the third of the Three Stooges. Or “Ducky,” as in the odd Duck. “Because he’s our only Egyptian,” says Lisa, “And he does things a little differently.” Meanwhile, Hope is doing well. Her farrier declares her feet and legs the strongest he’s ever seen, and her dressage trainer loves the way she moves, and thinks
she’s going to be great. “She’s the first one to cross the streams and go over bridges. She’s knows how survive,” says Lisa. “Jimmy rescued her, so he won’t sell her. I would love for Hope to have her own little girl to love on her…but only with a buy-back clause. Who knows, maybe we’ll do dressage at Devon someday. “The other day, my husband said of Bellator, ‘I think he’s really good, isn’t he? How did we get this lucky that we had three amazing colts this year?’ “I said, ‘I don’t know, faith?’”
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2003
2018
CLM Ali Mareekha (Prince Rex x BC Mari Mareekh)
You were only with us a short time. Your beauty and brave heart will never be forgotten. So we named your only foal Bellator â&#x20AC;&#x201D; fighter, warrior, soldier.
(Bellagio RCA x CLM Ali Mareekha)
2019 straight Egyptian colt Note: Two Javan photographs were merged for this ad.
KYRIE ARABIANS James Kazanjian and Lisa Gaudio Farm Manager Kaity Huff kyriearabians.com