S2 E16: Recycled Racehorse Falconry - Merging OTTB Retraining with the Art of Falconry

S2 E16: Recycled Racehorse Falconry - Merging OTTB Retraining with the Art of Falconry (Transcript)
[00:00:00] Hi everyone. And welcome back to OTTB on tap. I'm Niamh and today I'm flying solo. Emily is in Wyoming visiting her family. I'm sitting down today to talk to Martin Whitley of Recycled Racehorse Falconry, which is based in the UK.
He's our first international guest. I'm so excited to have you here today..
Martin, thank you so much for joining me today. Before we dive into your incredible venture, I'd love to know more about your background. Could you just tell us a little bit more about yourself and how your journey with horses began? I've been riding horses forever. There's a picture of me out fox hunting in a basket saddle when I was seven months old.
So cute. So horses have always been part of my life, or mostly they've drifted in and out at times, but I come very much from a farming country sports background. So I've ridden forever I've flown birds since my late teens, I'm absolutely ancient now, so very long time ago. And what was your background in relationship to off the track thoroughbreds?
Were they just always around and that was what you had, access to, or did you have a specific kind of journey with off the track thoroughbreds? I fell into it by My father was the typical English racing story. How do you make a small fortune out of owning horses? You start with a large fortune.
He blew an awful lot of money owning very poor race horses. Absolute fortune. So I have no interest in horse racing at all, but what I did, I loved working the horses when they came out of racing. So we hunted with them, did full chrism, did all sorts of things. I just loved working thoroughbreds.
Thoroughbreds are very much my sort of horse. They're really known for being super athletic and quite spirited, but They also can present some challenges during their retraining. What were your earliest experiences in terms of lessons that you learned from them along the way?
Oh, I could write a whole book on that. Basically, first of all, don't take anyone else's word for what the horse is like. Find out yourself. That's great advice. We've had it since we bought horses in people. And we will, have a very different view on a horse than the reality sometimes.
But let the horse be the horse. Let the horse find its job. We found out right from the start, we have several different aspects of what we do with our horses. And when a horse comes to us, we want it to do Falkland in some form, but we will let it find, adjust to its own form of what we'll do with it.
And each one works. So they're cross trained and, Yeah. And each one works out a different style of how to do things. So we have a very different. Yeah, I think that's really important when it comes to thoroughbreds because I think that they get put under this umbrella of stereotypes, many of which are incorrect.
And I think that, like for instance, we're on a breeding farm with probably 80 mostly thoroughbreds and they just could not be more different. Every full crop, they're all individuals and it's just very cool to see how their individuals personalities and. physical attributes come out as they get older and get broken and go on to, do new things.
So why did you think specifically that off the track thoroughbreds would be a good fit for your falconry program? They're the perfect horse for falconry. We do teaching, we do display work, but we also do field falconry, hunting falconry with them. Now we hunt across Dartmoor, which is one of the very few areas of proper wild country left in the UK.
It's rough going, it's heavy going, it's bad going. You need a horse that's fast, quick on its feet, so you're not having to place its feet for it, will think for itself, and can adapt to what you're doing. And Thoroughbred's absolutely brilliant for it. Once given the job, and once they know the job, they are the most amazing horses.
I wouldn't do Falkorne on anything else. Yeah. It's funny. You would almost assume you'd be out there doing it on a draft horse or some kind of cross, we do have an Irish draft here, which my wife, Philippa, loves very dearly. Of course. And he's very good, but we need to teach him because for some reason, people think an Irish draft is going to be better behaved than a thoroughbred.
I would never do field fulcrum on him. It's slow. It's cumbersome. It's not very bright. I have to say we've had some horrific weather here in Pennsylvania over the last couple of months and it's either frozen ground or it's clay ridden soil that is just so muddy and so slick and I'm so careful about what I'm doing with my new young thoroughbred. And then I turned him out in his field yesterday and it's on a huge Hill. It's all very early. It's very similar to England. And he bolted across the field with his friends, ran straight down a Hill to the gate, to the muddiest, slickest part at, full tilt and was just.
Perfect. It was like, there wasn't anything wrong with the ground whatsoever. And I'm watching, I'm like, why am I being so careful with him? Yeah. We do that when we watch them out. It's watching the Irish draft galloping down the hills when it's wet. You're like, oh God. And it's much the same when you're actually doing full crew with him.
You have to hold him together with a thoroughbred. You can drop your reins, look at what's going up there and trust them. Yeah, exactly. It's what Lucinda Green calls the uncomfortable ground training, the most beneficial thing you can do for horses. You said that you were involved in falconry from a very young age.
How did you get involved with that as a teenager? What sparked that interest? falconry very much from a hunting with birds of prey things. I went on a day hunting with a bird called a Harris hawk at a big center near here. It was present for my late first wife. And just the first time that bird flew back to me.
I loved it. I wanted to do falconry. I just wanted to do falconry. Our rules and regulations on falconry are very different over here to what they are with you. Over here you can just go and buy yourself a bird. But back when I started, it was much, much harder to get it with modern captive breeding.
The birds are very readily available now, but back then it was harder. So I persuaded someone to sell me my first bird. I couldn't find anyone to teach me, so I read every book in the world [00:06:00] about falconry. So I'm entirely self taught. So falconry wise, don't believe a word I tell you, okay? That's really amazing and I actually didn't think about the differences.
I did. Do a quick search earlier this week about falconry places in and around this area because I'm so interested in it because I've always been obsessed with owls and we have a lot of really cool birds of prey in our area, specifically the red tailed hawks.
And we do have a lot of. Bald eagles as well. We actually have a resident mascot at our farm. We call him the penguin. He's a red tailed hawk, but he has this huge belly and he has a little area that he hunts in and he's always on the fence rail when you're hacking out to the ring. Yeah, it's like a 10 minute hack out.
And he's always just there hanging out. He's really cool. But yeah, it's something I would just love to get involved with as well. We have any golden eagles there? Proper eagles. Yeah. We have golden eagles and bald eagles. Much more yeah, bald eagle's not a real eagle though. Yeah. It's just a fish eating scavenger.
A fish eating scavenger. Don't, you can't say that right now where the eagles just won the Super Bowl. On a complete tangent, biggest thing I ever caught with my bald eagle, I used to have one. I had to get her out of the country rather rapidly last year, after one incident with her. Biggest I took with her was a six foot two, 250 pound golfer, person playing golf.
She knocked out cold, tried to kill stop it. He had issues. Oh yeah, I would say so. Just specifically against golfers or just no people in general, in her defense, it was only a goal for it wasn't like it was a proper person. There's all that beautiful falconry and horse riding ground wasted on them.
It's funny, I used to play golf in high school and all I ever thought about was how much fun it would be to just gallop down the fairway. I used to be based just next to a golf course and every time I rode across it, I thought these golfers, they look serious, they look miserable.
If I was galloping my horse down the middle of there, I would be grinning ear to ear the whole way. And you'd be so happy, right? Just running through the water traps and everything. Yeah, yep. You said that you grew up doing falconry, that's really cool. What do you guys actually hunt for specifically?
Rabbits, or? With the stuff we do on foot rabbits I can rabbit haunt from a horse, but to be honest, if you do that, the horse is a complete pain in the rear end. Because you're on and off the horse so much. So what we hump with from horseback, we mainly use we started doing it from horses to hump crows with Peregrine Falcons and Peregrine Crosby.
It's fast. Okay. It is the fastest thing and most exciting thing you can do on a horse. I promise you. You've got a really fast falcon facing a really agile bird, and we have to do this in big open country. You don't want a tree in sight to do this. And you'll get a flight that goes for maybe two miles across an area like Dartmoor, and the flight's going on 40 50 miles an hour, and you're having to keep up with that.
That's why you need a fast horse. So you're going flat out, pretty much. You're going flat out, yes. Faster than, say, first flight fox hunting? Oh yeah, fox hunting, folks are used to people who find fox hunting a bit slow and trivial. That says a lot, considering how fast and wicked the hunt is in the UK.
I do have a couple of adrenaline junkie friends that would probably agree. Probably really enjoy doing some falconry with the horses. We do that. And then with our golden eagle, we will hunt foxes and possibly slightly bigger things than foxes. If they stick their heads out at the wrong time. So it's like more like nuisance animal hunting.
Okay. We're on the difficult. position, especially in the UK here now of how I justify, because we have to justify everything these days. We're not, as long as we don't enjoy it, it's fine. The crow hawk, can we justify that? They're a major pest to the ground nesting birds.
, but in terms of falconry, it is the most jaw dropping flying you will ever see. You've got a fast falcon. That can fly, dive speeds well over a hundred, 150 miles an hour. But I think a bird that's fantastically agile. Okay. So it's an aerial dog fight. It honestly, visually stunning.
It doesn't matter what your views are on hunting. I could take you out. You'd see a good flight with a falcon. And I promise you, you'd just go, wow. At the end, you'll never see anything like it. Forget wildlife documentaries, I can show you proper flying. Sign me up. With fox hunting, I know that the fox will run in a zigzag, in diagonal direction.
And so with crows and other things that they're chasing. How do they fly? You said they're really agile. Do they go up and down? Do they have an actual pattern of how they down if you get the ultimate flight is the crow tries to stay above the falcon because it's above the falcon it's safe and the falcon tries to get above the crow and you'll get a ringing flight and you get that on a windy day and it's going downwind.
You're trying to keep up with that as it's going up. And at the end of it, the crow wins, we take our hat off to it. Yeah. If the falcon wins, it'll be another crow. The crow will bail down to cover, because it needs to get itself on the ground or in cover to be safe. And the falcon will dive.
And it is stunning, a falcon at full dive. I mean that they Fastest weave clock one of ours at just playing with it was 148 miles an hour. That's insane. And that's just playing with it at home, so it'd do far faster than that when it's actually hunting. When it's actually on something. That is just unbelievable.
We're going to get a little bit more into The details of your program, but how did you guys partner with Dartmoor Falkenry? I know you just mentioned that it's one of the only Few true open spaces, right? Dartmoor Hawking is actually my main forgery business Okay, which I've run that for since the death of my first wife Yours, okay got it that was my business and then I stopped riding for a little bit for various reasons, which we don't need to go into.
And then I met Philippa, my present wife. And everything we do with the racehorses now is entirely her fault. Okay. Entirely her fault. You can't really say that because she's not here to defend herself. That's why I've been brave and blaming her for it. , she got me riding again. She had, when I met her, she was running [00:12:00] a pub, a hotel up on the moor, and she had a lovely old Irish horse, and got me riding again.
And I'd go and see her, and her little face would light up thinking I was coming to see her. I was like, can I take the horse out again? It was lovely, and he started rekindling my love, and I wanted to do Falknery back on horses, because I'd always done Falknery from horseback for fun. So we started doing, A little bit just playing around and at the time there was an awful lot of me.
But once I started riding again, I wanted to ride thoroughbreds. Yeah. I just wanted to ride proper horses again. So I went on a crash diet, lost a huge amount of rate, really, probably far too quickly to be really healthy. But crashed myself down. Philip had brought me a lovely little thoroughbred, William Perceval, and we started doing stuff from horses again.
So we started doing that, started hunting from horses, doing that, and then people going, oh, can we have a go? Because I was running normal foot forklift sessions anyhow, and we start, we'd started doing public displays and that's when we started actually, yeah. Branding ourselves as the Recycled Racehorses Falknery Team, because we wanted to push how versatile racehorses could be, because they have such a bad reputation over here, mainly because they're getting into the wrong hands.
And we want to show, no, look what these horses can do. They can do amazing things. So we built on from there, and we started doing a bit of teaching, which was I'd say a bit hit and miss because we hadn't a clue what we're doing in the way we're teaching it to other people, it's one of these things I can do it very easily, make it look really easy, but trying to translate that to explain to someone who's never met a bird, how to do it took a bit of work.
And then we started thinking we can do a little bit more of this. And then St. Tommy No Brakes came our way. Now Tommy is, my lad Tommy was his racing name, and he's a great. Big Irish thoroughbred, 17. 1, absolute powerhouse of a horse real old fashioned chaser. I don't know, you had a jump racing with you.
Yep, yep. Yeah, he's big old fashioned chaser, proper Irish horse. And he'd been point to pointing, which was hunt races, down in Cornwall. Yeah, we've got a bunch of those here too. Yeah, okay. And he belonged to a friend of ours. And she knew we'd been lurking. She said, why don't you take Tommy? And we'd actually turned him down because he's 17 1.
At the time I was looking for something about 16 1. Because I was looking more for a field falconry horse and field falconry you're on and off and on and off. And six months later, we're still looking. She phoned me up and said, look, I'm going to send Tommy up to you. He said, I've seen you hawking on the moor and I always get onto a rock to get on anyhow.
He said you always get onto something to get on. Now he'd been turned out for a year. She said, just put a saddle on him and. Get on with it. And we're seeing Tommy racing. Tommy was a powerful house. He took two people to lead him around the collecting ring. Absolutely. And we're thinking, Oh what am I getting him?
But he was only on loan and we could always send him back if it didn't work. And there wasn't going to be any offensive. We did send him back. Which is one of the problems we do have sometimes with lone horses. People take it very personally when you say it won't do the job. Yeah, so we did. And honestly, Tommy turned up and chucked a saddle on him.
And within half an hour of him turning up, we were wading around with him carrying a golden eagle with a seven foot wingspan. Oh, my God. Tommy just did falconry and he loved it. And he became fell into line as our main teaching horse. Also my main field falconry horse. But he's like Jekyll and Hyde.
If we take people teaching, I take you over. I'm assuming you've never done fulcrum in your life. Never, no. I could put you up on Tommy's back within a couple of hours you'd be flying a golden eagle from him. That's amazing. And he would stand in the middle of the yard and he'd fall asleep on you while you were doing all this.
Yep. Okay, now take him out in the field, or even worse, take him out fox hunting. He loves fox hunting. Okay, he, sorry, trail hunting, because we don't hunt foxes anymore with hounds. I can hunt foxes with golden eagle, but not with a pack of hounds. I see. It's all very complicated. Yeah. Take him up there.
Tommy's fine as long as he's in front. Tommy doesn't do second place. That's where you got no breaks because he has no breaks at all when he's having a nice time. He's the strongest horse you could ever do. He's perfectly safe with it, but he's strong. But don't touch the reins. There's no point because you aren't going to get him anyhow.
No. Normally when I go out with him I end up field mastering because it's easier just to let him go there. I feel like I'm just going to have to be in front. Yeah, he's faster than everyone else anyhow and absolutely safe. But He's just been the ideal horse for teaching, we could put someone who hadn't ridden, we don't encourage people who haven't ridden to come and do Falkenew from horses, but you could put someone who hadn't ridden a horse and put them up on him and let them fly a bird.
And they'd be perfectly safe. Yeah. But Tommy's downside is the other side, because to try and promote what racehorses can do, we like to do the displays at public shows, big shows. Tommy really enjoys that side of things too. Now, the problem is Tommy really enjoying a display and myself enjoying a really good display are two very different things.
Because Tommy goes into the arena, he goes into, Oh, I've got rails here. We've got a crowd. They're cheering me. I'm a racehorse. Yeah. Tommy likes doing the fast bit, but he's very hard about doing the unfast bit. Yeah. Which is quite important when you're doing displays. So here's a lovely time, but I have to spend the whole time face I'm fighting him.
We did a display once, he went in, it was home ground, they cheered. He took off. I was trying to do a grand entrance, nice controlled canter, carrying a golden eagle so I could go, look at me, aren't I great? Yeah. And Tommy went for it. Now, this is when we're quite naive with Tommy and quite new to doing display work.
I didn't have my reins short enough. Oh no. Okay, so I was standing up. I had an eagle in one hand, so I couldn't do anything to shorten up the reins. So all I could do is stand up, leaning back, and leaning back. And to keep the eagle out of it, I was holding her out to one side. Now to keep her balanced, she put her wings out.
Oh my God. And she's a big girl, seven foot six wingspan. And she was lifting. So rather than trying to hold this eagle up, I was trying to hold an eagle down. She's pulling you off the saddle. Yeah, she was literally pulling me up. I was trying to hold this eagle down. While pulling in this force that had no intention of stopping, we did three circuits of, luckily, a very big main ring at a flat out racing gala [00:18:00] before we could haul into a halt.
Oh my god. Do you think the crowd knew something was wrong? No, they thought it was amazing, apparently. I thought it was part of the display. Once we got Tommy stopped, we didn't let him move a foot for the rest of the display. We did it very firmly in the middle. Yeah. It is exciting sometimes when you take an off the track thoroughbred to its first show, if there's a PA system or a speaker or, and they hear the speaker and all of a sudden they think they're in the post parade and, you're like, Oh God.
It is funny how they. vary because our one eyed horse, Caymans he was a good old Finn horse, so he's very grand. He won over 300, 000 pounds in his flat racing days. He raced in Australia, Dubai, in the UK. He responds to the PA system and the crowd, but he's like a different horse. He grows, and he looks like I'm a big thoroughbred, and he's big again.
He's 17. 1. We like big horses now because you fall off, you've got time to savor the moment on the way down. It's not all over in a flash. That's a great way to put it. My last Thoroughbred was 17. 1, 17. 2 and I'm pretty small. I'm five foot six and. But you've got plenty of time to appreciate the moment then.
Yeah. And I used to always say that when he spooked it was nice because he was so big it would feel like it was in slow motion so there was so much horse there I could usually just sit with him, . I loved watching I think they did it this year for the grand national.
They brought in a bunch of the old winners and they did a little parade around with them. And some of these horses they're getting pretty long in the tooth and they came in and they had their coolers on and boy, were they showing off when they walked them in. They never forget.
They never forget. They know how special they are. But came as when he's going to an audience, you can still ride him on a little finger. Yeah. So he's great. He looks like this great big prancing thoroughbred. He's only got the one eye, which is a great talking point for him. So he makes my really quite inadequate, widened, look quite impressive because I was looking at the great big horse and the fact he hasn't put me on the floor, but he rides beautifully and he does it so intuitively.
Yeah. One of my very best friends Nikki is she's a equine ophthalmologist here at the New Bolton Center in Pennsylvania, which is one of the biggest vet veterinary schools and hospitals in the country. And, she's a big advocate for the one eyed horse. She had one that she competed up through a fairly high level
and we've, I've interviewed a couple of people about them and I think it's so good to support. them in that journey, because there's just nothing that they think that they can't do. They exactly, enucleating the eye is honestly, sometimes the best thing you can possibly do because they adapt so well.
And like you say, they're so intuitive and they have so much of their kind of. senses still on the offside, that if you treat them as though they can see with both eyes and you just appreciate the fact that there might be a couple of things, you have to show them slightly differently. There's nothing they can't do.
No, exactly. We use came as a bit of teaching as well. And you always have to stress to people just don't ignore the fact that it's got one eye. It's only a problem to you. It's not a problem to him. Yeah, that makes sense. Cause it's just not something that even occurs to us when we take him out and we've hunted him.
We've done field falconry. He was a flat racing horse. We took him jumping a couple of times. He loved jumping. It was the only time I've had problems stopping him. He just took to jumping and thought it was the best thing ever. Did he lose his eye on the track or after, or did he have an ulcer or something?
He infected it. When we took him on, we were told it was a racing industry and accident. It all sounded very glamorous, and then we met someone who worked with him, who was there when he lost his eye, and this is so typical Caimans. He rubbed his head on his hay net, stuck a piece of hay in there, got an infection, and re infected.
He is king of the stupid accident. You can gallop him across terrain that other people wouldn't ride a horse, and he's fine. Put him in a 2, 000 acre field with one bramble. stem in the middle of it. He'll go and rip himself to shreds on it, yeah there's always that horse that tries to kill himself in a padded stall, yeah, that's him. That's him. So talk to us a little bit about your process and the retraining process for horses just come off the track and how you introduce them to the birds of prey. Are there any specific things that you do or challenges that come up when you're first trying to introduce them?
Can you just talk a little bit about that? It's always an interesting process. We have a vague idea of how we're going to work with each horse, but each horse is so different that we have to take things so separately. Chances are, we'll bring them back here, we'll turn them out for a couple of weeks.
While they're turned out, we'll go fly birds in the field, but we won't necessarily fly them near. If they want to come and join in and see what's happening, they will do. But there'll be other horses that are used to it. And, very often if I'm training a young bird, I'll go out there and sit on someone's back while it's training, while the horse is just loose in the field, because the horses are good with it. So we try and make horses birds as much part of their life before we introduce them. So by the time we're trying to introduce them, birds are just something that happens. Yeah. Then we'll start introducing them a bit more formally on the ground. So the horse got room to back out.
We never force anything. Absolutely never force anything. There's a very odd horse that won't do it because it's actually, from a horse's point of view, it's a big ask. It's not just the flapping, which is the thing that occurs to everyone. It's you're trying to work what is really the ultimate prey animal with something that smells like it.
Yeah. With the ultimate predator, it smells like it wants to eat it. And we might forget horses at the bottom of the food chain, but they've never forgotten. No. And that is just hard baked into them. It's actually funny. I was asking my boyfriend last night. I said, is there a specific question you would want to ask Martin?
And he actually asked something along those lines, which was , how do you take these two animals that are on separate sides of the food chain? and break down that instinctual primal part of them to work as partners. And I think that's exactly what you're saying you're [00:24:00] doing. This is the whole fascination because you work with you chuck the human into the mix too.
You're working with three completely different mindsets. Yeah. Because first of all, birds of prey, they're all about themselves. Yeah. They are completely. We'd call it self centered, but, they have no emotional attachment. They work with us as long as we're a convenient means to their ends. That's all it is.
They don't care whether I think they're a good bird or a bad bird. It's not in their thing. It's all about them. So all we're doing is adapting their hunting technique into a way that works with us. So to do that, we have to make the horses be a practical use to them. Now with the horses, it's to get them, we don't want them just to tolerate it.
We want them to enjoy it. And I don't know if you've seen some of the photos on our Facebook pages and the birds sat on the horses and yeah. Yeah. They've got to all get on really well. The horses normally learn to tolerate the birds and accept them, and then they become quite indifferent.
But once they've actually been out in the field with them and realize it's fun, then they have a completely different mindset. Their association with the birds is like a fun thing, not just, they're just tolerating them. Yeah, and we always have to keep that around so on the teaching thing they don't decide it's too much fun.
We have a couple of horses that we cannot use for teaching because they just think we're going for hawking, we're going out in the field, we want to do fast stuff. And they're my favorite field hawk horses, but they wouldn't necessarily have the mindset for doing the teaching. But most of our horses we've got five thoroughbreds and the Irish draft and most of them will do all, whatever we need to with them.
And it's just a slow process. It depends on the horse. As to how much it will take it of it, but by the end of it, we'd expect them all to tolerate a hawk landing on them. They will all carry the golden eagle. We've got two golden eagles here, both are hunting eagles. They will carry them quite happily.
They will get to the level, you can walk up to them with a golden eagle, get them to open up its wings and basically smack them in the face with a golden eagle ring and they won't back away. Yeah. If they're Tommy, they'll nuzzle into them. Tommy adores his eagle. Oh. He does. It has to be seen to be , believed.
But they all like the eagles because they associate them with fast hunting and Yeah. That side of things. So we expect them to do that. Then we expect them to get used to the falcons, which can be a trickier one because falcons are fast. Okay. And they whiz around. They're quite small when they'll come in from all sorts of angles and they'll be flying, around the horses.
They'll probably be flying 60, 70 miles an hour. And that's when we're trying to do the teaching side of things. Yeah. So we then got to trust the horses enough that we can fly a falcon underneath them. Oh, wow. We've actually flown a full canoes going, I think, 76 miles an hour on the five horses lined up together.
Oh, that's so cool. Just, there's a video of it somewhere out there. Oh, we just did it for a laugh one day when we had a teaching session in, so I said, get all the horses out and we'll see if we can do it. All our most fun things tend to be totally unplanned and they just happen in the moment. Let's give it a go and see if we can do it.
Let's see what happens if we do this. Yeah. All right. Yeah. we have complete trust in the horses around the birds and the birds around the horses. The ones that do it, they're all very confident. One of our problems we have now around when we're doing displays is we have to check around, see what other horsey events are going on in there because we do have a couple of hawks who will just go and sit on the backside of the nearest horse, which if it's not a horse made to falcon, it can be a little bit dramatic.
I'm sorry. It's going to really land on your horse now. Yeah. And we are dealing with horsey women, so it can be quite a frightening for me experience. I have to say if a hawk came. And wanted to come land on me. I would be so excited about it. It would be scary, but it would be really cool.
In addition to having all of these other birds around our property, we have turkey buzzards in Pennsylvania, and they are like prehistoric. Yes. They're so big. I don't know how big their wingspan is, but they just mess with you. They know exactly what they're doing. They hang out by the water trough, so they hang out by the arena gate.
and they are just, they're belligerent. You'll come up to them and they'll just wait until the last possible second to just open up their wings and fly away. Now, if one of those came near me, I'd be terrified because they just look so scary. Yeah. We had a smaller horse, a Harrishore many years ago.
I was actually out hunting with some friends with him and he went off on a little adventure and he turned up. There was a pony club rally, a pony club's also a children's riding club, and he went there sat on a pony's backside. Of course, all sorts of drama. How many kids got bucked off that day?
I think four hit the floor. I didn't actually. When one of those ponies starts up, they're all like, Oh, that looks like a good idea. Anyhow, very naively, I turned up in the middle of this about 10 minutes later looking for my hawk. Have you ever met Pony Club Mothers? Yes. Pony Club Mothers.
They are the scariest evolution of the human race when they are irate. I still have mental scars from that. lot of Pony Clubbers and Pony Club Mothers that listen to this podcast and I think a lot of them are going to agree with you. Or maybe feel a little bit seen. Yeah. Yeah. But actually the kids loved it because a couple of the kids who did stay on, they were riding along holding the arm out and this horse was flying back and forward to them quite happily, just hoping someone was going to have a piece of food there.
Oh, that's so funny. Have you ever experienced or had a significant challenge with a horse that then went on to really thrive? Like a horse that maybe just really struggled with it initially and then learned how to enjoy it? Several. It's always just a case of Letting them take their own time.
He's no longer with us. We had a lovely old horse called Bob. I can't remember what his proper name was now. Great big head. He was a flat racing bit. He was quite a chunky [00:30:00] thoroughbred. And we went up to interview him. And he was with Godolph and Rehoming at the time. Our interview process, we normally take a couple of birds with us.
Not to actually shove at the bird, just to do things in the distance and see how the horses react. You can tell a lot about that. He took one look at a golden eagle, dragged Joe, the poor lady who's the rehoming officer at the time, right diagonally across a 50 meter arena. Just like that. Wouldn't come near us.
But we could see he was going to do it. And we did things gently around him. He didn't like birds, and he didn't like birds. And then just one day Oh, I'd love to give you the wonderful things where I saw it could happen, but Philippa and I were looking at each other and said he'll tell you birds.
So we just jumped up on him and started flying birds on him. And it was just, because he'd been so spooky, he'd never had a formal training process with it or something. Just one day, he suddenly realized, boom and then that turned him around and he turned around. So it's just patience, wait for the moment and never start a horse off with expectations as to.
I talk about this a lot with this new horse I got off the track. He's just turned five and he's a bit hot blooded, but he is very brave and , whenever I work with him, I call it waiting until he's ready to learn. So that might take five minutes or it might take 10 minutes or it might take, 15 minutes of groundwork and then all of a sudden he's ready to learn and I can do anything I want with him.
Yeah. But if I just hopped on and said, we're doing this, made a demand of him instantly, it's going to be a fight or not a fight, but it's just not going to be the right conversation that I want to have. And I think he's brave and inquisitive and smart. And I want to just know that he's in the mindset to be ready to accept new information.
Yep. Yep. , that we very much understand because we have to work or we try to work very much in the way we do Hawks and Falcons because with vertebrate, you can only work on positives. You can't do anything negative. Yeah. Because anything negative, I'm an unsafe place. Yeah. They don't want to be with me.
So you can only work on positives. So we always try and do that with the horses. So everything's always got to somehow or another be a positive experience. Yeah. So we never force it. We let it go. And, it works. It works. Our other thing is we don't go, oh, it's a thoroughbred.
It's, it is thoroughbreds because you like them. They're quick on their feet and everything. Yeah. But we don't come to a thoroughbred going, oh, it's going to be. Neurotic and flighty. Yeah. We assume they will probably do it. Yeah. That we've had more problems when we used to try and do it with cobs and things like that.
Oh my gosh. Than we ever did with proper horses, but yes. Theres a reason that cobs get a bad reputation. They deserve a stereotype. They deserve it. Yes. Sorry for mentioning the C word
, in choosing a thoroughbred for retraining and for your process. What kind of qualities or traits do you particularly like in the horses that you choose? These days I, if I'm looking for myself, I like a big horse. Yeah. I do like big thoroughbreds. They suit me better. Smaller ones can be more practical, but the big ones are, more fun, really.
Yeah. So I like the big ones. Do you like a horse that has raced a lot? Do you like one that's, raced on the turf or any things specific like that? Or do you look for any particular breeding lines that you like? I would say jumping horses tend to be easier to work with than flat racing horses.
Yeah. They tend to have had a longer life. They tend to get out and see more of the world. Flat horses live very regimented. Mhm. Lives. But we have a mixture of both. We normally try and get them ourselves from trainers or, from, good rehoming centers.
Yeah. We've got an idea of the horse. Won't buy one off that's been out doing the rounds because it's.
It's quite sad to see some of the horses out there, they get a bad reputation, mainly because people haven't understood them, mess them up a bit, pass them on to someone, and they go, and by the time, I can't save the world, I would love to do it all, but I can't save the world and save every horse that's already been badly messed up.
Yeah, it is one of the things I think that's tricky is that It's often a lot easier just to get one right off the track that hasn't had any retraining. I, in particular, don't really love a horse that's never raced. It's not to say that a thoroughbred that's never raced can't be fantastic , but I much prefer one that's done some racing and has some experience and because they're just broke.
You get them and they know so much already by the time you get them. Try to speak their language, it makes the relationship go a lot easier. And yeah, it is a lot harder to undo bad training or poor management even. Just. Poor management.
Yeah, because sometimes it's just even that letdown period or they're, when they come off the track and they need a little, TLC or whatever sometimes people just don't do it the right way. And that, can create problems. We do see the common problem over here is it looks a bit skinny.
Let's feed it and feed it, but we're only riding it once a week. And then they're like, why is it so hot? Why is it so hot? Why is it such a handful? It must be because it's a thoroughbred. Yeah. We just talked about this, I think on our last episode, we we're talking about, the myth of, alfalfa makes thoroughbreds hot.
No, what happens is that you get a horse that loses all of its condition and then you start feeding it. It starts to feel good. It gets new muscles. It feels even better. And now you've got this horse that really feels good. So the horse that you bring home and that you ride the first couple of times might be really quiet just because they're just a little bit sore.
They don't feel all that great. And then they start feeling good and you're like, Oh, so yeah it's nice to hear that echoed. throughout the world as well. Yes. No, very common problem over here. We often get people asking for advice and we'll help them where we can, but yeah. Yeah. It's hard.
Cause I think, and the same thing happens over here. You have a lot of facilities, a lot of trainers who mean but don't necessarily have the exact experience or they don't have. the same type of accessibility to the management that the horses need. Say you live in California, you don't have the [00:36:00] same kind of turnout that we have in Pennsylvania where we have a lot of grass and we have a lot of property.
So I would say that geographically and regionally maintaining thoroughbreds can differ from state to state and it can be really difficult when you don't have the right access. Not to say it can't be done again, there's many ways to do it, but it is a lot easier when you have access to the right types of facilities and trainers and people in your corner, farriers and all that.
Yeah. No. We're very lucky. We have a good veterinary team behind us. Good physiotherapist. Our farrier is fantastic. So that all helps, having the right support crew behind you. And to understand what you're working with, that's so much of the thing. Yeah, absolutely. Have you ever had a horse that, or have you ever seen any big red flags that a horse is just not going to be suited, whether it's a thoroughbred or otherwise suited to falconry work?
We've won the, he did the most amazing interview. We took him there. Took a bird over to him actually got a bird quite close to him, thought he'd be fine. He never went near a bird again in his life. He wasn't going to have it at all. And some do, we're probably quite lucky with the number of horses we get through because it is, sometimes we forget because we're doing it day in, day out, how much of an arse it is for a horse, it's flapping, it smells like it wants to eat it, it's everything, and so that can, and we did have one. Big black horse. I know you're not allowed to say there's no such thing as a nasty horse, but just occasionally you get a horse that is a complete and utter whatever you'd like to put behind that.
And we didn't try and progress on the full crew with him in the end, because he just wasn't going to be safe. He would never be safe to carry a bird on. I don't think he'd care a bit about the birds one way or the other. He just wasn't going to be safe. Wasn't going to do it. Yeah.
Yeah, it was a problem. again, there's such individual personalities. We actually had a horse who, a little, we have a lot of deer in our area, white tail deer. Yeah. And they're quite big, , and we have fencing that has gaps underneath of it.
So the deer can get in and out when they're bigger, they can jump out. But We actually had a fawn get into one of the paddocks with a horse and it turned into a demon and tried to kill the fawn. It was extremely upsetting to see because otherwise this horse is the nicest horse on the planet.
He's a big dope. But to see that horse go into this bizarre mode and go after this. It's sometimes a bit odd, like when you're just like, Oh, okay that's not gonna, that's not gonna go well. Yeah. My mother had a horse many years ago that you can turn out in sheep because it would.
Go after the sheep. It would go after the sheep. Pick them up really seriously. Pick them up, chuck 'em around and kick 'em round. And oh, it was quite, yes, . Yes. I saw this video on Facebook yesterday and it was these horses out in the snow and I guess that they live with a little Shetland. And the Shetland had tried to get out of the paddock and the two bigger horses grabbed it over the fence and wouldn't let it escape.
In the snow. It was so good. , it'd be my Shetlands, I'd let it go and hoped it didn't come back again. ? I was brought up with Shetlands. Okay. I was brought up riding Shetlands, so I know. Yeah. They're monsters. She, they're demons. They are . I remember when I used to ride, I lived in Yorkshire for five years and I used to ride a little Shetland named Boots.
And he was a little black Shetland. I was really tiny when I was a kid. And boy, that thing was just such a little troublemaker. And they eat tails. They eat tails. They have a lifelong ambition to be somewhere else. Yes. It doesn't matter. Put them in the most perfect field, next to somewhere that would die, kill them, and they go straight into where they would kill them, just because they can.
Because they can. Because they can. You look at them and they know exactly what they're doing. Yeah. Yes. It's all deliberate and calculated. It's all on their path to world domination. Okay, so moving on to your interactive sessions for riders and your displays.
Can you describe what you guys do when you have a group of people come in and have the experience with the Falcons and the horses? Okay. We only run the sessions for people booking together, so we don't have to mix and match different riding abilities because. When we used to try and do that, you get a good confident rider and a nervous rider.
It's not fair on either of them putting them together. Both of them on their own, we can give an amazing session and run it to them. So the first half of the session is learning how to handle birds. I call it my numbingly boring, but apparently guests really love it. I'm sure they love it. It's all the basic stuff because if you can't handle a bird correctly in a way that's not going to upset it or offend it, there's no point putting you on a horse to do it because you're not going to, so you have to get all the tedious stuff, how to carry them, how to call them incorrectly, how to keep your body language in a way that it's not.
upsetting or scaring. Bird of prey, everything's got to be food threat or irrelevant. I have to try and teach you to be irrelevant, but that's a positive thing if that makes sense. You shouldn't feature very highly apart from somewhere they're going to come on to because I've put a piece of food there.
You're like a post. You are just a post. You're more fun when you're a post on the horses. See. Always like doing the stuff with the horses. So we've got to get your handling correct. And then what we'll do afterwards we'll, once we eat you up on the horses, we'll fly you a nice basic bird. We've got a little Harris talk.
He'll fly back and forwards to you. It's all nice and simple. It relaxes you because you don't take hold of him, so if he gets upset, he can just jump off, come back as and when. He does scare people a bit because he'll normally just come and sit on the horse's neck, the backside. Just so he knows that's where he's going to be called to anyhow, so he might as well be there waiting.
Yeah. And all the horses will put up with it, but it's quite funny watching people who aren't expecting that when suddenly this hawk appears in front of them on the horse. How much do these birds weigh? Some of them are quite [00:42:00] heavy, right? The only big bird we have that we do that we are training white tailed seagull, which is a bit bigger than your bald eagle.
Oh, wow. My bald eagle who attacked people, she attacked other people as well as the golfer. We couldn't get near horses. She was terrified of them. Oh my god, but she would attack people. She would attack people, but she had issues, bless her. Aw. But she made small children cry at Christmas. It made it worth it.
I'm sorry, sorry, I do a lot of work at posh hotels at Christmas. I meet some really horrible small children. I'm not quite as nasty as I sound. You sound like somebody I would love to go to the pub with. That's what you sound like. But she was terrified of sheep and things like that. In everyday life, she was one of the wettest birds.
It's just she had issues with people. In general and we couldn't get her anywhere near the horses, but the white tailed seagulls, it's basically our version of the same thing. We're hoping to get her. She's got an eight foot wingspan, but she weighs in at about 12 pounds. But the biggest one you work with at the moment is our male golden eagle, and he's a tiny little thing.
He weighs in at about six and a half pounds. Okay. Though, when you're holding, I'm a photographer and the camera that I use in my studio weighs seven and a half pounds. And when I have to pick it up off the tripod, that's quite heavy when you're at your arms at an extension or you're holding your arm out or doing anything like that.
So I think that's something that people maybe don't factor in a little bit. It's fine because we only use him at the end when people are a bit more relaxed. Yeah. But your average person could probably only hold him for a couple of minutes. Yeah. Even doing correctly. I can carry him for five or six hours, but I'm doing it the whole time.
It's not physical strength, it's technique, being relaxed and knowing how to. balance him. But because he's so big and potentially so powerful, he's not aggressive. He's very straightforward. Being a male, he's easier to work with than a female, which biological fact in my world, before anyone gets funny, females in the bird of prey world, bigger, tougher, meaner than males.
They hold the territory. They can be much more aggressive, much more bad tempered. Yeah. But they do a lot of, they do a lot of the primary hunting, is that right? Yeah, they do. They all take the big, really big stuff. Yeah. But it's just a male. It's much more straightforward to work with, but even with him, we don't fly into people's gloves on the horse.
I can draw them to myself on the horse, but I can adjust to get the landings right because even the small male, he's so big, if he gets landed wrong and lands above your glove and has to try and balance himself, he's going to hurt you. He's going to really hurt you. And that's with no malicious intent meant.
Yeah. So with him, we do simulated. Fox hunting. We have a wonderful fake fox, Charlie James, who gets dragged along by a machine at about 60 miles an hour and you'll do like you would do in Mongolia, hood off, eagle goes off in pursuit. You follow him on the horses. That's so cool. It is, I say to myself, pretty cool.
It's not as cool as doing it in real life, but nothing like school is doing it in real life. Yeah, but we do that, but we work you up with the smaller birds to get you relaxed and everything before you do that. The smaller birds will come back and forwards to you. Then we'll teach you how to use a lure.
Now a lure is, it's a fake magpie we use, rubber magpie on a piece of string. You don't see the falconry displays over there. So it's hard to explain what we do, but it's how we exercise the hunting falcon. It's simulated bird hunting. We will spin this lure around, the falcon will try and catch it.
We'll try and stop him catching it. I see. It's quite a skill set to do that. So I can do that on a horse for a display. It looks, I say to myself, incredibly posy. I can't get you doing that as a teaching thing because basically trying to ride a horse, spin a lure when you're not sure what it's doing, and if you have a falcon chasing it, you'll wrap it around your head.
Okay, you just will. It's a fact. Yeah. Now the problem is from a falcon's point of view, if that lure's wrapped around your head, it's a skill, easy target. It's not going to stop him. Grabbing it. Yeah, for sure. What we can train you to do is hold it down so the falcon comes to try and grab it underneath the horse and you'll just flip it up at the last moment so it's hidden behind the horse.
So you get a chance to work with a falcon, so you're flying the falcon onto the horse. If there's two of you together, you'll fly onto two horses at, he'll be doing 60, 70 miles an hour. And then he'll go right out. He's designed to catch other birds. So he'll go out and come in from the air again. Your job is to maneuver the horse around to present it properly, which is always very interesting because we have two people.
We expect you to do it in synchronization. Yeah. No, you're keeping the horses parallel, which is. Now what's really cool is watching the Fall Can We Do, he's a little peregrine called Ben, and he's horribly bright. Now, I tell people off for saying these birds are manipulative, but he's only that far away from not being manipulative.
Because birds of prey have a very different outlook on us. We assume, particularly amazing flies, they want to be out there flying. They don't, they want their next meal by the shortest, easiest route. Cause that's what survival's about. They're short. Yeah. They're intrinsically very, what we would call lazy, but we get laziness wrong because we live luxurious lifestyles.
In the wild, laziness is energy efficiency. So he's actually worked out how he can position two horses, or the riders on two horses. So he gets the easy shot coming between the horses, where the lure can't get out of sight from him. Yeah. And he'll actually do that. He'll cruise around. Please put you in the right position to give him the easy shot.
It's absolutely fascinating to watch. He's manipulating the rider. Yeah, he is. He will actually, genuinely, he will actually maneuver them. It's just a hunting technique he's worked out to work. Yeah. He doesn't have the thought process to work out the whole process of what he does, but this behavior will generate that sort of thing, which gives you that shot, which is the shot you want, because that's the guaranteed shot.
Because coming in with two horses and the lure between them. That lure can go out of sight, but you come between them rather than underneath them. That lure can't go out of sight. They're really smart. They are really smart, but he's also worked out with one person on his own, that if he sits on the horse's backside, he can then peer down to see where the lure's gone.
Which, of course, that luckily startles the guests more than it does the horses. Yeah, I can imagine that's not something you'd ever experience in your day to day life with horses. [00:48:00] How often per year do you have people come in and do a small groups like that? The teaching days we probably do about.
30 or 40 a year of individual days. Then we've been doing five day courses as well, where people come and do a much more intense thing. You really learn the whole process through. Yeah. Do they actually get to go out and do a little hunting with you or? No the problem with the hunting side of things, we can arrange to take people out.
Until after we've met them, we have to this day and age, vet people a little bit to see if they're suitable. Because till we've met people, we don't actually know what they're writing. Yeah. I'm trying to be tactful here. No it sounds like it's not for the faint of heart, it's, our teaching days, as long as you're honest, but people are often not.
Yeah, no, I know what you mean. I'm trying to say this politely, but. People often have a better opinion of their riding abilities than they actually are. Yes. When it comes to, yeah. I always say that people either egregiously overestimate their riding abilities or they drastically underestimate their abilities.
Yes. Yes. It doesn't seem to be a lot of in between. No, there isn't. No it's quite interesting. It's actually part of what we're doing in our morning bit. You learn over the years to, Be able to tell what people are going to be like on a horse by the way they're working with the birds. You can actually end up working out quite a lot.
Because we stopped asking about riding abilities or, as long as you can keep a horse between you and the ground, we'll give you a go, but then we'll judge what we can do with you once we've met you and. So we never make a promise of a set. We never have a set day that we do. We work it to the people there.
Yeah. If that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. And it keeps everybody safe and keeps your horses safe. And , you want the horses to have a good experience too. They don't have to just tolerate nonsense, no, exactly. Because, the teaching bit can be a bit of a strain on the horses.
It's very repetitive for them. It's quite, Tommy's fine. Cause he just goes to sleep and you can see him. He'll come out and say, we're going, Oh God, client work is 45 degree Dobby angle. And he'll just switch off. And I love that. But he's really safe. It's saying that if someone really wants to ride him and they can ride, they'll pick him up and he will then up to what they want them to do.
But we just have to be careful. Cause he does get fed up. He gets, A horse botherer, if that's a polite way of putting it. Yes, sure, yeah. The other thing, I was talking to some people at my barn about this the other day, but you also can never determine, and some people don't know this about themselves, if they have a hot seat or a quiet seat.
Yeah. And that's something that's just intrinsically a part of somebody. It has nothing to do with their ability. I have an extremely quiet seat. It's like a dead seat. I can get on a very hot animal and make it very quiet by doing nothing. And then I have friends that can get on the same horse and just light it up.
And they're like, I'm not trying to do this. And it's something that you have to know that about yourself to factor that element into your Relationship with horses. I know the type of horse I like to ride and sometimes it can be a bad match because your energy or seat just wakes them up or makes them too dull or whatever.
Yeah. Moving on to sustainability and giving animals a second chance, it seems to be really central to what your program is all about. How do you see recycled racehorse falconry contributing to larger conversations about animal welfare, conservation, and sustainability? We are big advocates.
I used to see from a name of showing that race horses can do, we have horses here doing stuff. Now the horses in the country are doing, or, now the horses outside of Mongolia are doing. Yeah. And some of what we do, they don't do their horses over there. So we got horses doing absolutely neat stuff.
All thoroughbreds apart from the Irish draft. He's an Ory thoroughbred, by the way, Lisa the he's an honorary, recycled race horse. Aw. . We want to show people, look, these horses can do absolutely amazing things. Don't be put off by the idea. They have a reputation for highly strong. Yeah.
Okay. Yes. They can be reactive, but the reactiveness is one of the things that probably plays into making good forry horses. Yeah. Because they're responding to what's happening and switching off to it before you really realize what it is. It's a bit like the birds. If you habituate them to things, they'll put up with things you wouldn't believe, because that's become irrelevant.
Our horses, very often, they're spotting birds coming, worried about what's happening, and that's no threat, so they're switching off to it before the riders actually realize what's starting. So reactive can work as a positive as well as a negative, where with a cob brain, really, it's so much slower.
That's why there's so much more problematical to work with. Cob and brain is probably not a sentence you should use together. Sorry. I was once accused of being a horse snob. We were doing a display somewhere in this lady on a large, rather large. Corp came up and gave me a lecture that we should, I've been doing this lay on Tommy and he'd been a bit of a handful.
And she said, you need a horse like this to do it with. And I happen to have a golden eagle on my hand at the moment. So I just twist my arm to make a bit of Windsor and that cop tanked the woman through the middle of the crowd. It's funny now. It was not funny at the time. Straight through the middle of the crowd at the show ground.
And I was thinking, God, whose insurance does this come under? It's the first thing that crosses your mind at these times now. Yeah, no, I, and it has nobody died, but about half an hour later, she comes storming up to me. I'm just, something, you're just a horse snob. So I took the title and I ran with it.
Listen, if you're a horse snob, who's in favor of thoroughbreds, I'm here for it. So that makes me a horse snob too. Then I suppose it's the best place to be. Looking ahead, what are your aspirations for your program? Do you plan to expand it or do any new programs or do some world traveling? We would love to take the team on tour, but because of different rules and regulations, we can't [00:54:00] take a team of birds.
It's very tricky. We got asked to do a display at the big race meeting in Paris. And the legality of getting the birds there was fine. It was flying them in a way that was considered commercial, then became, the whole thing became so complicated we couldn't do it, which was a shame. But we want to get out more and we want to preach the recycled racehorse and how much these horses can do.
We're really strong advocates on that. Because over here they do get such a bad reputation, it's just so sad to see. And yet we see them doing the most amazing things. And, they switch, they adapt, and, even within themselves, Tommy out there teaching half asleep, Tommy in the field, and he's absolutely fantastic, they can switch the most or whatever and Cayman's even more he's got one eye and everyone yeah.
The one I something we always have to mention, but we also have to mention it because everyone thinks it's a problem. Yeah. Where it isn't, it's not something in our day to day management of him. He doesn't even occur to us. Yeah. We just quite interesting because we have another one eyed horse.
We've actually got two of them. We don't collect them. Roy. You don't collect them. It wasn't deliberate. We had a rather, oh, trying to be polite about journalists, was not a horsey journalist. Okay. And he kept making a big thing about Kames one eye, so I told him, look, I have to be realistic with you, but you mustn't publish this, okay?
The reason he's got one eye is how we graduate Falknery Horse. Once they've got to a fully trained Falknery Horse, they have the right eye removed by an eagle. He went off and wrote about it.
You're like, that's how, it's a fucking rehorse. That's how you know it's a truly well qualified. Yes. Sorry. Back to Roy. Roy's a little git in all the best ways. He's like having a naughty. So he's got a little pony around. He lost his eye when he was a foal. His mother stood on him when he was about two days old.
And he is the complete opposite of what I'd miss. If you're working with Roy, even if you're in the box with him and he knows you're there, you have to talk to him very loudly before you touch him on his blind side. Yeah. That's interesting. He rides with his head cocked to one side. Huh. At all times.
So he's very obvious, one eye there. Yeah. Where Cayman's lost his eye as a three year old or a four year old. Rides completely straight. Yeah. If I put you on Cayman's and sent you for a ride and asked you what was wrong with him, you'd come back, he's twenty now, so you'd come back and say he's a little bit stiff for the first five minutes.
Yeah, he just needs to walk in a bit and beyond that you say there was nothing there at all and you can take him out through anything and he won't do it or Roy's cockeyed. You have to be so aware of his blind side. That's interesting. Which is really, and yet bird wise Roy's fantastic. Roy's make horse really for if we're introducing a new bird to horses, which again is a whole different structure.
It's a big thing to introduce a bird to a horse. Yeah. Roy's the one we do it with on the ground. Yeah. Yeah, because he's absolutely brilliant around the birds as long as you keep him to his good side. He's really good for that. But it's very interesting having the two different horses lost eyes at different stages, but the difference in characteristics, and they're the complete opposite of how you would expect them to be.
Yeah. And my experience with one eyed horses, it, Caimans is more of the rule than the exception. We just had a really gorgeous little filly in she's a liver chestnut with a blaze and a bunch of white socks. And she had just had her eye removed and you could see her eye socket reacting to the stimulus on that side.
And she'd stand on the cross ties and have things going back and forth around her under the cross tie. And she had never had a problem. It was unbelievable. She had just had it enucleated and she was from day one, she got the bandage off. She was. Like a absolutely normal horse. And I just think it's a really nice thing to show people.
Also the management of eye injuries when they're only going to continue to get worse is really brutal for the horses and the owners from a management standpoint. And, Again, my friend Nicky would tell you in a lot of circumstances that taking the eye out is often the best and easiest course, the best thing you could possibly do because the recovery time is, super quick.
Kate, we've met people who came as his racing career and he carried on racing successfully with one eye and they've all said it's just, he's always been an absolute gentleman. He is. The best public relations for racehorses in a life after race you can get when we're doing displays with him we will leave him tied up to the trailer between displays and you can just let kids who've never been near a horse wander in there and go and talk to him and you know i haven't i've got to hover over him because he's only got one eye or anything you know he's going to be absolutely aware completely safe you know you're saying kids haven't been near a horse to go in there and brush him and he'll just stand there and go You know he's just such a wonderful public relations thing for racehorses and what they really can be like.
That's amazing. And he travels the country. We did in 10 days, we did 1500 miles with him one summer doing displays, five displays at different venues. And he just takes the whole He probably loves the attention. He does. He loves the attention. You can just stick him in the trailer, go anywhere.
Get out the trailer, get on with it, and he's just absolutely perfect, and, you take him around some of the shows, you see all these show horses that are showing all year, and they're doing it, and they're completely different mindset, and there's this star, which is supposed to be so flighty and highly strong, and you take him in the middle of all this, and he just What I do, yeah, that's really cool. Yeah. We want, this is what we want to be showing people more. We want to get out there and meet the non racing public because over here that people have the idea racehorses just discarded after racing and yeah, don't get. Yeah, it's so interesting. I had reached out to an organization in the UK about talking to them about the process [01:00:00] for if there is a relationship between trainers and aftercare programs in the UK and what that looks like and what that process is like, because it's become a really huge thing in the States.
We have so many good aftercare programs that are actually working specifically with trainers. For instance, my new thoroughbred came from a race track that has an actual organization that just works with that track to place. Yeah. So they work and they have partner farms. And so we're a partner farm and they, when they have horses that are coming up, the trainers will connect with this aftercare organization.
They'll reach out to their partner farm, see if they have space available. Then the partner farm gets a stipend to put towards. And then the horse goes with a contract that basically just keeps a paper trail. So the horse can be resold and things like that, but it keeps a paper trail there so that the organization can always have some sort of track record of where the horse goes.
And it's just a really nice resource for trainers who want to make space in the racing barn, but don't have the resources to know, how to reach out to the public. And so there's. tons of those all over the U. S. and it's becoming more of a full circle operation than than ever before. Now we have the retired racehorse project, which is a huge competition that happens every year in Kentucky.
And then the third about that. Yeah. So that's actually what I'm hoping to do with my horse this year. And and then, so that's, Hundreds of horses every year working with all these big organizations. There's the Thoroughbred Incentive Program, which creates a unique number ID for horses and they can qualify for points nationally in the country.
They have a big championship every year. So it's really cool to see in our country specifically where there is a lot of ship to slaughter. Yeah. There's no regulated slaughter in the United States. So it's either the horses get shipped to Canada, so that's becoming not even really much of a part of the equation anymore.
There's all of these resources so that they end up with a soft landing and often ended up in really good sport horse careers. Yeah. It's all starting here, but we just always a bit behind on it. Yeah. It's so interesting. I wouldn't have guessed that really, but I'm, I'd be really curious to talk to other aftercare organizations in the UK about that.
I'd like to know what the process is with, how open the trainers are at the track. And they'll do things here where they'll have a showcase where we have an organization here called Canter and there's regionally different divisions of it. And they'll do a showcase at a track.
So when the meet ends, they will. Take photos and do a listing of each of the horses and put them online. And then they'll have a day where the public can actually go to the track and go and meet the trainers, talk to the owners, the trainers, ask about the horses, see them walk and jog in hand and, adopt them right there if they want to.
And it's just a nice way to take the veil away from. The back side of the track and let the public in and see what the operation's meet the trainers, have the trainers have that relationship with the public. I don't know. I think it's a nice process. We're getting that and they are starting to have parades of racehorses now, ex racehorses in new jobs.
But unfortunately over here, they only ever feature on the big names. And my thing is, what about the has beens and the horses that never really got anywhere? They still need a life and opportunity. And some of them are doing amazing things. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah that's the big thing. I think specifically the retired racehorse project here is doing that and show it like they feature 10 different disciplines or the makeover.
And it'd be really cool one year if we could have somebody that. Had a hawk or heard a prey, in their freestyle, demonstration. So I think that that it's not going to be long until we see something like that, but, just showing the versatility and that they can do all of these different jobs and those jobs create value.
And then also security. Yeah. Knowing that they have a home. Yep. Exactly. Exactly. Martin, thank you so much for sharing your story with us. , I've been so excited to chat with you and all the remarkable work that you're doing. For those that are curious about learning more or participating in one of your programs, what's
the best way for them to reach out or get involved. Have a look, either find us on Facebook for the Recycled Racehorse Forgnery team, or look at our website, which is recycledracehorse. co. uk, or just contact us directly. You'll find our contact links in either. Talk to anyone. I can talk for England, and then I've got one last question for you, which is, what is one word you would use to describe an off the track thoroughbred?
Amazing. Awesome. If you want it in one word. Yes. No, that's perfect. It's funny because a lot of times we ask that question and people are like, one word, there's no way I can think of one word. One word is difficult. It is. Because there's so much more you can say about them. Yes. If you like what you heard today, please leave us a five star review on Apple Podcasts. You can follow OTTB ON TAP on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok, and contact us with interview candidates and topic suggestions at OTTBONTAP.
com. We love hearing from you.