All the Pretty Horses

Photos by Brett Williams on Flickr

When you work all day on a computer with Internet access, it is hard to stay away from the unfolding disaster that is California On Fire. Everywhere, people are fleeing. Families who have made it out with their pets wander the parking lot of Qualcomm Stadium, as animals are not allowed inside. People with livestock--horses, goats, cattle--are less fortunate. Many have made it out with a trailer or two of their own or their neighbor's horses, but find themselves barred from re-entering the areas in danger. There, horses, goats and everything else domesticated run to and fro in their pens, struggling to breathe.

I don't personally believe that hope is an emotion possessed by horses (goats, maybe ;o) but I know very well that fear is, and I can feel (imagine) their fear from here. It makes me pace the floors of my home in helplessness.


Horses stand in a pen as fire threatens the Bonita neighborhood in San Diego, California. More than 300,000 people have been evacuated and around 1,000 homes destroyed as ferocious wildfires raged unchecked for a third day across California on Tuesday.(AFP/Getty Images/Eric Thayer)

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As stables fill, owners urged to rely on friends, family to house animals
By Elizabeth Fitzsimons,
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

October 23, 2007

Trailers wrapped around the Del Mar Fairgrounds yesterday morning, some waiting as long as two hours to unload some of the thousands of horses evacuated from ranches and backyard stables threatened by the county wildfires.

But by 9:30 a.m., the fairgrounds' 2,400 stalls were full. Horse owners who didn't make it had to look elsewhere: to friends and family with barns or land, to an evacuation site in Lakeside or stables in San Juan Capistrano, Thermal and Indio.

Much of San Diego County is horse country, home to thoroughbred breeding ranches and countless backyard stables housing family pets. As many as 300,000 horses live in the county, and when people flee from the fires, so do the horses.

Volunteers with trailers and law enforcement, including a team of San Diego mounted police officers driving horse trailers, went in search of horses to rescue.

Dianna Bonny, 44, of Olivenhain towed one of the last trailers into the fairgrounds. But she still had 21 other horses she needed to move.

The wind was whipping ash, dust and palm fronds as Bonny pulled two horses from their trailer and into stalls. Horses in the row stomped their feet and threw back their heads. Some bared their teeth.

“We should have started this at 4 in the morning, but you just don't know,” she said, shaking her head.

Nearby, word carried fast that the fairgrounds had closed.

Horse owners in Rancho Santa Fe and Olivenhain were looking for other options: calling friends with barns or even large yards outside the evacuation areas, or gathering horses into other paddocks and outdoor stalls in areas away from trees and chaparral.

At El Camino del Norte near Del Dios Highway in Rancho Santa Fe, which was ordered evacuated, about a dozen people were parked at a roadblock. Several said they were moving horses from Rancho East, a private stables in the neighborhood with about 60 horses. By midafternoon, only about 10 horses had been moved off the property. The decision was made to take the rest of the horses out of the barns and into the stables' outdoor pens.

Cardiff resident Gerri Minott said she had taken one of her horses from Rancho East to Ride America, a horse boarding and training facility in Carlsbad, but a race horse she owned was too high-strung to be moved. She put that horse into a Rancho East paddock.

“Smoke just got worse and worse. We moved them out of the barns, where there was wood, into steel-pipe pens,” she said.

Geanna Schmidt moved her horse at 5:30 a.m. and then helped others in Rancho Santa Fe and Olivenhain. At 1:30 p.m. she had just returned from taking a horse to a yard in Encinitas.

“We were kind of hoping we could get one more load,” she said.

At a county-operated evacuation site at the Lakeside Rodeo grounds, horses from Jamul, Lakeside and Ramona were cataloged and photographed. Most had owners that were accounted for. Others had been picked up wandering the streets in burned areas.

The grounds had room for about 300 horses.

“Because the fire is all over the county, people are really scrambling,” said Jim White, regional director of the county's Department of Animal Services. “We're running out of places to take horses.”

He asked that horse owners rely on friends and family, not evacuation centers, to help them house their animals.

Thoroughbred breeders, some with farms in the eye of the Witch Creek fire, also evacuated their animals. The Golden Eagle and Ballena Vista Farms outside Ramona, which rank among the most prominent facilities in the state for breeding and raising thoroughbreds, were evacuated but had escaped major damage.

“We had taken an aggressive stance on fire prevention and it paid off,” said Larry Mabee who, with his mother, Betty, owns and operates Golden Eagle.

“It's an island in the middle of the fire zone,” Mabee said late yesterday morning. “No loss of buildings, no horses or people injured.”

On Sunday, thick smoke engulfed the countryside just north and east of Ramona along state Route 78 and flames crept over the hillsides. At one point Mabee went to check on neighboring Ballena Vista Farm, just across Route 78, but he couldn't see more than a few feet through the smoke. He later found out the farm was unscathed.

In North County, the major thoroughbred facilities in Bonsall – San Luis Rey Downs Training Center and Vessels Stallion Farm – took in horses of all breeds and other animals.

“We have rescue volunteers manning ham radios to guide people in through the road closures,” owner Frank “Scoop” Vessels said. “Unfortunately – or fortunately – we've done this before, and we're pretty organized and trying to do the best we can to help our buddies.”

About 200 spaces were available yesterday afternoon at the Galway Downs Training Center in Temecula. Four years ago when the Cedar fire struck, Debbie Constantino was out of town at a horse show. Her three horses, taken from her Blossom Valley home by a friend, were freed in the chaos and lost for weeks, ending up in Granite Hills, Del Mar and Bonita.

This time, Constantino was prepared. She packed up the saddles, the feed, the buckets. She took a Sharpie marker and wrote her cell phone number on the horses' left front hooves.

“I can't believe this is happening again,” she said. Her nerves were getting the best of her, and the horses sensed it.

But she and the paint horses were safe now at the Lakeside Rodeo grounds. She patted one on the thigh; in the other hand she held an unlighted Marlboro Light.

“I've been saying my prayers and I made sure I grabbed my Bible,” she said. “If anything happens to the house, I know I got the important things.”