I was becoming more educated. The Chronicle Forums had allowed me to better understand horses at risk - after all, I knew there were dog and cat shelters. What did people do with unwanted horses? They're much bigger, and far more expensive to maintain. Which is how I learned about slaughter. I had never given it much thought - although I'm not a vegetarian, my poor graduate student days had left enough of an impact that even when I could afford it, I rarely bought meat. Almost overnight, I became aware of the double decker trucks on all the interstates coming out of St. Louis. And I found out about Cavel, a slaughterhouse in Illinois, and not too far from the Fairmount Racetrack, where my horse Ted had raced.

I went, unknowingly, to one auction in Farmington MO. There were hastily drawn drapes separating one part of the auction house from another, and my friend warned me not to go back there. The first I saw were two adorable little ponies...and then I saw a saddlebred mare, her papers tacked up with a nail on the wooden post of her temporary stall. Apparently she had been finely bred, and even at her age (about 20 years old) she had the regal bearing of a true saddlebred. When she turned her face to me, I could see that she had had a horrible injury to one eye - she was clearly blind, and the eye socket was badly scarred. And I realized: who would buy her? Who would take care of her? Where would she end up? I had no resources or knowledge myself - I didn't have the money for her purchase, much less her care, I didn't have my own land, I didn't have a trailer. And I was haunted by her.

Which is when I began to think, "There but for the grace." My horse Ted is typical of the Bold Ruler line: athletic, smart, and with what I like to call a highly developed sense of injustice. Ted's is not an easy personality, and I realized, in other hands, he would not necessarily be valued for what he is. It would have been all too easy for him to have grown increasingly defensive and wary, and for him to have fallen through the cracks. For him to have ended up in the same place as had the saddlebred mare.

Reminiscing back to the horse crazy child and adolescent I was, when any horse - any breed, any age - would have fulfilled all my horse fantasies, the 12 year old in me kept thinking, "But I would have wanted these horses. I could have loved them."

Which brings us to the starfish analogy. If the starfish are littering the beach, drying out and dying when the waves recede, and if you can only throw one or a few back - it means all the world to that starfish. Maybe all I could offer was stupid, small things. But I felt a tremendous need to do just that.

And so I started by helping smaller groups, a bit at a time, thinking outside the box...