Restoring the Horsepower : A Thoroughbred Gym in Newhall Is Bringing Legs Back From the Dead

Four years ago, Diamond Night was on the brink of Hollywood stardom. He was getting kudos for his lead role as the sensitive, mysterious thoroughbred in “Return of the Black Stallion” (critics said he was the best thing in the movie). He was living a glamorous life, eating only the finest alfalfa, getting his pick of adoring fillies. Talk to any producer in town: Diamond Night could have been bigger than Trigger.

Then the accident happened.

On a bright summer day in rural Newhall, Diamond Night was being given a light workout by his trainer, Corky Randall. They were inside a circular ring about 50 feet in diameter. Diamond Night was racing around the wall. How he loved to run like the wind. It was in his blood: Arabian stallions were bred for speed and stamina as well as intelligence and beauty.

No one knows what Diamond Night was thinking while he frolicked through the workout. His next role? Women? His investments? But he certainly wasn’t paying attention as the turf flashed beneath his nimble hoofs, nor was he aware that the usually soft earth had been packed down earlier by a team of Tennessee Walkers.

Inexplicably, Diamond Night suddenly took a tumble on the hard surface, landing on his left shoulder. “He just fell,” said Randall, still bewildered by the accident. When Randall reached the star, it was apparent that Diamond Night was seriously injured. X-rays would reveal 18 fractures of the radius, nine of them major.

There seemed to be no choice. Diamond Night would to have to be destroyed, overdosed with an injection of an anesthetic drug like Nebutol. He would simply go to sleep and never wake up. As far as anyone knew, no horse had ever survived a similar injury. An operation might repair the bone, the thinking went, but the recovery would kill him. A horse just doesn’t have the temperament to remain immobile during long periods, and could be expected to exacerbate the injury while recuperating.

But then Dr. James Bullock rode to his rescue. Bullock is a veterinarian who runs a clinic down the street from Randall’s horse ranch. Bullock and Randall had been friends for years--they both worked on the set of “Return of the Black Stallion” in Morocco, Randall as animal trainer, Bullock as unit vet.

When Bullock examined Diamond Night, he realized that the horse’s show business career was over, but he thought he could save his life. Diamond Night is no ordinary horse. “He’s extremely intelligent and very trusting in man,” said Bullock, who is no ordinary vet. There are kindly old vets--the type who putter out to the farm in a pickup and tenderly tell Johnny that his pet goat won’t make it--and there are vets who clip poodle toenails in Beverly Hills. Bullock, 40, is neither.

Except for a little old-fashioned compassion, Bullock takes a strictly modern approach to veterinary medicine. Not afraid to try something new, he was the first private vet in the country to use a Jacuzzi for horses and a high-speed treadmill that keeps pace with race-track thoroughbreds, and was among the first to use magnetic-field therapy on animals.

“Jim was the only one who would have tried to save Diamond Night,” Randall said.

But the decision to save or destroy Diamond Night wasn’t up to Bullock. There was supposed to have been an insurance policy on Diamond Night that would have paid off big if he had to be destroyed. But due to a mix-up, the policy had lapsed. The studio would have had a dead horse and no money, so what the heck? Bullock was given the go-ahead to operate.

“If there had been a policy,” Bullock said, “the horse would have been put to sleep and they would have collected the insurance.”

So Bullock and his eight assistants went to work on Diamond Night. The horse was placed in a sling, anesthetized and lowered onto a hydraulic operating table. The operation lasted 5 1/2 hours, and it was a success.

Then came the long period of recuperation. Diamond Night would have to be suspended in a sling for eight months, a predicament that would have tried the patience of a human, let alone an animal that had spent a lifetime romping and running. But Diamond Night somehow understood what he had to do.

“It was extraordinary,” Bullock said. “Most horses would not do that.”

Bullock’s daughter Nicole, then 2 1/2, gave Diamond Night the necessary tender loving care and attention, the two of them developing what Bullock calls, “a special rapport.” “He was her horse, and they really loved each other,” he said.

Bullock took care of the rest. To enable Diamond Night to get around, he had a welder build a mobile “wheelchair” with a hoist that lowered the sling so the horse’s feet barely touched the ground. Bullock also used magnetic-field therapy to accelerate healing--it increases oxygenation and circulation in tissue--and put Diamond Night in a Jacuzzi-like whirlpool called an Aquaciser, where he could exercise his legs on a slow-moving underwater treadmill without exerting a great deal of force.

Today, Diamond Night is washed up in movies, there being little call for gimpy 8-year-olds. But even though the Hollywood glitter has faded away, he still leads a good life--considering the alternative--as a permanent resident at Bullock’s Equine Conditioning and Rehabilitation Center of Southern California. In lieu of payment for services rendered, Bullock accepted ownership of the horse.

At the tidy four-acre facility, with its wrought-iron fences and rows of flowering oleander, Diamond Night occasionally has to share the spotlight with valuable horses from the field of racing. In the four years since Bullock made veterinary history by saving Diamond Night, his center has become the Mayo Clinic for horses--an average of 15 to 20 are on the premises at one time.

Bullock and his staff have worked on quarter horses and thoroughbreds from tracks like Santa Anita, Hollywood Park and Los Alamitos, and he is credited with extending the careers of European thoroughbred champion Pelikariki and Tolltac, a quarter horse champion that won a major stakes race a week after being released from Bullock’s care.

Because of high-tech equipment like the treadmill, the Aquaciser, a radiology machine, a device for arthroscopic surgery and a diagnostic lab for complete blood work-ups, Bullock’s facility has been likened to a health farm or horse gym, the Nautilus Plus of the four-legged set. But Bullock, an Iowa farm boy who went to college at UC Davis, doesn’t agree with the comparison.

“This is not a recreational facility or a camp,” he stressed.

Horses are sent to Bullock from as far away as France, but none are as seriously injured as Diamond Night was. Most of his patients either need arthroscopic surgery to remove bone chips or suffer from ailments ranging from pulled muscles to bucked shins. Arthroscopic surgery, seldom used for horses three or four years ago, has not only prolonged the careers of some thoroughbreds, but possibly saved their lives as well.

Before the introduction of the simple arthroscopic procedure, career-ending surgery was often necessary to remove bone chips from thoroughbreds. “If you eliminated his usefulness as a racehorse,” Bullock said, “and the owner had insurance, the owner might have opted for the insurance.” That means the horse would be destroyed.

Fates not worse than death also befall injured thoroughbreds. If a horse has an undetected nagging injury and isn’t performing up to expectations, Bullock said, “The trainer will say, ‘This horse doesn’t like the track,’ or ‘He’s not working well,’ and then the owner will give the horse away or sell it for as little as $1,000.”

Although horses were leaving his clinic in good shape, Bullock found that some were breaking down again once they returned to the track. He discussed the problem with Dr. William Dakin, a Sherman Oaks veterinarian with 45 years of experience. One day, Dakin was watching a horse gallop on the high-speed treadmill and told Bullock that his hoofs weren’t landing flat.

“Dakin has the gift of seeing things in how a horse travels that others can’t,” Bullock said.

Bullock began videotaping horses on the treadmill and was astonished to discover that most weren’t landing properly on their hoofs, forcing them to adjust their gait, which usually led to lameness. Bullock also found out why: improper shoeing. It caused the problem in 90% of the horses he was treating, and once a horse was shoed properly, his ailment disappeared.

“The biggest problem with a race-track horse,” Bullock said, “is that he’s not conditioned properly--which causes injuries due to fatigue--and he develops soreness of the joints because of improper shooing.”

The first day a horse arrives at the clinic, Bullock gives him a full blood workup, EKG and endoscopic exam. “I don’t want to leave anything to chance,” he said. Horses usually stay a minimum of four weeks, a maximum of 12. After Bullock corrects a horse’s ailment and has him shoed the correct way, the horse is put into a conditioning program: running three miles a day on the treadmill and eating a vitamin-enhanced diet. Bullock also monitors the horse’s blood and liver, kidney, muscle and cardiac functions weekly.

Although it doesn’t sound revolutionary, the conditioning program initially ran into resistance from trainers, who felt that Bullock was doing their job.

“I got that all the time: ‘What’s a vet doing training horses?’ ” Bullock said. “But I don’t train horses, I condition them. At the track, a trainer runs a horse for a mile, and the horse is running in cups, not on a consistent surface like the treadmill. A horse doesn’t leave here with a fatigue problem. After our program, a trainer will run the horse for a mile on the track, but the horse’ll be ready for another one.

“We’ve always had a lot of skepticism from trainers when they first see or hear about us. One guy told me, ‘You run my horse three miles a day, you’ll turn him into a plow horse.’ But now that he’s seen the results, he keeps sending horses to me. If I start to overtrain a horse, I can pick it up in his blood--his muscle enzymes will start to increase, and then I’ll back off.”

Christian Doumen was a skeptical trainer until he saw the results of Bullock’s program. Doumen sent Chris’s Lad to Bullock for the removal of a bone chip, then let Bullock condition the 7-year-old gelding. Once healthy, Chris’s Lad left the clinic and won two of his first three starts at Los Alamitos.

“I really like the program now,” said Doumen, a Frenchman who has been training horses in this country for two years.

At the clinic, Bullock was working on a 3-year-old filly named Peaches, who had arrived with a bad back. As he expected, Bullock traced the problem to improper shoeing. After the horse was reshod, her back ailment went away, and she entered the conditioning program, working out twice a day on the treadmill.

Built in Switzerland and designed for standardbred horses, the treadmill can reach speeds as high as 35 m.p.h. (the world’s fastest horses run at about 40 m.p.h.) It can also be inclined to increase the workload. When Bullock bought one two years ago, at a cost of nearly $40,000, he had to customize it for thoroughbreds and add an industrial fan at the front to simulate onrushing wind.

A handler led Peaches onto the treadmill, closed the padded gate in front of her and held the reins as Bullock set the incline at six degrees and started the machine. Cuing her by tapping a whip on the metal frame, Bullock gradually increased the speed until Peaches was galloping, going nowhere as fast as she could. All that was missing was disco music and an instructor in a leotard yelling, “OK, let’s stretch it out!”

Bullock slowed down the treadmill until Peaches was trotting, then stopped it completely. “You can tell she’s ready to leave,” he said, caressing her head, “she hasn’t even broken a sweat.”

By applying modern medical techniques to racehorses, Bullock said, “I can help develop their genetic capabilities to the maximum, but I can’t take a genetically inferior horse and turn him into a Kentucky Derby winner.”

Science, however, may be able to predict a horse’s potential at birth, Bullock said. It has been learned that horses with high levels of muscle enzyme are superior to horses with lower levels. A recent study in Switzerland followed the careers of 20 young horses, Bullock said, “and the five with the highest enzyme levels as yearlings did better than the others.”

After Peaches returned to her stall, Bullock took Diamond Night out for a little exercise. Despite the limp, despite the deformed left leg, the horse still looked like a Hollywood star, prancing majestically, his head cocked rakishly as Bullock put him through his paces. Then Bullock gave him a command, and the horse rose up on his hind legs, pawed the air and whinnied.

It was pure Hollywood. The Return of Diamond Night.