Horses’ Best Friend : Chatsworth Woman Saves Ailing Animals From Certain Death

Had Jolene Venables never found Sassy--covered with sores and knee-deep in muck--odds are the registered Arabian horse would have ended up on dinner plates in France or Japan.

Nearly 400 pounds underweight and more dead than alive, the once majestic animal was waiting to be auctioned by the pound and hauled off to the slaughterhouse.

The thought made Venables shudder, so the former manicurist and bail bondswoman scraped together $850 and bought Sassy. “They told me a week ago she would die,” Venables said on a recent morning as she injected penicillin into Sassy’s neck, which was covered with oozing sores so painful the horse could not eat or drink.

Five or six times each year Venables buys sick and neglected horses headed for slaughter and nurses them slowly back to health at her Chatsworth ranch. She treats their ailments and, when they are well enough, finds them new homes.

Her nonprofit stable at the foot of the Santa Susana Mountains is currently home to four horses in various stages of recovery. Five others are in foster homes until new owners can be found; 25 more were placed in permanent homes over the last several years.

But the horses that Venables saves are a relatively insignificant number when compared to the nearly 750,000 sold for slaughter each year. That number has increased as the demand for horse meat rises abroad and as horse owners, pinched by the recession, are forced to give up their animals.

Many of those horses end up in crowded, unsanitary pens waiting to be auctioned to rodeos or to meatpackers. Venables haunts these pens of sick and unwanted horses, deciding which to save and tying ribbons in their manes to set them apart from the condemned.

“I want to save them all,” Venables said. “I see all these little baby horses and I want to take them all home.”

But she knows that is impossible. Her veterinary bills alone sometimes run $800 a week. Food is expensive, and she depends on local equestrian stores to donate broken bags of pellets and hay. Volunteers groom and exercise the horses, which are kept only until they are healthy enough to leave and then are sold to buy more.

Venables’ operation is funded out of her own pocket and by donations. She uses money raised from training or boarding other people’s horses to pay the bills for her rescues.

Kate Roth, a volunteer for the San Juan Capistrano-based Pegasus Foundation, which finds new owners for homeless horses, said undertakings such as Venables’ are becoming more and more common across Southern California. Although people have been taking in stray cats and dogs for years, adopting an unwanted horse is a different proposition.

“It’s a much bigger mouth to feed,” Roth said. Owning even a healthy horse is costly--between $200 and $500 a month--and a sick horse costs even more. None of Venables’ horses are totally well, but she and her volunteers treat each like a champion thoroughbred.

“People tend to think of animals as lesser beings than ourselves, but they’re really not,” said Steve Martin, a massage therapist who volunteers at the stables several hours a week. “They have individual personalities.”

There is Sassy, pulled off the meat truck almost at the last minute. The horse walks with a pronounced limp and still cannot eat or drink on her own. Venables forces a garden hose down the horse’s throat to prevent dehydration. Even so, the sharp outlines of ribs are visible under a dull chestnut coat that is stretched tight.

And there is Scooter, a 2-year-old Arabian whose legs were so swollen that it took 10 minutes for Venables to walk the horse across her tiny lot. His sores are nearly healed, and already prospective buyers are eyeing the horse, whose playful nature has endeared him to volunteers.

Veterinarians and potential buyers credit Venables, who has no formal veterinary training, with saving horses written off as dead. Stewart Weissman of Hidden Hills worked with Venables to save an 8-year-old Arabian mare from the meatpackers.

That horse, Cheri Amour, now belongs to his 13-year-old daughter, Stacy. “Without Jolene, that horse would not have lived,” Weissman said. “She is a very impressive woman.”

Venables, however, says what she does is natural. “I take care of them like I take care of me,” she said. “I take vitamins; I give them vitamins. I exercise them and they exercise me.”

A horse lover since she learned to ride at age 6, Venables has spent 30 years working with horses either as a trainer or as a show rider. But it is only over the last 17 years that she has used her extra money and time to save horses from abuse and slaughter.

In 1976, she found a horse that was being abused by owners who were injecting it with psychedelic drugs. She took the horse for a ride and never brought it back, nursing it until it gave birth to Whiskey, an appaloosa that still lives with Venables.

Since then, she has spent every spare dime caring for horses, which she refers to as “my kids.”

“If you’ve ever heard the scream of a horse, it’s very sad,” she said. “It’s something you’ll never forget. It’s like when you are in school and you run your nails down the blackboard, it’s worse than that.”