STATE OF GRIEF

Without deerstalkers or magnifying glasses or the help of anyone named Watson, equine researchers in this bedrock of thoroughbred horse breeding have been investigating for weeks a mystery that would baffle a Sherlock Holmes--or fill up the pages of another Dick Francis novel.

Hardly fiction, this is not a whodunit but a whatdunit, and the harsh reality of mare reproductive loss syndrome (MRLS), as the strange condition is called, is that it’s turned the Kentucky breeding industry upside down.

Figures are still trickling in--proof, perhaps, that the worst for the breeders is behind them--but from late April through late May, there were 532 near-full-term mares that had aborted or had stillborn foals, and more than 700 mares that had lost early-term fetuses that were to be foaled next year. The $900-million Kentucky breeding business, a cyclical, volatile enterprise that had been cresting in recent years, is expected to take a hit estimated at more than $200 million.

Ric Waldman, the stallion manager at William T. Young’s prosperous Overbrook Farm, where the stallion Storm Cat stands for an industry-high $400,000 stud fee, cautions that the catastrophic MRLS could happen again, while also wondering what remedies his nursery can take to prevent such an occurrence.

The dilemma for farm managers throughout Kentucky is that researchers from the University of Kentucky and elsewhere are not in agreement about what brought on this grief. Working hypotheses are hanging from the trees--literally, because one of the theories, presented by the University of Kentucky’s Maxwell H. Gluck Equine Research Center, is that the mares may have been contaminated by cyanide from caterpillars that eat leaves off the thousands of black cherry trees indigenous to this area.

The cyanide supposition was discarded early, before it was embraced again. Now, at least as far as the University of Kentucky is concerned, the cyanide explanation has supplanted a theory that mycotoxins from fungi were the culprits.

But a couple of scientists from Clemson University have speculated that toxic hemlock plants, which grow near fence rows and in tree clusters, could be responsible.

“The (UK research team) re-emphasizes that it is not excluding any possibility,” university officials said in a recent statement. “Field observations and clinical data still suggest the involvement of cyanide. If hemlock is involved in this syndrome, the examination of equine tissues from late-term fetuses or blood serum from MRLS mares should demonstrate the presence of toxins associated with hemlock poisoning.”

While the Clemson pair plan to continue their investigation, Kentucky is not short on less scientific theories, some of which are not being dismissed out of hand.

Arthur B. Hancock III, the owner of Stone Farm in Paris, Ky., supports the thoughts of Bill Ferguson, his longtime fertilizer supplier, who says that farms that treated their pastures with nitric acid, which can form nitrogen, seem to be especially vulnerable. Hancock has raced two Kentucky Derby winners, Gato Del Sol and Sunday Silence, and besides breeding Gato Del Sol he also bred Fusaichi Pegasus, selling him at a yearling auction for $4 million before the colt won last year’s Derby.

“Bill Ferguson doesn’t have any formal training,” Hancock said, “but he’s an awfully smart guy, and what he says frequently makes a lot of sense. He’s the kind of guy that had he been around might have cracked the Japanese code and won us [World War II] sooner than we eventually did.”

Ferguson’s association with Stone Farm dates to the early 1980s, when there was a minor foaling crisis in Kentucky. Hancock’s operation was hardly affected then and compared to many farms he’s been fortunate this year. Hancock said recently that Stone Farm had had only four dead foals out of a broodmare band of 75.

“Arthur didn’t have any nitrogen in his soil the last time, and he didn’t have any there this time, either,” Ferguson said. “Taylor Made Farm [in Nicholasville, Ky.], on the other hand, had nitrogen in its soil in both the fall and the spring, and it’s been one of the hardest hit. All the testing of the pastures that’s being done now is coming after the damage has been done. The nitrogen is gone from the soil now. But where did it go?

“I think there may be two or three factors involved in all this, including the soil temperature that changed drastically when we went from extremely warm, dry weather to a freeze [in April], and I think nitrogen is another one of them. This is just what I think. Usually when a guy like me comes along, they always ask, ‘Where’s his pockets?’ Well, I don’t have any pockets, I just have a theory. There are no pockets, because I don’t even have a dog in the race.”

Hancock may have lost only a few foals, but one of them was from the mare Fineza, who produced Keeper Hill, winner of the 1998 Kentucky Oaks. Fineza had been in foal to the young stallion Menifee, who was beaten by just a neck against Charismatic in the 1999 Derby.

Bella Chiare’s Menifee foal died on May 6, the day after this year’s Derby, when she delivered the colt 20 days early. The week of the Derby, subsequent surveys revealed, as many as 70 foals a day were being lost. At a May 6 party attended by John and Debbie Oxley, whose Monarchos had just won the Derby, the conversation was dominated by the foaling crisis, not the race that had been run just 24 hours before.

“This is the ‘Twilight Zone’ coming to the Bluegrass,” Hancock said. “But I think this has been a one-time thing, and it probably won’t happen again. I don’t think it’s the result of some strange plague. I think the goofy weather may have triggered it. On the 17th of April, it was 80 degrees in Kentucky. Then the next day, the temperature went down to 23 and we had a snow and a frost. We went a long time without rain, rain that might have washed the nitrogen away.”

On April 26, Tom Riddle, the veterinarian who helped start the respected Rood & Riddle Equine Hospital in Lexington in 1986, visited Taylor Made Farm to determine the sex of the foals that six mares were carrying. There is a narrow window when this can be done, usually 60 to 70 days after conception. When mares in utero are sold at public auction, they generally bring higher prices if the foal inside is a colt rather than a filly. Down the road, a successful racing colt can be bred up to 100 times a year, whereas the filly would be capable of producing only one foal per year.

Three of the Taylor Made mares were in the same barn, and Riddle found that two of them had died.

“Last year, I had made a sex check of about 400 mares in foal,” Riddle said. “Only five of them had lost their foals, so to find two dead foals in the same barn was very unusual.”

Riddle first thought that the two dead foals were just due to bad luck, but the next day, making a sex check of six more foals at another farm, he found two more deaths. The next week--the week of the Kentucky Derby--he came across a dead fetus at yet a third farm.

“So now I personally knew about five deaths at three different farms,” Riddle said. “That was as many as I had encountered the whole previous year. It was beginning to look like there was a possible relationship. The Friday of Derby week, many farms were reporting a number of fetuses that had died.”

Two of the Taylor Made mares that lost their foals, Riboletta and Manistique, are owned by Aaron and Marie Jones. Aaron Jones, a lumber tycoon from Eugene, Ore., campaigned Riboletta last year when she was voted the Eclipse Award for best older filly or mare, and had bred both her and Manistique, also a multiple stakes winner, to his new stallion Forestry. In all, Jones has 24 broodmares, eight of whom lost their foals.

“The foal they pulled out of Riboletta weighed 140 pounds,” Jones said. “It’s heart-breaking. On their own, Riboletta and Manistique are the kind of mares that could make a sire like Forestry. But I think Frank Taylor [one of the owners and the manager of the family-run Taylor Made] deserves a big pat on the back. He attacked this problem right away. If it hadn’t been for him coming forward, we’d still be wallowing in all this.”

Jones did not attempt to breed Riboletta again. Instead he has returned her to training, at trainer Eduardo Inda’s barn at Hollywood Park, with the racing goal the Breeders’ Cup Distaff at Belmont Park on Oct. 27.

A 2,400-acre farm like Overbrook, whose 10 stallions besides Storm Cat include Deputy Minister, Carson City and Silver Deputy, has enough of a financial cushion to ride out the storm, but many smaller farms here are not as fortunate. Horse insurers, facing sizable losses because of the calamity this year, have largely stepped back from insuring foals anymore.

Opposite Overbrook in size is Cedar Point Farm, a Paris property, where eight of its 12 broodmares lost their pregnancies. Gill Aulick, who manages the farm his father opened in 1956, is thankful that 100 of their 300 acres are dedicated to cattle.

“Besides our 12 mares, we run a small boarding operation,” Aulick said. “We don’t race our horses, we breed them for the commercial market. The kind of horses that we sell will usually be in the $25,000-$50,000 range. If we ever sell one for as much as $100,000, that would be something special. The farms at the very top will be OK through this, but the ordinary guys, the grass-roots breeders like me, are in for a struggle. I’ve got boarding clients that want to move their mares out of Kentucky, to states like Maryland, Oklahoma and Virginia. We don’t run a horse hotel, so I usually require my clients to stay a minimum of 90 days. This year, though, I had to make exceptions. One of my clients moved his mare, but he paid his full bill, anyway.”

Kentucky’s average spring crop totals 10,000 foals. Breeding the infected mares back is really not an option, because that cannot be done for 120 days, an interval that would extend beyond the end of the breeding season. The normal gestation time for a foal is 11 months after conception.

Both Tom Riddle and Tom Roach, co-owner of Parrish Hill Farm in Midway, Ky., pointed out that a high percentage of the dead foals--more than 40%--came from mares bred in February and early March. Parrish Hill bred the champion Princess Rooney, was the co-breeder of Charismatic, the 1999 Kentucky Derby winner, and also bred that colt’s half-brother, Millennium Wind, winner of this year’s Blue Grass Stakes.

Of the 60 mares at Parrish Hill, only three lost their foals, even though the farm was overrun with the eastern tent caterpillars that have been said to be the carriers of the cyanide from the cherry trees. Cyanide is not deadly to caterpillars, which actually use the poison as a deterrent to being eaten by birds, which can die from the stuff.

“Three foals,” Roach said, “but they all belonged to the same client. Those were calls I hated to make. The man took them about as well as you could hope for. They were by some well-known stallions--Capetown, Go For Gin and Anees. It was pretty depressing. You’d see these foals come out--looking normal, perfectly formed, and then they just quit breathing.”

Tom Riddle, the veterinarian, is a member of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Versailles, Ky. Last week, the pastor there gave a blessing and conducted a prayer service on behalf of Kentucky’s beleaguered horse-breeding industry.

“It’s going to take a good three years before everything’s back to normal,” Tom Roach said. “The world’s best stallions have always been in Kentucky and they will continue to stand here. This is a serious blip, but it’s brought everybody together, because we all know we’re in this together. We’re going to come back from this.”