Gray Dapple

Thoroughbred Assistance Program - Going Beyond The Finish Line

Scotchy

Scotchy, AKA Butterscotch, was rescued from Bravo Packing horse slaughterhouse in September of 2008. He had been living there for over 6 months with his grandfather, Gentle. Scotchy was blind in one eye when I started my investigation of Bravo. Gentle served as a kind of seeing eye horses for him. The two were inseparable.




Scotchy was ultimately adopted by a wonderful woman in the Midwest who also adopted Bravo's "Soulmate" and Tears of Angels from Gray Dapple TAP. Scotchy has a best friend, Linda's daughter's horse, Chief ... and although technically he is blind for life, Linda swears that in his own special way, Scotchy can see.

One afternoon, Monty's father, Joe, plant owner, woke up on the wrong side of the bed. He took a look at Gentle and approached Monty, half drunk at 11:00 am, ranting, "I'm tired of seeing that tired son of a bitch old draft horse walking round circles in back of the lot. If you don't shoot that m---- f------, I will.

I was on my way over to the kill lot with a small team of investigators. It started to rain. Monty usually only killed horses on rainy days because he was in violation of EPA regulations and the rain would wash the blood off the dirty fields. I was shocked when I arrived and was told that Monty went on a horse killing spree just an hour before I arrived. He had killed, amongst others, Gentle.

Scotchy was hiding in the back of the lot, trying to fit into the substandard cow shed so Monty could not find him.

Over the next several weeks, I noticed that Scotchy had no will to live. He walked around with his head down, and had no interest in eating or even drinking, not that anything but black moldy hay and green bacteria infested water was ever provided for them anyway.

As the weeks progressed, Monty plummeted into a downward spiral. He learned that the AZA suspected that he was packaging and selling grade 4-D meat, equivalent in zoo meat language to "roadkill." He was determined to exonerate himself from these scandalous suspicions by attending a big, glam AZA conference in Wisconsin and setting up a Bravo Packing Horse Meat Stand.

One night, due to some bad news in Monty's personal life, he went outside into the kill lot to feed Scotchy from a pink grain bucket. Monty actually fancied Scotchy and was hoping that Amanda's undercover persona, "Aspen," could find him a home with a large, handicapped boy. He did not really want to shoot or slaughter Scotchy ... and although that may seem ironic, such is the case even with serial killers who develop a liking or sympathy for only certain victims they are slated to kill and not others.

But on that particular evening, Scotchy ran from Monty and refused to be polite about it under the circumstances of his belated grandfather having been shot and dragged off to the meat grinding room in front of him. Monty was appalled ... in fact, he ran amok and jogged off to the freezer storage room and grabbed his baseball bat. He called Amanda, AKA "Aspen," at 11:30 that night and confessed the following ...

"That one eye blind draft is now good for 2 blind eyes. That m-- f---- ran away from me tonight and this time, it's on him. What's done is done. He wants to run away from me like a mo--- f---- when I go comin to give him grain ... then he's gonna find out the definition of a baseball bat .. that was the plan and I succeeded. Now he'll think the f--- twice about runnin again when he sees me comin. He got the bat and now he can't see straight ... the stupid ugly m--- f---- is now walkin circles, runnin over my fence. I'll have to shoot him when I get back from Wisconsin, if Dad doesn't do the job while I'm away."



Scotchy was rescued with 9 other horses on 9/31/2008.



He had to be hauled off to emergency surgery on 10/1/2008 at Mid-Atlantic Equine Surgery Center in Ringoes, NJ. Dr, Patty Doyle was shocked when she observed that Monty's baseball batting resulted in his eye socket being bashed in 6 cm into the white. There was no change of saving the eye. Scotchy's eye was surgically removed. A minor surgery was also done on Scotchy's foot, to remove an abscess that had occurred a the filthy Bravo kill lot.



When Scotchy returned from the hospital to the Sorvinos' farm, he was put in a gigantic foaling stall. He was in amazingly good spirits until his eye bandages were removed days later ... when he suddenly realized that his vision was not just obstructed by bandages, but that he was fully blind. Poor Scotchy went into a serious depression for 2 weeks, until he finally accepted that he was loved by his rescuers and other horse friends and that life was worth living.