Dina Alborano rescues ex-racehorses bound for slaughter. A savvy social media operator, the New Jersey resident drums up donations through platforms like Facebook and Twitter, then purchases and plucks horses from ‘feed lots’ – facilities, also known as ‘kill lots’, where horses are penned before going to slaughter in Mexico or Canada. Through her horse rescue organization, she then endeavors to find these horses new homes.

Alborano’s efforts have recently received support from some of the most respected jockeys, trainers, owners and journalists in the industry. Some say that she has broadened awareness of this issue like few have been able. But her efforts have also courted controversy.

Critics argue Alborano exaggerates the plight of some of the horses she rescues, needlessly exploiting the highly emotional nature of the topic. Indeed, last month, horse racing outlet the Paulick Report published a story that raised questions about how Alborano manages and conducts her organization, allegations she vigorously denies.

But Alborano’s story touches upon much broader questions about the sport’s relationship with horse slaughter: namely, why are racehorses bound for the abattoir when the drugs they’re given during their racing careers prohibits them from entering the food chain? Who is policing the system? And are there enough homes for the thousands of horses retired from racing each year?

In recent years, the industry as a whole has stepped up its game significantly when it comes to re-homing its retired equine athletes. Driven by ethical concerns as well as a growing realization that potential new fans are turned away by a sport that permits its competitors to end up on foreign dinner plates, the industry is funneling more and more human and financial resources towards what is coined racehorse “aftercare” – the retraining and rehoming of retired racehorses.

“We’ve known the issue of horses ending up in bad spots as long as there’s been racing, but now with social media, it’s put out there in people’s faces on a daily basis,” said Victoria Keith, president of the National Thoroughbred Welfare Organization, a newly established aftercare body. “Everybody’s finding out it’s happening.”

Only, while change has been relatively swift, untold numbers of racehorses are still slipping through the net.

“Is it enough? No,” admitted John Phillips, president of the Thoroughbred Aftercare Alliance, an aftercare accreditation organization – the largest such program in the country – which this week held its annual pre-Preakness Stakes fundraiser, the race set for Saturday. “We have a lot more to do.”

‘It’s absolutely ridiculous’

No horse has been legally slaughtered for human consumption in the United States since 2007, when the federal government pulled funding for horse slaughter plant inspectors. This left Mexico and Canada to pick up the slack, both of which have come under fire in recent years for their records on food safety and horse welfare. The European Union, for example, barred horse meat imports from Mexico in 2014 after a series of damning audits.

Last year, more than 88,000 horses left the US for slaughter in Canada and Mexico, according to figures compiled by the Equine Welfare Alliance. But how many of those were ex-racehorses? With no hard data, that’s hard to answer. A much-used estimate is 10,000 ex-racehorses. According to the Equine Welfare Alliance, data from 2006 suggests that as many as 17% of horses that go to slaughter each year are ex-racehorses (close to 19,000 at that time). But it should be noted that this was before the racing industry had started to grapple seriously with the problem.

Nevertheless, as Alex Brown, a former racetrack employee and now an author and prominent anti-slaughter advocate, points out, many of these horses shouldn’t be headed to slaughter at all.

“It’s a food safety issue,” said Brown. Drugs like the painkiller phenylbutazone are ubiquitous in racehorse training, but they’re prohibited for use in animals intended for human consumption. “Livestock like cows and chickens, those animals are highly regulated in terms of their drug intake if they’re going into the human food chain. But the horse seems to slip through the cracks,” he said.

So, why do racehorses “slip through the cracks” as Brown says? “It’s almost a running joke at the auctions: ‘Will somebody sign this paper or that paper?’” Brown said, explaining the holes in the documentation system for horses bound for slaughter in Canada. This is compounded by the lack of a comprehensive national “passport” system that charts each horse’s medical history, he said. “It’s absolutely ridiculous.”

Racetracks themselves are at the vanguard of policing the system. That’s because the vast majority of racehorses are stabled and trained at these facilities. When trainers seek stalls for their horses, they sign agreements with the track that often requires them to ensure that any horse stabled there doesn’t end up going to slaughter, at least not directly.

But the devil, they say, is in the details. These agreements can differ in rigor of wording, and certain racetracks are much more vigilant about enforcing the rules than others. “The more reputable racetracks don’t want to risk their reputation, and they’ve pushed their killers off the shed row,” said Equine Welfare Alliance president, John Holland. “The less reputable tracks, he’s still there. Horses still leak out to slaughter.”

That said, a variety of obstacles make enforcement of these policies difficult.

In New York, for example, a retirement program called Take the Lead has, over the past three years, facilitated the rehoming of around 375 ex-racehorses. New York racetracks, however, sit among the “elite” echelons of the sport, and owners there tend to be wealthier and more able to fulfill the “ethical responsibilities” to their horses, said trainer Rick Schosberg, Take the Lead’s administrator.

On the other end of the scale, however, are those horses too slow to race in the more prestigious venues like New York, or those whose abilities are on the wane. They typically end up at racetracks on the bottom rungs of the ladder, running not for a million dollars but for a measly handful. Once there, these horses too often fall foul of the claiming game – races geared towards lesser talented horses where they can be bought and sold.

Retired racehorse Ball Four is one of five horses currently housed at Old Friends, a nonprofit thoroughbred race horse retirement farm at Kentucky Downs in Franklin, Kentucky. The track donated land to the organization, which also has farms in Georgetown and New York. Photograph: Miranda Pederson/AP

Once ensnared within the claiming game, a horse can pass from owner to owner, track-to-track, and state to state multiple times within a matter of months, making the tracking of them difficult and responsibility for them less clear cut. And if the horse is injured, the most convenient, cheapest option is often to sell the horse for slaughter.

“One of the biggest things I’m focused on in our program is education opportunities for owners and trainers so that horses are retired one race too soon instead of one race too late,” said Jessica Hammond, program administrator at Beyond the Wire, a Maryland-based organization tasked with finding horses who race in the state new homes. Retiring horses from racing before injury occurs is not only the “right” thing to do, she said, it significantly increases their chances of finding a second career. “A horse with injuries is much more likely to end up in a bad spot than a horse that’s sound, unfortunately,” she said.

‘The disconnect has never been clearer’

Finding homes for ex-racehorses isn’t as swift and as easy as it sounds. Nor is it particularly cheap. Racehorses – highly strung by nature – often need time to un-wind from the rigors of racetrack life, and some need training to prepare them for new roles, like three-day-eventing or trail-riding. All this can take many months – years, even.

Programs like Beyond the Wire don’t do this grunt work. Rather, they funnel funds towards specific facilities that do – facilities like the Foxie G Foundation, a 125-acre farm in Maryland where 78 ex-racehorses currently reside, 40 of them in the process of being re-homed.

“When a horse comes in to us, they’re always allowed decompression time, then we start to evaluate on the ground, then we evaluate under tack,” said Laurie Calhoun, co-founder of the foundation, explaining how she begins to assess and re-train the horses who come to her. “It’s a pretty lengthy process.”

Foxie G is one of hundreds of such rescue facilities around the country, many of which differ greatly in their approach. Bringing some kind of uniformity is the Thoroughbred Aftercare Alliance (TAA), which “accredits, inspects and awards grants” to aftercare organizations, including Foxie G. The TAA currently distributes around $4m annually.

In order to gain accreditation with the TAA – which boasts 64 organizations and some 170 different facilities under its umbrella – a rescue organization must tick a number of boxes. They must be registered as a 501(c)(3) non-profit, for example. Its euthanasia policy must be consistent with the American Association of Equine Practitioners, a national veterinary organization. Importantly, the TAA frowns upon the rescue of racehorses directly from auctions and ‘kill buyers’ – people who purchase horses to send to slaughter in Mexico and Canada.

“There is a segment of people who make a living humiliating or embarrassing people into buying back a horse that they at one point in their lives owned,” said the TAA’s president, John Phillips, who added that rescuing horses from kill lots isn’t a total deal-breaker when they’re doling out funds. “What we don’t want to get into is with individuals or groups who use the threat of kill buyers to basically hustle business.”

Others also argue that kill buyers have turned this threat into a cottage industry, artificially inflating the prices of the ex-racehorses in their care knowing that they have a ready market in the rescue groups. But by cutting out the kill lots in this way, Dina Alborano said, a large pool of slaughter-bound ex-racehorses are being ignored.

“That’s their absolute last stop. They went through the auction, the kill buyer bought them and now they’re at the kill lot. Now they’re just a meat price,” Alborano said. “I think it’s really people’s cop-out not to help. People are always looking for a way to side-step doing something.”

And this type of practical and philosophical discord is also emblematic of another obstacle hampering efforts to effectively tackle the problem: the internecine conflicts between aftercare groups, all competing for financial support from a similar pool of donors.

“It’s very discouraging to see so many organizations so unwilling to work together, especially when it was supposed to be about the horses, not them,” racehorse owner Maggi Moss said in an email to the Guardian. Moss was the winningest racehorse owner in the US back in 2006, with 211 victories that calendar year. She’s also a long-time advocate for racehorse aftercare, and founded the Hope After Racing Thoroughbreds retirement program in Iowa. But she’s critical of the way in which separate organizations compete with one another.

“That disconnect has never been clearer to me than it is now,” Moss wrote.

‘Wouldn’t that be wonderful?’

Compared to other countries on this issue, the US is behind the curve. A few years ago, Australia – with the second largest breeding industry globally – came under fire for the number of ex-racehorses there ending up in abattoirs. In response, the industry instituted a series of measures that have significantly tightened this faucet.

“There’s some difficulties that we have that they don’t,” said California Horse Racing Board commissioner Madeline Auerbach, who has been, in recent years, a prominent aftercare advocate both in California and nationally. The “difficulties” Auerbach points to is how the US racing industry doesn’t have a centralized governing body – like an NFL or NBA – to enforce a nationwide set of policies as Australia did.

Nevertheless, “I think the industry needs to step up and say, ‘You know what, we’re going to pay the bills on this before the government steps in and says, you bet you are,’” she said, arguing that the sport must institute a more secure aftercare funding mechanism as it tackles the problem in piecemeal fashion. But in this regard, there is forward momentum. The Jockey Club, for example, imposed at the start of the 2018 breeding season a $35 fee for each mare bred by a stallion, with the proceeds slated for aftercare programs.

And there are other positive developments, too. Earlier this year, Southern California racetrack Santa Anita introduced a more stringent horse tracking system that allows management to know where horses go when they leave the grounds. In Louisiana – a border state with a poor reputation for slaughter-bound ex-racehorses – the National Thoroughbred Welfare Organization is working to place a representative at each Louisiana racetrack who can identify and re-home vulnerable horses, said Victoria Keith.

“It’s a tough issue to figure out how to put more than just a band-aid on,” Keith said, explaining how she hopes their plans for Louisiana are more than just that. According to Cathleen Doyle, however, band-aids wouldn’t be necessary if a federal bill was passed banning the export of horses for slaughter abroad.

In the 1990s, Doyle successfully spearheaded the campaign behind Proposition 6 in California – a bill to end the export of California horses for slaughter. And while overall numbers since 1990 – when nearly 350,000 US horses were slaughtered – have dropped precipitously, there’s plenty of room for improvement, she said.

“If we could ever institute change to see if we could get that 88,000 figure closer to nil, wouldn’t that be wonderful?”