Dr Kellosalmi rescued
this white paint horse from the slaughterhouse
All Photos: Heath Fletcher |
As he was getting ready to pack
up his things and leave the Alberta horse auction, Dr
Ray Kellosalmi noticed there was something slightly
off about the last horse to come up for bidding. "She
was a three-year-old white paint horse with a few brown
spots and when she came into the ring she was totally
in a lather, totally wet," he recalls. "It was obvious
to me she was in lots of pain. I thought, 'There's something
really wrong with that horse.'"
And so, as he often does, Dr Kellosalmi
outbid the slaughterhouses and loaded the young horse
into his trailer with the others he'd bought. He closed
the doors and set out on the nine-hour drive back to
his ranch in interior BC's Okanagan Valley.
Although he had no inkling of it
at the time, the saga of the white paint horse was far
from over.
HORSE
HIDEAWAY
Fifty-eight year old Dr Kellosalmi is a semi-retired
GP. He and his wife own and operate a horse sanctuary
on their ranch near Vernon, BC, a project they began
in 1987. The sanctuary is a sort of halfway house for
horses: they buy horses that are in danger of being
sent to slaughter or who've been rescued from poor living
conditions, and care for them until suitable owners
can be found to adopt them.
The horses come to him from a variety
of different sources: word-of-mouth or vets' referrals,
the SPCA, the RCMP when they've seized them from dangerous
or abusive owners, and from slaughterhouse auctions
all over the west.
Caring for horses is not
so different from caring for humans, says Dr Kellosalmi |
EQUINE
REHAB
Sometimes a veterinarian cannot visit the ranch quickly
and Dr Kellosalmi must treat the horses on his own,
with a vet's advice. "I still deal with surgical problems
at the clinic, and horses are no different. Just like
I've stitched up my own dogs over the years when they
needed it, I've done the same for the horses. It's no
different from stitching up humans, really." After the
horses are rehabilitated, properly fed and examined,
they're put up for adoption in the US and Canada.
Dr Kellosalmi emphasizes the 'natural
lifestyle' benefits of sanctuary life for the horses'
development and health. "A natural lifestyle means healthier
horses and less colic," he says. "As soon as you take
the horse out of the stable and out of the feedlot,"
and onto larger, more natural ranches, "you forget the
name of the vet very soon because you don't have to
call — that says something about how horses should
be kept as opposed to how they are kept."
There is no shortage of time-consuming
and energy-draining things to do on the ranch. Dr Kellosalmi
regularly wakes before dawn to let his hoofed inpatients
out to pasture. And he grows and harvests all the requisite
hay in his own fields. In his spare time, he oversees
work crews building expansions to and repairing the
sanctuary's facilities, which include several massive
barns and mile upon mile of fencing.
"Instead of going golfing or going
on lavish holidays," he says, "we spend what money we
get, through medical practice or investments, on the
horses."
Dr Kellosalmi estimates that he
has saved nearly 600 horses over the years. At the moment,
there are 21 horses living at the sanctuary.
He's quick to downplay the sanctuary's
impact. "Really you're keeping a few animals alive out
of millions that need help," he says with regret in
his voice.
AND
PEOPLE TOO
Dr Kellosalmi practises several days a week at a walk-in
clinic in Vernon, BC, a small city in the southern interior
of the province. He cut back in 2004 after nearly 30
years of 70- to 80-hour weeks at his own practice in
nearby Kelowna, and now he has plenty of time to spend
caring for his equine patients at the sanctuary.
He had hoped to retire from medical
practice some time ago, but the community needs his
help. "A third of Vernon doesn't have a family doctor,"
he explains. "I get requested to help and I hate to
turn people down."
Horses and humans present unique
challenges for the doctor, but he doesn't prefer treating
one over the other. "Doing both of them for me is better
than doing one," he says. "I find that doing farm work
and dealing with horses — which is exhausting —
is quite different from doing medical work, which is
exhausting in the sense of long hours, but there's nothing
that weighs half a ton pulling you, and you don't have
to stack hay bales by the hundreds!"
Hundreds of horses have
gone through Dr Kellosalmi's Okanagan Valley ranch
on their way to new homes |
'ALWAYS
A PASSION'
The physician has lived around horses all his life.
"Riding was always a passion for me," he says, "but
helping the horses was a greater passion."
Dr Kellosalmi, who's of Finnish
descent, and his wife have a daughter and son, aged
30 and 29, who are as passionate about horses. "Over
time," he says, "they started to veer the same way:
as benefactors of horses rather than as riders."
Dr Kellosalmi has written extensively
about the treatment of pregnant mares whose urine is
collected as an ingredient in hormone replacement therapy
drugs — and the fate of the thousands of unwanted
offspring of those mares, many of which are sold off
for their meat. After the Women's Health Initiative
study discovered a possible link between horse-derived
estrogen and breast cancer in 2002, the mare urine industry
took a serious hit. On top of that, cheaper synthetic
and plant-based estrogen replacement alternatives have
recently been developed. As a result, the pregnant mares'
urine industrial farms—which are located mostly
in the Canadian prairies and North Dakota—have
been drastically scaled back. Good news for Dr Kellosalmi's
campaign to get horses off of industrial farms—but
bad news for all the now-useless horses who are being
sent en masse to slaughterhouses in Canada and the US.
MIRACULOUS
RESCUE
One of those horses was the white paint horse Dr Kellosalmi
took pity on at an Alberta auction almost two years
ago.
Dr Kellosalmi saw that the horse
was struggling during the trip back to his ranch. Her
neck was swollen and distended, with rope burns around
it. She was having difficulty using her hind legs and
could not bend her neck down to eat. He knew something
was dreadfully wrong and arranged for a vet to come
and x-ray her.
"What we found was astounding,"
he recalls. "It was a fracture. The sixth vertebra in
the neck was 60% angulated away from its normal position."
The injury likely occurred when her sellers tried to
rope her, she resisted, and they yanked too hard, he
surmises. "The vet said she should have died, no way
she should be alive — yet there she was."
Friends and fellow horse caretakers
called the case a miracle, amazing, a once-in-a-lifetime
situation in which a horse with a broken neck not only
survives but also makes a significant recovery.
Dr Kellosalmi decided to name her
Angel.
Angel is now a healthy five-year-old.
Dr Kellosalmi has decided not to put her up for adoption
because her neck will likely never be strong enough
to support a harness. "We retired her and now she runs
with the others in the pasture and has a regular life,"
he says with pride.
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