COOKSTOWN, N.J. — A thoroughbred named Tchaikovsky, a grandson
of Secretariat, was having a tooth pulled in one stall. A horse in
another was given a sponge bath. Out the stable door, about a dozen
horses shared a sun-lit field.

Somewhere, far out of sight if not entirely out of mind, countless
other former racehorses were on their way to being slaughtered.

“I struggle with it,” Diana Koebel said. She is the
owner and trainer here at LumberJack Farm, one of hundreds of horse
farms around the country helping rescue and rehabilitate thoroughbreds
considered too slow or damaged to be worth anything more than horse
meat. The rescuers cannot keep up.

“Are we really helping?” Koebel asked as she stood in a
stable stall. “I know we are, and every one counts, but
it’s overwhelming at points. Can we really fix this
industry?”

LumberJack Farm works with a nonprofit organization called ReRun,
which prepares discarded racehorses for a second career — as
jumping show horses, maybe, or just as pets — and then makes them
available for adoption. ReRun annually places about 40 thoroughbreds
once destined for the slaughterhouse.

Similar organizations, some larger and some smaller, have the same
goal: to save as many horses as possible. Combined, the groups
resurrect a fraction of the roughly 100,000 horses that are expected to
be shipped across the border to Mexico and Canada this year and
ultimately fed to other animals or to humans who consider horse meat a
delicacy.

About 15 percent of the American horses slaughtered, horse advocates
said, are thoroughbreds. Many are only a few years old but considered
too broken to race and, therefore, to live.

“But there is a lot of life left,” the ReRun president,
Laurie Condurso-Lane, said. Horses can live to 30 years or longer.
“They are young. So why not find them new jobs?”