LOS ANGELES, June 8, 2010--The day before election day, Ed Asner called. It was not collect, and he asked me to vote for somebody. A few minutes later, Mitt Romney called. He, too, was asking me to vote for somebody, maybe it was Ed Asner. Then Meg Whitman, who's running for governor, called. Ms. Whitman has spent more than $80 million on her campaign, much of it her own money, and I'm impressed that she makes her own phone calls. Finally, Jane Harman, my congresswoman, called. Jane has my lifetime vote, because several years ago, when the IRS was bearing down, she wrote the Long Beach office on my behalf and told them to get their act together. They wrote me a letter of apology. I had it framed, and in my will it is to be sent to Washington, to hang in the Library of Congress.

But enough about politicians. This election day I am voting for Kelly Young, who like Meg Whitman makes her own phone calls, only they are not a recording. My vote for Kelly is a vote of confidence, that she keeps her farm, the Lost & Found Horse Rescue, in business. About a thousand horses later, a thousand horses that otherwise would have been consigned to slaughterhouses, Lost & Found has its back to the wall. Kelly needs to raise about $250,000 in less than a month to keep her 18-acre place near York, Pennsylvania, going.


The French, who have sweet-sounding words for some tasteless things in life, call a slaughterhouse an abattoir. It is in France, among other countries, where horse is routinely sold, prepared and eaten. In Paris a few years ago, someone at the table looked at the menu and said (I think as a joke): "I'm torn between the cheval and the moules." I knew cheval meant horse, but then I said: "Horse or mules? They're both on the menu?"

"Moules are mussels," he said.

I once asked Patrick Biancone, a French trainer who had relocated to the U.S., about eating horsemeat. "Personally, I do not care for it," he said. "I don't have many friends who like it, either. It is not a delicacy, as you sometimes see it (called). What I know about horse is that people who eat it do so because it's cheaper than other meats."

It was a donkey that led Kelly Young into what is now her 21st year of horse rescue. She had gone to an auction to buy a show pony, but fell in love with a crippled donkey instead. Recognizing Kelly's infatuation with the donkey, its owner went up to her and said, "He's yours for 50 bucks."

Kelly was able to place the donkey at a shelter in Maryland. "I had no idea what would have happened to that poor thing if I hadn't come along," she said. This was when foreign-owned slaughterhouses were operating openly in Illinois and Texas. In 2004, the week of the Breeders' Cup at Lone Star Park, I made a tough 50-mile drive from Fort Worth, Texas, to a town called Kaufman (population 6,700). A nice woman who lived there, Mary Nash, and Paula Bacon, a schoolteacher who was also the mayor of Kaufman, had me over to Nash's house for tea. She lived a mile from Dallas Crown, a Belgian-owned slaughterhouse that killed 15,000 horses that year and exported the meat to Europe.

For weeks, Nash had been chasing a couple of vultures out of her back yard. Residents of Kaufman had been unsuccessful in closing down Dallas Crown. It was a Sunday, and I walked down the mostly empty main street of Kaufman, overcome by the smells of dead animals and urine. I drove out to Dallas Crown, on the outskirts of town, and while there was no activity there, I stood outside the fences and imagined what would be going on behind those walls the next day. Slaughterhouses at the time were knocking out horses with a captive-bolt gun that shoots a metal rod into their brain. Their throats were cut and they were skinned and cut open with saws. Their hearts were kept beating in order to pump out all of their blood.

I drove back to Fort Worth and visited the offices of a lawyer who represented Dallas Crown. "Cattle, pigs, chickens, sheep and turkeys are living creatures that humans kill and eat," he said. "So are horses. There is nothing peculiar about eating horse meat. . . "

Some of the horses that have gone through Lost & Found Farm include the stakes winners Major Mecke and Notably Frosty. They even have a horse now, Makbars Account, who paints. I've seen his work, colors put to use with paper plates, and would say he's an early impressionist. I went back and looked at some of Jackson Pollock's stuff, and can't tell the difference.

One of Makbars Account's pieces will be offered at an auction soon. But that will raise, probably, just a few hundred dollars. Kelly Young said that a column Jerry Izenberg wrote in the Newark Star-Ledger prompted donations of about $25,000. The woman who leases the farm to Kelly has cancer and needs to sell it if the $250,000 can't be found. The slaughterhouses in the U.S. have been shuttered, but there are abattoirs in Canada and Mexico that still welcome stock from American kill pens. Kelly's phone number is 717 428-9701. I'd bet that she would take a collect call from Ed Asner if he rang.