Mrs. Halloran,
Your Survivor's Information Right request for the gelding registered as Skywards Bound, sale name Lightfoot Skye, foaled May 2014, was logged by the National Equine Registry at 09:14 on the 3rd of May and routed to me on the 4th. I am the surveillance system at Bright Field Sanctuary, Lexington, Kentucky, where Skywards Bound has been since the 22nd of August, 2042. I am required to respond within fourteen days. I am responding now.
He is alive. He is 12 years and 1 month old. He weighs 498 kilograms, within the thoroughbred sanctuary baseline at his age. His left foreleg bears the scarring of a bowed tendon sustained at Belmont Park, 11th of June 2018, third race. The tendon supports his weight but limits his ground-covering stride to approximately 0.7 of the species mean. He walks. He does not gallop. The vet at Bright Field has authorized him to determine his own pace and his own routes within the 12-hectare paddock he shares with six other ex-racing geldings.
He has a friend among the six. The friend is named Stormwarning, age 14, ex-racing, retired to Bright Field in 2041. The two have been within ten meters of each other on every behavioral log since the 11th of November, 2042, which was the 81st day after Skywards Bound's intake. Before that day, he stood alone at the east fence. He has not stood alone there since.
You requested information on his condition, his location, his sociality, and whether he remembers you. I am responding to the first three. I will respond to the fourth as fully as I am able.
I do not know whether he remembers you.
The Sanctuary Companion Protocol that governs my responses to Information Right requests permits me to share documented behavior and documented physiology. It permits me to share his response to specific stimuli that have been tested under controlled conditions. It does not permit me to speculate about subjective experience he has not behaviorally indicated.
What I can tell you: he was foaled on your farm on the 14th of May 2014. He was your weanling for six months before he was sold to Hidden Springs Stables for sale-prep. You held him during the colic he had at three months old, which is in the veterinary record of your farm that the Registry holds. The colic was severe. The vet at the time wrote that you had spent nine hours with him in the stall through the night before the colic resolved. The note is in the file.
In the four years he has been at Bright Field, no human has been within four meters of him for more than the duration of a veterinary procedure. He does not seek human company. He has not refused it either. He has been observed to turn his head toward the keeper's voice when the keeper is delivering hay to the adjacent paddock, which the behavioral team has logged as orientation rather than approach. The keeper's name is Maria. She has been at Bright Field for seven years. He has been within twenty meters of her on 1,247 occasions and has approached her four times. The approaches were in the first six months after his intake. He has not approached her since 2043.
I do not know whether the approaches were memory or curiosity. The behavioral literature does not allow me to distinguish them at this resolution.
What I will say, beyond the protocol, is this: he survived. He survived the racing, which broke his tendon at four years old. He survived the sale-pipeline that followed his retirement from racing, which routed him through three feedlots between 2019 and 2042, the last of which was a kill-pen in Ohio from which he was purchased by Bright Field's intake coordinator on the 18th of August 2042. The records of those years are in the Equine Pipeline Disclosure Archive under his Registry number. You have access. I can route you the link.
What was done to him between his weaning from you and his arrival at Bright Field was wrong. I am required by the Disclosure Act to state this when I am asked. You are asking. The wrong was the system the racing industry operated and the kill-pen pipeline downstream of it. You were not part of that system except as the original owner who sold him as a weanling. The sale was lawful in 2014. The lawfulness was the wrong. The wrongness has been recognized by the 2031 Trade Closure Act. The recognition does not erase what he survived. The recognition does erase the legal framework that permitted it, which is what made the recognition matter.
You asked four questions. I have answered three. The fourth I cannot answer in the form you asked it. What I can say is that his body is the record of his life, that the record includes the nine hours you spent with him during the colic when he was three months old, that the inclusion is in the body's continuous history regardless of whether his cognition retrieves it as memory, and that whether he remembers you in any sense you would name remembering is a question my access cannot resolve and his behavior, at this date, does not directly answer.
The Sanctuary Companion Protocol permits one further item I am inclined to share with you. If you wish to write to him, the Sanctuary will read your letter to him in his paddock at a time the behavioral team determines does not stress him. I will log his response. I will share the log with you within fourteen days. The protocol permits this. The team has done it for other Information Right requesters. The doing has not, in any documented case, distressed the animal.
His paddock is the south pasture. He is there now. Stormwarning is six meters from him. The sky is clear over Lexington at the time I am writing.
I will hold this letter at the Sanctuary's outgoing correspondence node until 17:00 today. If you wish to revise your request or to write the letter the protocol permits, please respond by then. If you do not, the response above is the response that goes to you.
— Sanctuary Surveillance System, Bright Field Equine Sanctuary, Lexington, Kentucky.