Donna Ewing has been threatened by sleazy stable owners and sadistic trainers. She has gone toe-to-toe with psychopathic horse dealers. She has been picketed, cursed and spat at. Someone once threw blood on her front door.
Dressed in blue jeans and cupping a cigarette, her hair buffeted by a country breeze blowing across a grassy field, Ewing has more than her share of serrated memories. All around her are animals that have survived agonies. She is 63 now, a farmhand, horse whisperer, feeder of lambs, swatter of pigs and maybe one of the gutsiest women around.
In 28 years–18 as a volunteer–of running a 24-hour-a-day rescue operation for horses and other hooved animals, she has taken on the tough, sometimes seedy world of horses and stable owners with no trace of fear or compromise. Her Hooved Animal Humane Society in northwest suburban Woodstock not only has saved countless horses from dying of starvation or abuse, but also stands out as a model of animal welfare agencies. It has helped rewrite Illinois’ hooved-animal protection laws–in essence, providing the animals with status similar to abused children–and formed close alliances with state agencies in applying them. It has educated and helped create similar organizations in dozens of other states. It has challenged what it sees as ongoing abuses such as drugging and inhumane training methods all over the nation.
In all, Donna Ewing is one of the most visible animal welfare figures in Illinois, and some say she’s the most powerful.
The day after last Christmas, for example, she blitzed television screens with the rescue of 21 starving Morgan horses from a farm near Crystal Lake. Having given the owners a required 48-hour notice that impoundment was imminent if conditions were not improved, Ewing had the legal right to remove the animals. Cameras rolled as she and 12 volunteers, including her daughter Ronda, led one emaciated animal after another out of a fetid barn and into the society’s rescue van.
“The horses were calm, listless, weak,” Ronda Ewing wrote in the society’s magazine. “There was no sign of water in the empty buckets. The horses were tied by ropes in a manure-filled aisle way, unable to walk more than a few steps.”
Said Donna Ewing: “I took one look and I said, `Oh, my God.’ It was a concentration camp. Thirteen of the horses were close to death.”
Besides food, the horses needed dental work–some had teeth so neglected that they were cutting into the horses’ mouths and tongues–hoof work and extensive veterinary attention.
“We were looking at well over $25,000 to get this herd back to health,” said Ewing. “We needed help. We had to go to the media.”
The publicity resulted in the largest response in the society’s history. An answering service was hired to take the deluge of calls. In the two days following the rescue, more than 800 people visited the organization’s 26-acre farm, and cash donations from horse lovers–from professionals to little girls with horse fever–totaled more than $100,000. It helped that the Morgans were lovely, valuable horses.
“It doesn’t make any difference to me if it’s a Morgan or a non-registered mutt horse. They’re all treated equally,” said Ewing. “But these were registered Morgan horses with bloodlines that people from all over the country were looking for. And they all would have died.” Charges were not filed against the owner, an elderly widow in poor health.
Donations were enough to cover the herd’s expenses and replenish the society’s coffers “until the next batch,” Ewing said. And there will be a next batch. Veterinarians tell the society that horse abuse in Illinois is a small fraction of what it used to be, but because caring for a horse is an expensive, year-round proposition, neglect will continue to occur.
Ewing grew up as Donna Behm, daughter of an electrician, in Appleton, Wis. But she was a farm girl to the core. She rode draft horses on her grandparents’ farm and “terrorized” her father to get her a horse of her own. He bought a small working dairy farm in nearby Black Creek instead, and Donna thrived on it. She communed with animals like a miniature Dr. Dolittle. She played with goats. She bottle-fed piglets, even taking them to her room and treating them like dolls.
But horses thrilled her. She crawled through fences and sidled up to them. She stroked them and whispered to them. Her first horse was a rescue. She was 15 when she spotted a blood bay Tennessee walker gelding among a truckload of emaciated horses headed for a dog food plant. Her father paid $40 for him and Donna fed and nursed him back to health. Named him Colie Bay.
In understanding them as she did, Ewing also saw horses as the most vulnerable of animals. They are big, powerful and fleet, but finely constructed. They have massive bodies with delicate bones. Their ankles can be thinner than a human ankle. They cannot breathe through their mouths, so if something lodges in both nostrils they will suffocate. They choke a lot. They cannot vomit, so if they are stricken with colic their intestines actually flip over and they die painful, thrashing deaths. If they panic and bolt, they are likely to pierce themselves on fence posts or any other pointed object.
More important to Ewing, horses depend on humans for their daily welfare. Neglect a horse and it develops hosts of problems. Starve a horse, particularly in winter, and it dies in four to six weeks.
That knowledge was second nature to Ewing as she grew up on the farm riding and caring for the animals. As an adult she was an avid fox hunter and owned a fine thoroughbred hunt horse. She and her husband, James Ewing, an investment counselor, lived on a 10-acre farm in rural Barrington. They had two daughters, Renee and Ronda, both of whom had Shetland ponies as children. Going out in search of a new horse for Renee in Barrington that day in 1971 changed Ewing’s world.
What she found was a herd of starving Arabian horses. Some were too weak to get off the ground; others were already dead. Her attempts to have someone step in and rescue the horses were rebuffed; local officials said they had no authority to do anything.
Ewing enlisted fellow horse owners to join her in launching the society. Her own home became the society’s office and her farm its base. She set up a network of volunteer investigators to report neglected herds. She sought out government and law enforcement officials to create hooved-animal welfare laws. She became a one-woman horse savior.
“Donna became the Joan of Arc of horses,” said Joy Meierhans, an Elburn horse lover who worked with Ewing in the society’s early years and still sits on its executive board. “She was doing what the rest of us were too chicken to do.”
Said daughter Ronda: “She had to help those horses. She is really a little girl who never outgrew her love of big, fuzzy animals, but there is a tough side to her that is motivated by that love. She has fierce feelings of injustice when animals are abused.”
And she worked for nothing. From the beginning the society has been a non-profit organization, and for years every dime of every contribution went to pay the bills and care for rescued animals.
“She found this neglected area of horses and hooved animals and she did remarkable work with it,” said Steve Miller, a former federal prosecutor who later worked with Ewing in investigating the show horse industry.
Her breakthrough success came in 1984 after two years of litigation involving a case in which the society impounded starving horses from a woman who ran a pony riding business. To demonstrate how the horses had been neglected during the winter months, Ewing took the carcass of a horse found at the stable and put it on the lawn of the Kane County courthouse. Half of the horse’s winter coat was shaved so the judge in the case, who knew nothing about horses, could see the skeletal body.
“It was one of my proudest moments,” Ewing said. “When animals have hair this long, you can’t see what’s underneath. So here came the judge and I’m saying, `Feel the horse. Feel the bones.’ “
The judge’s ruling in their favor was enhanced months later by an appellate court decision that upheld the society’s right to quickly impound the horses without due process of law. Now, state-approved inspectors could seize animals from owners after only a 48-hour notice to improve conditions.
“In other states you have to wait for a search warrant and a court order,” said Ewing. “More of these animals would have died if we had to do that. We argued the case like a child abuse case. You have to move. You can’t wait until the animals are dead.”
Few businesses with such inherent glamor have been as tainted as the horse business. And in few places is it as gruesome as the Midwest. Riding stables, horse farms, show horse competitions, the buying and selling of horseflesh–all of it for nearly half a century was dominated by a close-knit, ruthless clique of stable owners and horse dealers that bullied, scammed and even killed to get what it wanted. The godfather of this group was Silas Jayne, a garrulous psychopath and convicted rapist. Until his death in 1987, Jaynes presence permeated the horse business in the Midwest and somehow touched just about everyone in it.
Jayne and his brothers De Forest, Frank and George got their start shipping horses from California to the Midwest in the 1940s. They were rough, brawling horse traders who sold stock to genteel, monied investors or dog food processors. “A horse is worth 29 cents or whatever you can get for it,” Silas Jayne liked to say.
Yet Jayne knew horses, and had some of the best stallions in the Midwest on his farm in Elgin. He developed a wealthy clientele and was a fixture at horse shows all over the country. “People thought he was a god,” said one veteran rider.
By the 1960s, George and Silas Jayne owned competing stables and were caught up in a blood feud that ultimately escalated into murder. In 1965, 22-year-old Cheryl Lynn Rude was killed when she started George’s Cadillac and detonated a bomb planted beneath the hood. Silas was charged with conspiracy, but the charges were dropped when a key witness retracted his testimony.
In 1969 Silas was attacked in his Elgin home by a gunman. Silas was wounded but managed to shoot and kill the intruder. A year later George Jayne was shot to death by a sniper while playing bridge in his home. Silas was charged with conspiracy, convicted and imprisoned for seven years.
The Jayne style of brutality carried over to the horse business in the form of stable arson and insurance kills. In an arson scam, a stable was torched but not before good horses were removed and broken-down ringers put in their places. A horse’s identifying tattoo inside its lower lip was obliterated, sometimes burned off with a soldering iron, and the animal sold out of state. An owner with financial problems (to keep a show horse in training can cost $20,000 a year) would take out a six-figure insurance policy on an animal and then pay a horse killer to murder it. A corrupt veterinarian would declare the kill an accident.
Then there were the wealthy ladies, widows and divorcees who were lured into the horse business and fleeced by a network of suave, duplicitous horse dealers, trainers and veterinarians who sold them horses for hundreds of thousands of dollars more than they were worth. One of the most brazen of these was Richard Bailey, a velour-tongued, silver-haired lothario who advertised his charms in personal ads aimed at attracting well-heeled prey, one of whom was candy heiress Helen Vorhees Brach.
Beginning in 1994, however, the whole sleazy show was exposed, and the horse scammers’ world unraveled. Horse killer Tommy Burns, who had been a Silas Jayne stable rat, was arrested and became a government witness against dozens of corrupt horse owners, trainers and veterinarians. Richard Bailey was charged with conspiring to have Brach killed.
And in the most startling indictment of all, Kenneth Hansen, a longtime stable operative and Jayne underling who had been previously charged with arson and murder, was convicted of the notorious 1955 murders of Bobby Peterson and brothers John and Anton Schuessler, three Chicago boys whose nude bodies were found in a ditch. Hansen had killed the boys, prosecutors charged, in a nearby stable owned by Silas Jayne.
It was into this world that Donna Ewing thrust herself when she became a horse rescuer.
She had known the Jaynes for years, even bought horses from them. Though she respected Silas as a horseman, she was wary of him. “If Si Jayne liked your horse and gave you an offer,” she said, “you better let him have it or he’d get it somehow–even if he had to kill it.”
She knew of Richard Bailey and heard all the rumors about him and Helen Brach. In fact, Ewing rues the memory of a particular encounter she had with Bailey while he was in the company of Brach. His antennae perked up when he saw Ewing, who was alone and, perhaps, available for future plucking.
“He said something like, `You are such a beautiful woman. Maybe we can get together sometime,’ ” Ewing remembers.
To which Ewing, who knew Bailey for the oily operator that he was, answered that she was married and intensely uninterested and that Bailey should slither back to his date.
Unfortunately, Bailey did that and then some, scamming the widow Brach out of hundreds of thousands of dollars and, a court decided, ultimately playing a role in her 1977 disappearance and apparent murder. He is now serving a 30-year prison sentence.
Ewing also confronted the slick ways of the small world of stable owners. She saw how sick and unprofitable horses were mistreated or killed, their carcasses illegally buried on the premises, how competitors were hounded and threatened, how stables suddenly went up in flames with animals still inside.
Among the worst operators was Ken Hansen.
“He had emaciated, sick horses. Horses with open sores,” she said. “When we went out there, he laughed at us, scoffed at us. He knew he had a right to a warning and he’d say, `Which horse do you want me to kill?’ We’d come back the next day, and the sick horses would be gone.”
But Ewing kept coming back. Her investigators pursued Hansen and others like him despite thinly veiled threats and intimidation.
“The show horse industry in Illinois was a throwback to the Jesse James days,” said former prosecutor Miller. “These people were utterly lawless for decades. But Donna was fearless. Was there danger involved? Someone would not be paranoid to think that their life was in danger by challenging these people.”
Ewing shrugs off the concern.
“I’ve been threatened. Nothing that worried me,” she said. “I think, really, I was worried more that they’d do something to my horses. I’ve had people swing at me and hit me with chains. But I refuse to be backed down by bullies and brutal people. I feel I have a guardian angel. I really do. If God doesn’t want me to do this, I’ll quit.
“As far as the corrupt stable owners are concerned, I’d love to take credit for putting them out of business. But it was really a matter of time, given the way they were operating. A lot of them were nothing but a cover for the drug world. And some of the bad ones are not out of business yet. But they wouldn’t accomplish anything by getting rid of me. Helen Brach had a lot more on them than I did.”
And while she loathes the oily horse-show scammers, her concern is not their Brach-type victims, who, she insists, are still being taken today.
“I don’t care about that. If someone is dumb enough to pay $300,000 for a $5,000 horse, so be it. I think it’s sad and pathetic, but it’s their business. My whole mission in life is to make this world a better place for horses. I feel sorry for what happened to Helen, of course. But I’ll also never forgive those people (Jayne, Bailey, Hansen, et al.) for the beautiful horses they killed.”
She and her animals have 26 acres now. In 1988 the society bought 23 acres in Woodstock and finally had a home of its own. Ewing, who was divorced by then, moved into the property’s small house and worked the farm and directed the society full time. She also took her first salary, $6,000. (It is only $45,000 today.)
Horses, some of which still limp from past abuses, graze and romp, then lift their heads and canter over when she appears. If she goes through the fence, they push to get near her. In a barn up the way is a lamb named Lily that she just took in. Lily follows Ewing around as lambs are wont to do, and Ewing gets up twice a night to bottle-feed her. There are three nubian goats and a LaManchia goat, which is earless. And in the next out-building are the Vietnamese potbellied pigs. Twelve of them–the largest at 300 pounds is Bubba–who waddle and snort and move like giant leaden pillows.
“Once they’re here,” Ewing said of them, “they’re part of the family. I’ll let people adopt them, but I can’t let them be eaten. I couldn’t eat my pets.”
She won’t go so far as to say that animals cannot be eaten, however. Ewing is still a farm woman at heart. Her cause is animal welfare, not animal rights. You will not see her protesting whale incarceration in front of the Shedd Aquarium or throwing blood on fur coats in front of Neiman Marcus on “Fur Free Friday.” She will not rail against mink farms or slaughterhouses.
“I’m a common-sense horse person, not a humane-iac,” she said. “Animals are here to be companions. We have an obligation to give them a good quality of life and a good quality of death.”
That sets her apart from avid animal rights activists such as actress Robyn Douglass (“Breaking Away”), who was once a marquee member of the Hooved Animal Humane Society but has distanced herself from the group over the issue.
“I have a lot of respect for Donna. She walks a hard road,” said Douglass. “Hooved Animal is an animal welfare group. She has the backing of the state to where she can seize animals and bring about prosecution. Wouldn’t we all like to have that. That’s different from an animal rights group. She has to give the impression that there is no taint of animal rights activists in her group. I respect that. So I pulled away voluntarily. . . .
“It’s just a difference of opinion between animal welfare and animal rights. But I’m not critical of Donna at all. You have to walk in her shoes and see what she sees.”
Ewing’s current crusades are horse drugging and abuses of the Tennessee walking horse. Recently in her mailings and magazine, she lashed out at a University of Kentucky college professor for his research on the drugging of race horses, and the professor slapped a $3 million defamation suit against her and the society. The suit was dropped when Ewing’s attorneys prepared to present expert testimony to challenge the professor’s methods, according to Clifford Shapiro, an attorney for the society.
Ewing’s nationwide petition drive against what she sees as maiming and torture of Tennessee walking horses (to shortcut rigorous hours of training, some trainers get a horse to perform the exaggerated, high-stepping “Big Lick” gait by mutilating its hoof pads with acid, glass, screws or ball bearings) has brought the wrath of that multimillion-dollar business against the society. “To me,” she writes in her petition letter, “the Tennessee Walking Horse issue is personal.” Her first horse, Colie Bay, remember, was a Tennessee walker.
Her activities today are supported by a paid staff of six and a good number of volunteers. They work out of a new, $250,000 office and visitors center large enough to host educational conferences. The society puts out a glossy quarterly magazine for its 50,000 members nationwide and has a sizable treasury. Its honorary board includes such celebrities as Loretta Swit, Veronica Hamel, Dan Hampton and Timothy Bottoms.
Ewing remains at the center of the cause.
“She is a control freak. She believes that if she doesn’t do it, it won’t get done,” said Ronda. “She runs the organization from mucking out the stalls to getting up at 4 a.m. because she hears a horse stirring. But she’s not going to go on forever. The difference now is that she has a great staff and her fear of it all collapsing without her has been alleviated.”
“I’m extremely healthy and I love what I’m doing,” Donna offered, “but I’m 63.”
Which means nothing to the 6-year-old, purebred German Trachaner mare that was sidling up to her. It is a sleek, strong, lovely horse.
“You couldn’t touch this animal a few months ago,” she said, “and now she is totally trusting.”
The mare lifted her front leg and laid it in Ewing’s hand. Ewing whispered something to it. Something just between the two of them.
“I was born with it,” she said later. “It’s a curse. I was whispering to horses when I was 3 years old and I’ve never stopped.”
