By Gregory B. Hladky
The Hartford Courant
EAST LYME — They arrive at the state’s Niantic rehabilitation farm often looking like walking skeletons: rescued horses, goats, cows, and sheep that have been neglected, starved, beaten or abandoned by their owners.
A few weeks of decent food, water, shelter and veterinary care can produce stunning changes in these victims of animal abuse seized by the state.
“It’s awesome to see the transformations that go on here,” said Dr. Lara Gardner, the farm’s regular vet for eight years.
What is far less obvious is how nursing these animals back to health can change the inmates assigned to help out at the five-acre “Second Chance” farm within the state’s Niantic prison complex.
“We’ve had inmates due to get out who didn’t want to leave the animals,” said Ray Connors, a supervisor with the state’s animal control unit who has been involved with the rehabilitation farm since it opened in 2003.
Connors is a 31-year veteran with the state Department of Agriculture. A heavy-set man with a graying mustache, Connors has witnessed first-hand what helping abused animals can mean to the inmates.
One prisoner, Connors recalled, was a repeat offender who was assigned to help with two miniature horses the state had seized from their owner. “He had drug issues,” said Connors, “and he knew the horses could keep him out of trouble.”
The inmate had his wife buy the little horses when they came up at auction.
“He hasn’t been back since,” Connors added.
More than 300 animals seized in state anti-cruelty cases have passed through the Niantic large animal facility. Smaller animals such as cats and dogs taken by the state are turned over to local humane officials or area rehabilitation programs, state officials said.
One recent summer day, the farm’s population included 18 horses, two sheep, a donkey and 36 goats.
Those goats came from a herd of 74 seized from the Butterfield Farm in Cornwall in January. The owners, who used the goat milk to make cheese, were charged with animal cruelty and immediately gave up responsibility of the animals to the state.
Some carried disease, others were pregnant, and the cost of caring for them all triggered debate at the General Assembly. Some lawmakers questioned why all of the diseased goats weren’t immediately killed, which is what commercial farmers would have done.
But state officials argued that victims of animal cruelty were in a different category and should be treated differently than normal farm animals. Eventually, many of the healthy goats were sold at auction, 12 others were placed with a private rescue operation, and the kids born at the Niantic farm are being offered to 4-H and Future Farmers of America groups.
About half of the rescued farm animals that spend time at Niantic have been sold to carefully vetted buyers through an annual spring auction at UConn. Some horses have sold for as little as $200, while the most expensive graduates of the Niantic farm went for $3,200.
The rest, usually very old or unsound creatures unlikely to be purchased, have been adopted by people willing to provide them homes.
One of the adopted horses, called Blackie by his Connecticut owner, is about to become a movie star. He was adopted by a documentary film-maker from New Jersey named Kelly Colbert.
Blackie turned out to have been Montana born, a champion barrel racer called “Midnight” who came to Connecticut after being retired and adopted at age 14. The state seized the horse in 2011 after seeing a video of him searching for food in a paddock on his owner’s Easton farm, emaciated and in distress.
Colbert saw an item about Blackie on Facebook, ended up adopting him, and then discovering his remarkable history. She decided to do a film about the horse, about “his tenacity and toughness,” as well as his recovery at the state farm, which she plans to submit to the Sundance Film Festival.
“The work they do there [at the Niantic rehab farm] is remarkable,” Colbert said in a recent telephone interview. She praised the state animal control officers involved for their “compassion and sensitivity. ... They bring a very human approach to what they do.”
Blackie, by the way, is doing well at a show barn in New Jersey. He gets chiropractic care and professional massages, and has recovered enough for Colbert to now “ride him about six times a year.”
Connors said it is “very, very rare” that animals that make it to the Niantic farm end up being euthanized. He said fewer than five animals have been put down due to incurable disease or injuries.
All the animals that come to Niantic are allowed to stay until they are auctioned or adopted. Some have been around the farm for as long as seven years.
The state spends about $100,000 a year to house and care for abused animals at the Niantic farm. Proceeds from the auctions are also funneled back into the farm’s account to help pay for veterinary care, feed, electricity and all the other expenses of running the facility.
Donations to the farm’s fund have also been important, as have several substantial grants from private foundations. The John T. and Jane A. Wiederhold Foundation, a Torrington-based non-profit, recently gave $54,000 that state officials said is being used to replace corral fencing and for other general improvements at the farm.
Over the past three fiscal years, the animal farm account has received more than $56,000 in donations and proceeds from animal auctions, according to agriculture department officials.
Connors said the idea that the rehab farm could help both animals and inmates has been key from the start. “That was the plan. ... Kind of a win-win program — good for the animals, good for inmates,” he said. “Animal therapy is a fantastic thing. It’s all kind of connected.”
For some inmates, working on the farm is simply a way to get out from behind the razor-wire-topped fences and get through their sentences with a little fresh air and sunshine. But it’s clear to corrections officials that the animal rehab program can mean more than that.
“I’ve seen an inmate sitting on the ground with eight goats on top of him and a smile on his face,” said Damian Doran, a state corrections counselor who oversees prisoners working at the rehabilitation facility. “It definitely has a positive impact on the offenders who are involved.”
Only male inmates from the state’s Niantic Annex facility are allowed to work at the rehab farm, even though there are lots of women prisoners at the York Correctional Institute at the Niantic site who would probably love to help out. Doran said the state doesn’t allow male and female inmates to work together, and that the heavy manual labor involved on the farm was the reason for the decision to use male prisoners.
Billy is a 26-year-old inmate from Norwich who has been working with the animals for less than a month. (State correction officials, citing confidentiality policies, allowed The Courant to interview and photograph inmates assigned to the farm on the condition their last names were not used and their faces were not shown in photographs.)
“I got a year, and I’ve been in [prison] for about six months,” Billy said while doing chores at the rehab facility barn one recent summer morning.
“I grew up on a farm, a dairy farm,” he said in trying to explain why he was glad to be there. “It’s the animals. ... They all act differently and stuff. They’ve got different personalities.”
Billy said working on the farm is “something to make the time go by.” If he wasn’t one of the three inmates assigned to the farm, Billy said he would definitely try one of the other work programs. “But this is the best setup,” he added.
Cheyenne and Chinook would definitely agree. They are two mustangs seized by the state in an animal abuse case about a year ago from a farm in Redding.
The horses were originally adopted by Lisa Lind-Larson in 2005 under the federal Bureau of Land Management’s program to reduce wild horse herds on Western grazing lands.
By July 2014, state officials found the animals to be so emaciated from lack of food that every rib was showing, their skin barely covering their spines and hips, according to an arrest warrant application. Chinook and Cheyenne were in “deplorable conditions,” their stalls filled with deep layers of wet manure, their buckets containing dirty water, their paddock filled with rocks and weeds.
One of the horses had a bad skin condition, both were plagued by biting flies, and one of the animal’s legs was bleeding from insect bites. Both were in immediate need of dental and veterinary care, according to state documents.
Lind-Larson, 75, was arrested on animal abuse charges, which she is still fighting in court. In an affidavit, Lind-Larson claimed the horses’ malnutrition was the result of a property dispute and an “illegal obstruction” that prevented her from bringing decent food to her stable.
A year later, Chinook and Cheyenne were playfully chasing each other around their rehabilitation farm paddock. Their coats were glossy, and their eyes bright.
“You would never know they were the same horses,” said Connors.
It’s not only the inmates who grow attached to some of the creatures that end up at the state’s “Second Chance” farm.
One state animal control officer adopted two horses that she got to know at the facility. Connors himself fell in love with an abused Arabian named Isis (who was named for the ancient Egyptian goddess, not the Mideast terrorist group), an elderly Arabian who spent almost seven years at the farm after being rescued.
“If I could have convinced my wife, Isis would have come home with me,” Connors said with a laugh.