Criminal - The Big Lick

Episode Date: October 6, 2017

The Tennessee Walking Horse has a natural gait that's famously smooth. And, if trained in a certain way, it can perform a walk that's even more spectacular, called the Big Lick. But, there's a secret behind how, exactly, these horses are trained to do the crowd-pleasing step they're celebrated for; it’s called “soring” and it’s been outlawed since the 1970’s. Still, some horse trainers still use the practice today in order to compete in the Big Lick.  When Marty Irby, president of the Tennessee Walking Horse Breeders’ and Exhibitors’ Association, spoke out against soring, he lost everything: business partners, his father, even his wife.  Thanks to Mary Helen Montgomery for the story. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.  Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Botox Cosmetic, Adabotulinum Toxin A, FDA approved for over 20 years. So, talk to your specialist to see if Botox Cosmetic is right for you. For full prescribing information, including boxed warning, visit BotoxCosmetic.com or call 877-351-0300. Remember to ask for Botox Cosmetic by name. To see for yourself and learn more, visit BotoxCosmetic.com. That's BotoxCosmetic.com. Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Each month, Apple Podcasts highlights one series

worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey

involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. There once was a horse, a black stallion named Carbon Copy.

Carbon Copy was a perfect model of the Tennessee walking horse. He knew voice commands and would respond to a whistle, so people say he could take himself around a ring to show off without anyone on his back. Carbon Coppy was the winner of the stallion class of 1964, defeating 44 other top stallions. He continued to beat every other horse around and became the world champion. That same year, George Lee Lennox of Memphis, Tennessee, purchased carbon copy. And then, George Lee Lennox was found dead. They found his body slumped over in his gold Cadillac.

The car was full of blood. He'd been shot in the head two times. A man came forward and confessed that he'd been paid $15,000 to kill George Lee Lennox, along with two accomplices. The shooters identified themselves as members of the so-called Dixie Mafia, and it was widely speculated that the reason the Dixie Mafia wanted George Lee Lennox dead was because George Lee Lennox had a problem with Tennessee walking horse tradition. Almost 50 years later, there are still those that have trouble with the way Tennessee walking horses are shown. And in particular, one practice everyone denies. Today, contributor Mary Helen Montgomery tells us about an open secret that's torn families apart and sent people into hiding. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Shelbyville, Tennessee is known as the walking horse capital of the world.

The Tennessee walking horse is so central to the town's identity that there's a picture of one on the city seal. On my way into town, I saw a stop sign that said, whoa, instead of stop, as in the way you tell a horse to stop when you're riding. Each summer, the week before Labor Day, there's a big competition just for Tennessee walking horses. It's called the Tennessee Walking Horse National Celebration,

or just the celebration. They've been doing it since 1939. It's such a big event that all the schools in the county are canceled for the whole week so everyone can get ready for the show. I went to the celebration with a woman who asked us not to use her name or to record her voice because she's worried about her safety. She's been in this world for a long time and says not everyone gets along as well as they used to. She parked her car close to the arena, under a light, because she says she's been followed at horse shows before.

She thought my microphone would draw too much attention, so I just brought a small recorder in. Back to a flat horse. The celebration is not just a single event. It's an 11-day experience. Tennessee walking horse owners arrive from all over the country and camp in their trailers. I met one woman who had been coming since the first celebration in 1939. Her family doesn't even know much about horses. They just love to be here. For a lot of kids who grew up in this part of the country, the celebration was as good as Christmas. My entire life has revolved around horses,

and specifically Tennessee walking horses. My family put me on the horse in the saddle with double-sided tape on the saddle, rubber bands around the stirrups, and loop reins, so that was basically stuck there. This is Marty Irby. His dad is a Tennessee walking horse trainer. So he's been going to the celebration his whole life. It's one of my earliest memories, probably the most vivid memory from my childhood. I would have just turned five years old in 1984, standing in the middle of the arena of the Tennessee Walking Horse National Celebration. I remember standing there and looking around at the stadium of 30,000 people or whatever the number was somewhere about like that then, and just thinking that how amazing that was

and that that's what I wanted. I wanted to win that. I wanted to be that person from, I guess, sort of seeing that stardom aspect of it at an early age. But the real stars of the celebration aren't the riders. They're the horses. All those people descend on Shelbyville every year to see something only the Tennessee walking horse does. It's called the Big Lick. If you've never seen the Big Lick, you've never seen a horse walk anything like this. Their whole bodies are at an angle, with their hind legs squatted toward the ground and their front legs bounding forward in huge arcs, their hooves almost touching their heads. It's almost like watching a cartoon horse prance.

Marty spent his childhood helping his dad take care of big, lit horses in the stables, talking to them, loving them. His favorites were named Carbon Princess, Mark's Nut and Honey, Pride's Ringleader. Another horse named High Tone's Clown. So I could go on. There were many of them. And they were your best friends. Yeah, they were. They really were. He grew up in South Alabama and describes his childhood as a normal mom and dad happy family thing. Then sort of out of the blue, one day my father actually left us. You have to picture 1985 in South Alabama, and he left our family for another man.

The kids at school found out and started bullying Marty. I used to have to run from school when I left so the kids wouldn't beat me up because of my dad and that sort of thing. So I knew I lived every day to go to the barn in the afternoon to sort of get away from everything else and talk to the horses. And I guess I just sort of felt like they understood me. The barn was also the only place that Marty would get to spend time with his father. And then one day, his dad showed him how trainers got their horses to do the big lick. Trainers always attach big, heavy shoes to encourage the horse to lift its legs high. But there's a technique trainers use behind the scenes to get horses to exaggerate their gait even more.

It's called soaring. Soaring is when a trainer puts caustic substances like mustard oil, kerosene, or croton oil onto the horse's front ankles and feet. They wrap them in plastic and let the chemicals bake into the skin. The horse's flesh burns until it's extremely sensitive. Then the trainer puts a chain around each front ankle, like a bracelet. Each time the chain hits the sore leg, the horse

throws their leg in the air in sort of a way to get away from the pain. So it'd be like if you were walking over hot coals and stepping really high or something like that, or you were walking across, think of it as walking across black, hot asphalt barefooted. You would want to run really quick or step really high, and you wouldn't want to just put your foot on the ground. So that's what each of these things achieves, and the more that they seem to add to it, the higher that they step. Marty's dad taught him how to soar on Hightone's Clown, one of Marty's favorite horses. Yeah, I remember the horse had white feet, which is really interesting because white-footed horses tend to show irritation much more. They have red skin or pink skin underneath. And so he'd use kerosene and Gojo.

Gojo is that gritty industrial hand cleaner. Why the kerosene and Gojo? Like you put kerosene on first and then Gojo? No, different things at different times. It's a degree of soaring. So kerosene would cause a horse to be more sore than the gojo. So I guess they have this method of, they call it reminding the horse. They're sort of waking him up.

So the kerosene is stronger. So on like the first of the week, you would put the kerosene on the horse's foot. And as the week progressed, you would sort of dial it down to putting gojo, which is less of an irritant, still an irritant. You'd want to dial it down because before each show, horses are checked for signs of soaring, the way athletes have to pass drug tests. Sometimes the inspections are performed by the USDA, sometimes by private contractors. An inspector will touch a horse's legs with pressure to see if it jerks or winces in pain. Trainers have been known to teach a sword horse to pass inspection by beating it if it flinches.

Over time, the horse learns not to react to pain, and the Tennessee walking horse, which is known for its docile personality, takes it. If you're caught soaring, you can be fined thousands of dollars and even go to prison. Soaring's been illegal since 1970 when Congress passed the Horse Protection Act. The Horse Protection Act says two things, that soaring is cruel and inhumane, and also that it's just not fair. When it comes to the big lick, a sword horse has the advantage. He was always worried about the horse's white feet going into inspection and the pink skin and so he taught me how to use desitin which is I don't know if they still have that

it's like a diaper rash cream a white cream and so after the horse had been stored and gone all this then you'd have to put the desitin on the horse's feet to take away the pink and the redness and to make him be able to pass through inspection. Marty would apologize to the horses, petting them and telling them it was just the way it had to be. He was 13 years old. Sometimes you hurt the people you love most. In my case, it just happened to be horses, not people. Do you think any part of it had to do with your relationship with your father of how he was kind of gone and then he was back and that was something you could do to make him proud? Yeah, I would definitely say so.

You know, anyone probably seeks their father's approval. But, you know, he had sort of left for a while and reentered the picture. So that was the only time that I spent with my father was actually soaring horses and riding sword horses. By the time he was in his early 20s, Marty was competing, and he says doing really well. He had a horse named FDR he thought was good enough to win a world championship. So he sent FDR to Tennessee for training,

the thing to do if you're serious about winning. In Tennessee, the trainers used soaring methods that Marty had never seen in his dad's barn. I really didn't know to what degree they really do soar horses that went until that experience. The trainer in Tennessee put croton oil on FDR, an oil that's actually used on lab animals to study pain. Other trainers would do a thing called pressure shoeing, where they put half a golf ball or hardened putty between a horse's foot and shoe to make it hurt when the horse put its foot down. The Croton oil worked. Marty and FDR won the world championship at the celebration in 2003.

That's not quite a world grand championship, the very top prize at the celebration, but it's close. At this point, Marty had moved to Tennessee and fully immersed himself in the walking horse world. He didn't exclusively ride big lick horses. At this point, Marty had moved to Tennessee and fully immersed himself in the walking horse world. He didn't exclusively ride big lick horses. He also rode flat-shod horses, walking horses without the big shoes and chains that hadn't been soared. And at the 2006 celebration, Marty won his division on a flat-shod horse.

2006 is actually a year that the walking horse community doesn't like to talk about. For the first time in the 68 years of the celebration, the final and biggest event was canceled because almost every horse was disqualified after investigators found signs of abuse. A crowd assembled and demanded that the disqualified horses be allowed to show. The police were called. The New York Times describes an angry standoff between investigators and trainers. Trainers complained that the inspection process was subjective and, quote, suffocating a longstanding tradition. This didn't stop the big lick. The next year was back to business as usual. Marty kept winning a lot of big titles.

And by 2011, he was the president of the main organization for the Tennessee Walking Horses, the Tennessee Walking Horse Breeders and Exhibitors Association. I basically grew up with the Tennessee Walking Horse. This is Ashley Foreman. She remembers the day she met Marty. We were at a horse barn, and he had a padded horse in training. You know, I was just standing on the side and he just comes up and starts talking. And, you know, I was like, oh, he's very interesting. Well, 19 days later, we get married in Panama City. We had big dreams. You know, we were going to open a barn together and

we shared everything together. The love for the walking horses, the passion, the drive, it basically all revolved around the Tennessee walking horse. He even bought her two horses, a big lick horse and a flat shot horse. You know, when he and I got married, my mom was like, you know, you finally found what you were searching for. You found a guy who loves the walking horses as much as you do. And I said, I know, like, this is perfect. And the smile on his face, you know, it said it all. Like, it was perfect.

And then it just, it got crazy. Ashley didn't know it, but Marty had been secretly sharing information about soaring with investigators at the USDA and the Humane Society for years. He was having a crisis of conscience. The big lick, this thing he'd been part of since he was a kid, was getting a lot of bad press. And now there's proof of what some trainers are doing behind the scenes in Tennessee's beautiful horse country, down this gravel road, caught on tape in this barn. An undercover video was released on Nightline showing a man hitting a horse with a baton. The horse is tied up and you can hear the clanking of its restraints as it leaps up.

The report goes on to show trainers in the barn putting chemicals and chains on a horse's legs. The horses on the video appear to be in such great pain, they often refuse to get up and are whipped by the stable hands. In other scenes, McConnell and his stable hands use sticks and cattle prods in what the Humane Society says is stewarding, teaching the horse to stay still when inspectors test for sensitivity to pain. I actually happened to be, when it came out, in Wemding, Germany, judging a walking horse show where all of the horses, they don't allow any of this. And they don't even clip the horse's whiskers in Germany. They would never allow stacks or chains on their feet, soaring or anything like

that. So I sort of saw the world's reaction while being in a foreign country. And, you know, my cell phone was going crazy. And, you know, I didn't even know this expose was coming out. I had no clue. They didn't tell me or anything. When that video came out with the McConnell, it's not right. That's nowhere near what how big lick training barn should be. Ashley found the Nightline video horrible, but she says it's not at all representative of the big lick she loves. Horse shows would be gone if people still soared because of all of the things that we have to go through to get into a show.

I mean, get swabbed, get checked. It's a hard process. I honestly think that if it still went on, that there would be more people in trouble than what there is. She says there are lots of ways to train for the big lick that don't involve soaring, and that she would never do anything to hurt her horses? They're like my kids. You know, I have a little boy and I would place my animals right there with him. You know, if they're hurt, I'm hurt. If they're sick, I'm sick. You know, it's something that you don't want your animal to go through. Subtle results, still you, but with fewer lines. Botox Cosmetic

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Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Each month, Apple Podcasts highlights one series worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home.

His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. In April of 2013, the same month Marty and Ashley got married, a new piece of legislation was introduced in Congress. The Prevent All Soaring Tactics Act, or PAST Act for short.

It would increase penalties and oversight and also expand the Horse Protection Act, tackling not just soaring, but making it illegal to exhibit a horse if any device or material had been used to, quote, artificially alter a horse's gait. In all likelihood, the PAST Act, if it got through, would end the Big Lick forever. And Marty decided it was time to take a public stand and support it. The thing that I had to get to,

I would have probably done all of this sooner when I was president, but I knew that the day that it happened, that my world was going to collapse. I knew that my business was going under. I knew that the day that it happened, that my world was going to collapse. I knew that my business was going under. I knew that my family, I knew how they would react. I didn't know to the degree they would react. The Walking Horse Association needed to vote whether to support the PAST Act.

The association's support would be symbolic, and it would send a loud message. Even though so much was at stake, Marty stood up before the board and explained why he had changed his mind. It was almost like the weight of the world was off my shoulders, and all this years of sort of baggage and secrecy and all these things that have to do with soaring. And, I mean, there are just certain times in life when they're a defining moment,

and that was a defining moment in my life. Marty's father stopped speaking to him, and Ashley felt betrayed by the way he had voted. It was insane. I did try for a little bit to be supportive, but at the end of the day, you know, big licks are what I love. And we were basically against each other. No one would do business with me anymore. You know, my business partners were extremely mad at me.

You know, I basically said, you know, it's either your marriage and me or, you know, support the horses like we always have. Or you're somebody that I don't know. And that's why we got divorced. Having little left to lose, that summer Marty agreed to do an interview with The Tennessean, Nashville's daily newspaper. He talked about why soaring needed to end. The story came out on the front page, above the fold. Now people knew far and wide where he stood. He started getting letters of support from all over the country.

But he also started getting threats. People would call him on block numbers, threatening to attack him, saying things like they wanted to string him up for not keeping his mouth shut. He felt unsafe at home and went to hideout at a friend's house. She hid me out for about six weeks, I guess you would say. She lives in a place that's about like Fort Knox. She'd been an anti-soaring advocate for like 30 years. She was one of the main leaders of the anti-soaring movement.

The hideout was a huge solid brick house surrounded by water on one side and a giant iron fence on the other. The woman helping him had stocked plenty of guns and ammunition just in case they needed to defend themselves. While he was holed up, he reached out to the congressman who wrote the past act, Ed Whitfield, a Republican from Kentucky. Whitfield asked Marty to come testify at a congressional hearing in D.C., and Marty agreed. After he testified, he got even more death threats from people back in Tennessee, people he'd grown up with. I, at this point, have lost everything, family, money, had to file bankruptcy, lost my business, pretty much just had, you know, two nickels to rub together. And we were welcomed by the congressman during that time to come stay at his house and

stayed at his home in Washington, D.C. And during that time, a job came open from the congressman in his office. So he said, well, you're here. You don't have anything. You've had all these death threats as a result of testifying, all this stuff. He said, why don't you just stay here? Marty took that job with Congressman Whitfield, working with farmers and agricultural groups. Today, Marty works for the Humane Society in Washington, D.C. He works in equine protection, trying to stop the soaring of walking horses and doping in racehorses.

The PAST Act still hasn't become a law, but Marty says he's working on it. After so many conversations about the Big Lick, I was so curious to see it for myself at the celebration. When I called ahead to see if it would be difficult for me to get a ticket, the woman in the box office laughed at me. The arena seats 30,000 people, but when I went, there were probably just a couple thousand people in the stands. My guide, the woman who asked to be anonymous, explained what we were looking at. I felt like we were undercover, watching over our shoulders and talking in muffled voices.

Some of their butts are kind of swaying back and forth, and some of them look like their legs are just going in every direction. The woman I'm with says that you can tell which one's going to win if it looks the most uncomfortable and unnatural, and if it looks like it's working the hardest. She told me that the horses that'll score the highest are the ones with the most exaggerated, oversized steps. This year's winner, the world grand champion, was a horse named Jen's Black Maverick. His trainer was Bill Calloway. I was born into it, Calloway told a local paper. I was born and raised in the horse business.

Just after he won, some news came out. Documents show trainer Bill Callaway violated the Federal Horse Protection Act. Hours after winning the championship Saturday, the USDA suspended Callaway for eight months and fined him. Callaway was actually caught soaring his horses months before the celebration. But for some reason, he was allowed to compete anyway. His suspension didn't begin until after he'd won the championship. He will be able to compete again next spring. Thank you. is Matilde Erfolino. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com.

We're on Facebook and Twitter at Criminal Show. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. We're a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collection of the best podcasts around. Radiotopia from PRX is supported by the Knight Foundation, and special thanks to AdCirc for providing their ad-serving platform to Radiotopia. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

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