Advertisement

Ontario boy, 9, saves doomed thoroughbred with his birthday money

Horse Racing - Cheltenham Festival - Cheltenham Racecourse - 10/3/15 Racehorses head towards the third fence during the 13.30 Supreme Novices Hurdle Race Reuters / Dylan Martinez Livepic EDITORIAL USE ONLY.

Last summer, Brandon Heyman, 9, vowed to save 17-year-old thoroughbred mare Karazan after learning that the former racehorse had been purchased by a meat buyer and was destined for the slaughterhouse.

The young redhead spotted the horse on a rescue website and immediately wanted to help her.

"I was looking at the NYNE (Need You Now Equine) website one night and Brandon asked about this one cute red horse on the screen,” Brandon’s mother, MJ Allen, told the Whig. “I told him the horse didn’t have any place to go and what will probably happen to it.”

“[That’s] when he said, ‘Mummy, my birthday’s coming up. Just give my birthday money to them. I don’t want the horse to die,’” Allen told Off Track Thoroughbreds.

“I did it because nobody else was going to buy her,” Brandon said of asking that his birthday money be spent on the horse. “And I saw her hair was the same, exact colour as my hair. And I wanted to save her because I love horses.”

Brandon’s mother was so impressed with the request that she, with the help of some family friends, raised the $650 required to purchase the horse from a site that offers horses a last chance at a rescue, even after being purchased by a meat buyer.

A few days later, Allen shared the good news with Brandon: not only had the horse been saved, the horse was his.

“He went nuts,” Allen said of her son’s ecstatic reaction.

A couple of weeks before his ninth birthday, Karazan was delivered to the Allen’s Kingston-area property, a small horse farm.

"When Brandon came home, Karazan was already out in the field. He took off running to where the horse was in the field and stayed with her for the next two hours,” Allen recalled.

Brandon and Karazan are now inseparable.

“She’s his best friend. He’s always out grooming her and whenever he feels down, he walks out into the field with carrots in his hand to talk to his new buddy,” Allen told Off Track Thoroughbreds. “They’re a perfect match; She was meant to be with him.”

"It’s my very first horse," Brandon told the Whig. “I clean her, wash her, groom her, but my sister feeds her; I don’t know the proper feed mix.”

Brandon hopes Karazan isn’t his last rescue:

“If I get enough money I’ll make my own farm and get tons of horses from the slaughter. And if I could, I would get mostly everything that’s in the slaughter so that they wouldn’t die,” he told CKWSTV.