Equestrian Tea Time
Emma Jenkinson and Isabeau Solace discuss the state of the equine industry with guests.
Equestrian Tea Time
Black Horses, Dark Secrets
https://equiery.com/gentle-giants-draft-horse-rescue-takes-in-31-friesians-seized-in-vermont/
What happens when a millionaire buys 70 Friesian horses without understanding the tremendous responsibility of equine care? The results can be catastrophic, as revealed in this eye-opening conversation with Emma Jenkinson, who worked as an intern at the notorious Friesians of Majesty breeding farm in Vermont.
Emma takes us back to 2013, years before authorities began seizing horses from the property. She describes arriving in January to knee-deep snow and negative temperatures, working 12-hour days for just $300 a week – barely enough to afford groceries. The dangerous working conditions included walking valuable stallions down treacherously icy hills and managing dozens of nearly identical black horses with inadequate fencing. When horses frequently escaped their electric fence enclosures, staff scrambled to separate and return them with minimal safety measures in place.
The farm's owner, a successful businessman who sold his quarry operation to start the breeding farm as a "hobby," created an operation that quickly spiraled beyond what the staff could reasonably manage. Despite having four interns, a barn manager, two trainers, and maintenance staff, the farm struggled to properly care for its approximately 70 horses. When Emma decided to leave after a dangerous incident where multiple horses knocked her down, the owner refused to provide transportation back to Boston, leaving her to find her own way home.
The conversation broadens to examine the systemic issues in equine care regulation. Unlike other livestock industries, horse breeding lacks meaningful oversight, with no central registry tracking horse numbers or welfare. This regulatory gap becomes particularly problematic in harsh climates like Vermont, where winter conditions demand substantially more resources for proper horse care than milder regions.
Fast forward to today, and authorities have seized horses from Friesians of Majesty four separate times since 2023, with 74 horses taken by Dorset Equine Rescue alone. Despite multiple seizures and animal cruelty charges, the operation continues to struggle with adequate care. This compelling story serves as a stark warning about the consequences when ambition exceeds expertise in the world of horse bre
emmajenkinsondressage@gmail.com
https://youtube.com/@emmajenkinsondressage?si=Zt9ma9vtpMK2iZV7
Hello everybody, thank you for joining us again on this episode of Equestrian Tea Time. In this episode, myself, isabeau and my co-host, emma Jenkinson, we are going to discuss Emma's personal experience in an internship position at the famous, slash infamous Friesians of Majesty, friesians Breeding Farm in Vermont. I am going to read here at the beginning some details from a Vermont Digger article about. Let's see, june of this past year, 2025, an additional 39 horses were seized from Friesians of Majesty. This is the fourth time. Fourth time that horses have been seized from the property. This time, 39 horses were seized. The first seizure of horses was in 2023.
Speaker 1:Dorset Equine Rescue, gentle Giants and a number of other organizations participated in the seizure and in the rehabilitation of the horses. The Dorset Equine Rescue, since the first seizure, has taken a total of 74 horses off of Frisians of Majesty's hands. The reason, so what sparked our conversation today, was that the latest seizures from this past spring, 39 of the 40 horses, their seizures, were finalized, which allows the rescues that have been taking care of the horses to finally move forward with gelding the stallions, which is very important, and trying to rehome these horses. So, trying to rehome the horses, get them into permanent homes, get them moved on so that the rescues can take in and take care of more horses. Take in and take care of more of more horses.
Speaker 1:Uh, the article that I'm reading from is from vermontdiggerorg. It was an article on June 19th of 2025 of this, this year. Um, as I said, this has been an ongoing animal cruelty investigation for several years. Um, including the Fish and Wildlife Department, game Warden Service, department of Public Safety, animal Welfare Division, vermont State Police all involved, along with gentle giants in Dorset equine rescue and seizing these horses from the Frugian Majesty Farm. So there are plenty of other articles online to look them up. I will leave a link in the show notes to this particular article from the Vermont Digger and at the end we have an invitation to anybody else who might have experience with Freesians of Majesty to reach out to us about being on the podcast. But for now, here's our conversation. I hope you enjoy it. Now, this farm you had the distinct pleasure of being employed at this lovely facility. When was that?
Speaker 2:My goodness, that must have been maybe 2013.
Speaker 1:When you went there, it was as an intern or as a full-time employee.
Speaker 2:They called it an internship. Some people actually paid to be there wow I was.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was getting paid, um, I think $300 a week. Okay, um, I couldn't afford groceries on that. I didn't realize how expensive groceries were in vermont versus like we drive an hour to a little store it's way out in the boonies, whatever. Just to begin with, I was not making enough money to just buy groceries so I did not stay long. Notorious it's. I think he's still been advertising. I haven't seen in a few years, but he was looking for interns forever.
Speaker 2:There were four of us and a barn manager and then someone who was an intern as well but paid to be there, so she did not have as many chores, gotcha, but at the time there were 70 or more horses we had. There was a full barn with like 20 foals. I would work 12 hour days, um, we all got one day off a week. We would all take turns doing night check with a partner, sometimes, sometimes alone, um, and I showed up, of course, in January. So I've never experienced winter like that Knee, deep snow, negative 10. It's wet, so everything's freezing, like the barn door would freeze, close things like that, and so mostly all of that.
Speaker 2:just that was enough to get me to leave pretty quickly. I was there a few months, um, but also, uh, one of the things I was promised in that internship was lessons, and I only rode a horse two times in the two months I was there, wow, um. And just the management of the place was not like we hear of it now, but it was a little bit bad for a breeding farm. We had foals, fillies, colts, you know different herds of horses that all look exactly the same, by the way, because they're all black frasians. Yes, 70 of them, they're all, like almost all of them were kept in electric fencing and that's it, and so they would constantly be ripping through that and running loose all over the town, all over the property you know and we're trying
Speaker 2:to separate horses that look exactly the same too, and put them all back in their pens. So there was just a lot of that and I don't know. We were just all exhausted. We were. There were two trainers there and they spent all day in the arena and we would just we would do chores at 6 am and then all we did all day was tack up horses and bring them to the trainer and then bring them back down, and they had to put their barn with the arena, on top of a hill, and so you would walk, yeah, like a mile, down a an ice hill I'm not talking a hill, it was ice. Yeah, like I remember just trying to like skate up and down that hill with horses that were literally slipping in that $70,000 horses you know it was my fourth internship that didn't work out, where I was appalled and I you know.
Speaker 2:But that one's notorious nothing's being done and he continues to keep getting these horses back. Yeah, such a shame. And just, I used to to groom those horses and he was like this is a hundred thousand dollar stallion, you know. And now they're what at the draft horse rescue? Yeah, it's just ridiculous, right?
Speaker 1:and were these? Were any of these client horses that belong to other people, or these were all horses owned by the property owner?
Speaker 2:They were all owned by the property owner.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:He's not a horse guy, he was a. He's a big businessman. He was paving all the roads and owned like a quarry to pave all the roads from Massachusetts to New York, gotcha. So he got a big, big payday and then he sold his quarry to pave all the roads from Massachusetts to New York, gotcha. So he got a big, big payday and then he sold his quarry and everything and he bought a little farm to retire at and to hobby farm. Basically, this breeding farm was a hobby and it has gotten way, way, way, way out of hand, and even 10 years ago we couldn't keep staff. I left, of course, but I had two other people walk out just while I was there, so I can see how they lost all their staff. And this can happen. Because you've got that many horses, you need staff and that means you have to treat them and pay them well, and even 10 years ago that was not happening Sufficiently fed and stuff while you were there.
Speaker 1:I mean, you probably couldn't have laid eyes on all the horses on the property, you were probably only oh I sure did oh, you did okay, because they had us do a lot of work.
Speaker 2:You know, we'd start at 5 am and end when the sun went down. So I would get up and do a loop of all the pastures and physically roll hay bales into those and then I would go up to the barn and clean everything. And then I would go to the full barn and clean everything and then I would start moving horses all day and they would wow, you know. So I was probably more work than I've ever done, just because it's set up there and the ice and everything.
Speaker 1:But yeah, yeah, all the horses look great.
Speaker 2:All the foals, they were healthy, everybody seemed healthy. Nobody even had like a health issue while I was there, except for a lot of rain rot. We were battling, but we you know the barn manager there was very good. She really cared, if nothing else, she just cared about the horses. If no one was there, she would still take care of them. Maybe a few years before I got there, an instructor was living in their new barn build. That was the full barn with the breeding stuff and it actually caught on fire and burned that person. That person died in there.
Speaker 2:Oh wow oh shit the barn burned down to the ground. The family tried to see where something. I'll have to. We'll have to check up on that. But you know, things like this have happened before and and like they all signed MBAs, no one was supposed to even tell me about that when I was there. I never mentioned it, if that makes sense. So, yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if there has been any real incidents where people wanted to pursue legal action. He would have for sure gotten them paid him off and done something privately and told them to shut up because nobody will speak on this. I have reached out to other interns I was there with and nobody will even reply.
Speaker 1:So wow, this is the only place that I know. You know, horses have been repeatedly seized and this person is still chugging along. Um, he had, they had tours of people coming to view the horses. Where did you see any of those tours? Do you know anything about that?
Speaker 2:I sure did and okay, would come I. He did sleigh rides for one thing, oh wow, multiple horses and a big old sleigh, and so actually one of the worst experiences I had there because it put my life in danger was he had me go out on a sleigh ride with some tourists and he had he usually has somebody like lead the horses. It's a big sleigh, it's a lot of horses, whatever. So I'm leading these horses through a pretty small path in the snow, um, but anyway there's like streams under the snow so you can't see them. So I just like let his horses go forward and this giant sleigh, like that thing must have been like a thousand pounds.
Speaker 2:So I'm lucky I jumped out, I did, but I freaking fell in a stream in 10 degree weather and the tourists were like should we go back? And he was like no, and we like finished the ride. We went to a field. We cantered around. By the time I got back I was like shivering. Even he was like go inside. I must have had like almost hypothermia. I couldn't get my boots off. They were frozen on when they had staff. It was a place.
Speaker 2:It just wasn't paying us or treating us okay and that's probably why there's no one there now to hold the ship down. Um, and I just also thought it was interesting that they kept mentioning the barn fire, like when he gave me a tour. He mentioned but he's like, this is my new barn, but it's barn number two because we had a fire but thankfully no horses died Forgot to mention, like someone burned alive upstairs. You know, yeah, why even mention it then? Yeah, it just all seems sketchy to me. I actually heard about this incident when it started three years ago because a breeder I was working for knows one other gypsy banner breeder in Vermont who they're also close knit. She was complaining about it and sent that to her.
Speaker 2:Oh wow, it's such a small community, it's such a small state. I'm so surprised that the legislation is like letting this go on and, like I said, horse owners there and breeders, cause it's such a it's such an old practice, it's been passed down for generations to a lot of them. They have worked really hard to have a lot of welfare in place in Vermont for especially livestock, like that's why those horses could be seized in New Mexico. Of course, if you have that many horses, if any of them, even if they look like they're starving. If you can, if they can show like water and and there's hay on the property, they can't do anything. And so vermont's different, and I'm surprised they keep giving him his horses back well, it's very difficult.
Speaker 1:Just in the United States, you know, unless your animals kill somebody or unless you're, you know, trying to, you know, raise livestock in an area where you're not legally allowed to, there are no legal mechanisms to stop people from breeding.
Speaker 1:You know, we just we don't have any type of framework for monitoring and it comes back, probably comes back to the fact that we don't have any central registry of horses in the United States. There is no one place where you know the federal government knows how many horses there are, what they are and where and where they are. We've all been very opposed to that and we don't want, we don't want it and nobody wants to pay for it, nobody wants to keep track of it. It would be too hard to be a huge, expensive thing to find all these horses, track them down, register them, keep track of what they're doing. You know, just be a ton of money that nobody wants to spend on all these people with their very expensive fancy pets. You know, it reminds me a lot of his. Have you ever seen Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares?
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah, because my wife's a chef, so we're a bit upset.
Speaker 1:So I mean, the horse farms remind me a lot of that. You know, sometimes people are just well-intentioned but the reality of running the business really smacks them upside the head, and they really get knocked down and it's a tough business right the restaurant business and the horse business are rough, and sometimes these people are just jerks.
Speaker 1:And they would have been jerks no matter what they do. You know, sometimes they're just passionate but blind. And sometimes they're just passionate but blind, and sometimes they're just I want to bring. My grandmother made the best lasagna in the world and all of my customers are telling me it sucks. How do I prove to them they're wrong?
Speaker 2:okay, well, you, you don't um right, like if they don't want it and uh-oh, and not everybody wants horses and it's very, it's a big deal to start breeding them. Um, yes, and you know, what I wanted to ask you as a barn manager is like what do you think the limit on an amount of horses to have on a farm is? As an individual, like I think as an individual, huh, yeah, as an individual, in case your barn help quits or whatever, I would keep my farm at a point where I can handle it and I think what I've witnessed is the limit is like 20.
Speaker 1:If you have a tractor. It depends a lot on what the I want to say landscape, no, not landscape. The climate is what the I want to say landscape, no, not landscape. The climate is. There are people who live in Texas and Arizona in places where one person with a tractor can take round bales out tall. You'll have like two to six horses in each area. They have a shed, they have water. You drop a round bale in it and they will consider it a part-time job for somebody to spend six hours a day driving around taking a look at all those animals dropping round bales in the pens that need them, checking them for injuries, doctoring the ones that are injured, and they'll expect one person to do that for 100 horses. There's absolutely places, places like that.
Speaker 1:When you're talking about the Northeast, with the weather, I mean it. If you had a live out situation with sheds, um, you know it would still be very challenging to keep an eye on 20, 20 horses, um, especially when you're talking about weather and the winter and stuff. The extremes of weather are really hard. I've seen people keep horses in some really rough situations where they were thrown out, but they were in a large area. You know dozens, 56, you know a couple dozen acres. The animals can move from place to place, you know, like there's a place in the pasture where it's going to be cooler, where there's going to be less bugs. They're out in a group and they can be pretty hardy in situations like that.
Speaker 1:But the smaller the property is, the more extreme the weather is, the less you're going to be able to do that. You can't get away with that. The smaller it is and the more isolated I mean I've only got six animals in the barn that I'm in and we've still got two part-time people who come to help me. And in the winter, you know, the farm owner pitches in we would spend I'm in New Hampshire this past winter. We would have days where'm in New Hampshire this past winter. We would have days where between him and me, we'd spend six hours a day plowing.
Speaker 1:And this is not a huge property. This is a 12 acre property. It is not big, but when we got serious snow it would take me almost three hours just to do all of the driveway and the hard track and then if we wanted to plow areas for the horses to go out, that would take us another couple hours. And that's not including new installs. You know getting the horses out because you know they're not going to get turned out in the fields until we've plowed a path here. So, yeah, I mean, it can take a lot of people for a small amount of horses, depending upon the depending upon the climate.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:No, Vermont is going to be really rough, especially, like you said, in the winter. I imagine the bugs in the summer are horrendous there.
Speaker 2:I bet it's very humid. I don't know. I was there in the dead of winter and even then there was bugs and it was very humid I was there in the dead of winter and even okay, there was bugs and it was very humid, which is bugs in the dead of winter when it, yeah right, and because it was so cold that when it would get a little bit warm it would just feel to all of us like so warm, right, and the bugs?
Speaker 2:we would still have some bugs. But yes, that place had two full-time, stable hands maintenance people who were just like throwing hay and fixing things. We had four interns a barn manager, the owner and two trainers and we were all still immensely struggling. Yeah, I think we had. We did lack tractors.
Speaker 2:We had a vehicle that did not go in reverse that we would drive on the ice to bring, you know, up into the field and on this ice, and so we would like literally slide it on purpose and do a loop so we could turn around and leave, um, and bring all the grain over whatever. So things like that could have made things more functional if we had enough equipment. But yeah, it is just almost impossible to keep any amount of horses on that, like it was a lot of acres and then it was going all the way up that hill to the barn. Yes, yes, no, I've seen.
Speaker 1:I've seen some properties on some some horrendous hills and it is. It is really, uh, a big deal when you have to keep going up and down the side of a mountain, you know, exhausting, but then once the ground gets bad, once the footing is rough, it's really challenging, slash, quite dangerous, and I mean people don't think of this. Of course, when this guy set out to build his dream, his dream facility, having no personal experience himself, he was not thinking about, well, what is it going to be like to walk a weanling down that hill in January? Probably not something that was going on. Yeah, no, the horse industry is definitely one of those things and I'm pretty sure this is why so many people have farms in Texas and stuff is because if you're going to have horses, you don't want to have 100 horses in the Northeast, you don't want to have them in vermont, um, unless you can afford a staff of 20 full-time people um, 10 gators, you better pay real well, they better be happy to be there.
Speaker 2:And I had, like one other girl came in with me and actually left I think the first week and I ended up asking to leave. And I'll tell you the last little story of when I decided I had to go is I was taking a horse back and I was asked to get another horse and there were two pens that were. There was a gate between them and they were cooked in fillies, ok, and then that gate was on like a hill and so I was bringing a horse through that and holding the electric wire on one side and I heard thunder, but thundering hooves behind me and I just I literally fell down the hill, rolled and like duh, and these horses jumped over me. All the horses in the other pasture right, they all just came reeling through and some of them had gotten like that, one of them had gotten their leg on the the gate right and freaked out. Anyway, I had like 12 horses all mixed together that weren't supposed to be and I just was like you know what? They're not loose, they're like in a pasture.
Speaker 2:So I limped my way back up to the barn and they were just like where's the horse I told you to get? And I was like, um, well, this happened and I got screamed at for letting these horses mix and I at that point I was just like I'm going to get killed here, I'm going to get run over. Nobody's watching me. Nobody would have come and got me or looked for me if I had been down out there. They weren't even you know. They were just like where have you been? They're just like well, now we have to go sort out of these horses. And I'm like, yeah, well, maybe you shouldn't put a gate between those two pastures when, I asked to leave.
Speaker 2:He would not let me leave. He said like, oh well, I'm taking a trip next week there. He was pissed about me wanting to leave, so he kind of stopped talking to me. I was like communicating with his wife and he wasn't like guaranteeing that he'd give me a ride. And I was a few hours back to Boston where he picked me up from to get on a plane. I ended up calling the other intern who left and she lived nearby, so she came and got me and drove me to Boston and then I had to hang out there and like stay on someone's couch. I found somebody who knew somebody in Boston with like six roommates, and so I was very lucky that like these random people got me out of there because he was I was gonna have to hitchhike in the snow.
Speaker 1:He was not gonna take me back wow, yeah, some of the riding I did as a young person was at a farm that had been not quite a breeding situation but a hoarding situation. The lady had been really successful on a breed circuit at one point in her life and her business kind of trickled out and you know she had scallions running around with mares and fields. Then eventually the folks, everybody who knew her, once her show business dried up and she got it kind of got to be older and the horses were just still all out there breeding. Eventually our our, you know, 4-h leaders started sending us teenage kids over to her place to ride you know, why don't you go over to Sally's place? And they picked out some of the horses that were broke and we rode them and then they rehomed them and they kind of slowly picked away at her collection of horses to try to make it disappear Because she was getting older.
Speaker 1:Yeah well, I mean it was good at the time because us kids got some horses to ride. I mean I know they still wound up. She didn't want to give up the stallions, she didn't want to do that. There was some more. I wasn't involved with that at the time and I was 13 or something. But you know, at the end of the day she just had been her whole life and she didn't want to quit or shut down or stop. I lost track of her, I don't know how it wound up in the end. So I mean, people might, might, luck out like that. But this guy obviously in the uh episode here I'll probably links to a couple. I found a couple of good uh newspaper reports that give a concise um history of all all. It looks like he's had horses seized four times and he still thinks he didn't do anything wrong. And sometimes the judges have given some of the horses back to him. But yeah, I mean, like these folks, just We'll have to count how many horses died between all those four seizures?
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:For three, two or three years.
Speaker 1:Yes, let's see so. The first seizure in July 2023. Yes, 13 horses have been forfeited and rehomed. The second forfeiture request by the state, after 20 horses were seized in September 2024, was still pending. The state also seized two horses from the farm in June 2024. The state filed 16 misdemeanor animal cruelty charges related to the status of the 20 horses. The most recent seizure yes, 25 of the 39 horses wound up at Gentle Giants.
Speaker 1:But, yeah, this has been so. Yeah, I'll provide a link to this one article from the Vermont Digger, the VT Digger News. In Pursuit of Truth, I found a couple of good articles. Um, there's a lack of resources for implementing the laws, which is basically true. I mean, who's who's going to take care of 20, 30, 40, 60, 70, 100 horses from somebody? It's a huge. It's a huge thing to do, unless you're either going to go in there and just shoot them all, which there is an argument to be had for doing that, because this just might be kinder at this point because, yes, yes, a horse starving to death is there couldn't be a worse fate.
Speaker 2:And it's terrible. Yeah, they get in that part of the country because of the weather, like we were battling awful rain, rot and things like that. So if they haven't been getting care, yeah, oh my gosh, it just it could be so, so bad, interesting to see how.
Speaker 1:Mr frisians of majesty we'll have to try to figure out the article from 2024 once said there was still about 90 horses on the property. So if they took 40 something from the last seizure, that still leaves a large proportion of horses on there. You know it's interesting. Uh, Bex Nairn, the anonymous lady, does all the dissections on the horses. I didn't realize she started doing dissections because she was involved in post-track rehab with horses and so many horses came lame that she eventually got with horses and so many horses came lame that she eventually got, got curious.
Speaker 1:But she did some, released some statements recently, um, where she uh expounded on her experiences and you know they were really one of the reasons why she left the rehab project that she was participating in was because they were increasingly restricting what they, what they would let people talk about and say in public. So you weren't allowed to talk about these horses having this problem and you weren't allowed to talk about these horses having that problem. And apparently every year it got more and more restrictive, More and more rules would come down about what you weren't allowed to say. I imagine a lot of folks close to this situation also are in a situation where they can't talk but it doesn't mean we can't look.
Speaker 2:It doesn't mean we can't look or even ask.
Speaker 1:Hello again. Thanks for joining us on our podcast. Emma has been wanting to talk about the Freesians of Majesty her personal Frisians of Majesty story for a while now. Now that the latest court ruling came down finalizing the most recent seizure of horses, we figured this was a good time to put it on the podcast. We would love to chat with anybody else who has had any other direct experience at Frisians of Majesty.
Speaker 1:When we started our podcast together, we were mostly envisioning that it was going to be talking about the difficulties and experiences of people who have worked directly in the horse industry. So we would love to include some more of that in the future. So if you have a personal employee, employer or working student story and you want to come and talk to us, that would be great. Especially if you have any personal stories about working for or at Freesians of Majesty, we would love to chat with you. You can reach out to us. There's contact information on the podcast website and in the show notes here. You could reach out to Emma Jenkinson at Emma Jenkinson Dressage or to me, isabeau Zarebes Salas. I am on Facebook. Thanks for joining us.
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