Porsche’s story begins back in 2004, on a farm on the east coast of the United States. Porsche’s dam, Fancy Clancy, was acquired for 700k. Her sire, Fusaichi Pegasus, was the winner of the 2000 Kentucky Derby, and broke records when he sold for a cool 70 million. All said and done, around 800-some thousand dollars went into the creation of this mare. As far as rags-to-riches stories go, this is not one that is short on the riches.
Porsche was born, and raced, and won, under the name Fancy Fusaichi. She came in first in a stakes race — the highest level of the sport — in 2008, and racked up earnings close to 250k over the few years she was run. After her racing days were through, she was relegated to passing down her genes, bearing a total of twelve foals, several of them also race winners.
But as often happens in the world of sports, one’s value tend declines with age, and usefulness. We don’t know much of what her journey looked like, but in 2023, Fancy Fusaichi ended up here, in Washington state, having been sold to a local farm for the princely sum of $500.
Three years after that sale, she entered our radar by way of Animal Control. There is no exaggeration when we say that she was so thin she was close to death, with myriad of other signs aside from her body condition that pointed to poor or nonexistent care.
We could go on and on about the horrors of seeing a horse who has suffered from such neglect, but it’s more enjoyable for us all to hear about the light in her eyes when she stepped off the trailer at SAFE, how she was a horse who, though practically a walking skeleton, hadn’t given up. We’d rather tell you about how excited she was to see us at meal times, despite the portion sizes during those early days being quite paltry as we worked to safely re-feed her. It’s also very fun to tell you that, when she was given the OK by our vets to have access to free choice hay, after about two weeks of small, spaced-out meals, she practically unhinged her jaw on her first pass at a bale net full of alfalfa. It’s way nicer for us to talk about how she let us trim and treat her hooves, how she LOVES being scratched, how satisfying it was to slough off the matted hair on her legs and see the shine start to come back to her coat. We’d love to tell you how much joy we got catching her lying down on the camera for the first time, snuggled up in her deeply bedded stall atop her cushy stall mattress. We’ve been gladdened to watch as the levels on her blood work improve, and as the slack in the weight tape grows a little bit less with each check we perform.
As a new intake on quarantine, we’ve kept her separate from our herd, but during her daily forays out to a small round pen we set up to give her a place to roll, she is happy to see the other horses, and they are happy to see her.
At SAFE, Porsche was a rescue on the first day she arrived, but over the weeks she has been with us, has begun to transform back into the horse she has always been — a winner.
