How a patchy, warty, parasite-infested pony yearling with a leg injury and a little girl with no interest in horses eventually came to be tearing up jumper tracks in Alberta might be considered a rags-to-riches story. Today the flashy dapple-grey, 14.2-hand Beauty Queen and her devoted 12-year-old owner, Kamryn Sitter, have a Facebook page and even the hashtag #teambeauty, not to mention a squad of admirers and supporters celebrating every well-earned success in the low and pony jumper divisions.
Beauty Queen was one of a large herd of horses seized from a farm near Andrew, AB, about 100 kilometres northeast of Edmonton, in a well-publicized 2008 animal neglect case. Twenty-seven horses were already dead when the Alberta Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) arrived. One hundred others were emaciated, sick, or injured. The SPCA turned the animals over to breeder Susan Fyfe, who established the organization Rescue 100 to rehabilitate and find homes for the horses. The non-profit has since gone on to save hundreds of other abused and neglected horses, but at the time, desperately needed money to look after that first group.
To help, six women from Crossfield, who dubbed themselves the Desperate Horse Wives, put together a fundraiser that brought in $54,000. One of the women, Anne McKinty – Kamryn’s grandmother – took home two rescued fillies, nursed them back to health, and essentially let them be for five years. “The horses lived on my quarter section along with my other six horses and pretty much just ran wild,” she says.