In 1990 I was the barn manager at Hampshire Farm on Shelter Island. One of the partners, Zee Muray, had a Clydesdale mare and was breeding to a stallion standing at Triple Peaks Farm in Jamesport. When I leased the barn adjacent to Dune Alpin in 1992 I bought a Clydesdale yearling from Triple Peaks, Bubba. I trained Bubba to ride and drive and kept him his entire life. I called the stable Cove Hollow stable. Cove Hollow Stable was a boarding stable where I also kept a few pony ride ponies and some rescues. Dune Alpin gave me a free lease on the pasture on 27 and Cove Hollow Road near the Red Horse Market.Nearby a young man bought an estate with a five-stall barn. With the help of his trainer, he filled it with horses, two of them being Clydesdales from Triple Peaks. I was hired to run the barn and exercise the horses. One of the Clydesdales, Barney, was a wheel horse from a six-horse hitch, and the other, Simba, a two-year-old colt. Neither of them had been ridden under saddle and the colt had no training at all. I worked there for about a year and a half. The last six months money got very tight. The feed company was owed money, the Farrier, the vet, and me too. At one point I did get a check for $4600 from his partner but instead of walking, I decided to pay his barn bills and hang on. Things went from bad to worse and I had to quit. There was an Irish gardener working there who was also importing show jumpers. He took over the barn and brought in a horse he wanted to sell to the barn owner. Six months later I received a phone call in the middle of the night from East Hampton Village Police. There was a loose Clydesdale in Georgica. I went to see what was going on. There stood Simba, being held with a mere rope around his neck, he had no halter, and his head hung down between his knees The last time I had seen him he was so full of life, like a young Thoroughbred.He had lost weight. What was most disturbing to me at that time was that he was alone. I was alarmed that the other Clydesdale was not with him.I agreed to take the horse back to his stable.Walking from Georgica with Simba at 3 am I remember seeing a shooting star and having an eerie kind of a déjà vu feeling.I didn’t take him back to the estate. I hid him in my barn and went to the estate barn to see if the other Clyde, Barney, was ok. He was not. When Barney was at Triple Peaks in Jamesport he weighed about 2500 lbs. He now looked to be about 1500. The other horses were in rough shape too. The next day I could hear the gardener racing around the woods and fields on a quad looking for Simba.This is when I learned of the SPCAs’ inability to act. Because the horses had shelter and there was feed in the barn they could not seize the horses.The gardener had been feeding his horse and starving the others.I had to give Simba back but I started to drive my truck up to the estate early in the morning and throw a couple bales of hay over the fence for the horses. It seemed as though their owner had a nervous breakdown. He had lost a lot of money in a bad business deal.When I tried to reason with him he said when I suffer my horses suffer. He owed me $10,000 and was judgment-proof. Because his partner had given me a check for $4600 in the past, I decided to take him to small claims court and he showed up. We talked about the horses and he said He would try and work out a deal where I would forgive the 10,000 in exchange for the two Clydes, so that’s what we did.  The other horses started getting fed by his original trainer who had just come back from the Florida show circuit.Three months had gone by since I first found Simba in Georgica that night.I had been throwing hay over the fence all that time. The day I finally was able to retrieve the horses and bring them back to my barn I threw a saddle pad on Barney’s back and rode him the short distance back to my barn while ponying Simba( leading) He was so skinny I could barely sit on him and his backbone felt like it would cleave me in half.As I approached my barn with the horses I saw that my mother and sister had arrived.I thought they would admonish me for taking on more horses, especially starved draft horses. The fact that they didn’t was a bit out of character.It was June.That Fall my mother loaned me $10,000.to help winter the horses, I had 13 of them and only 4 or 5 were boarders.I went to Toppings Riding Club and spoke to Anne Aspinal. Anne Was preparing to head South for the Winter Show circuit. We struck a deal and she sold me 5 tons of hay and let me work it off. It was 1998, and in 1999 I incorporated Stable Environment Equine Rehabilitation. I rehabilitated them and in 2000 Barney was adopted, Simba in 2002.