A ground-breaking program linked to Taylor Made Farm, the world’s largest Thoroughbred consignor, is repairing broken lives by helping addicts to find sobriety – and training them for a new future working within the horse industry. Ken Snyder reports
USA: At 6.15am on weekday mornings in a beautiful home on a hillside in Nicholasville, Kentucky, a crew of men – some young, some old – meet to share thoughts, failings, triumphs, and occasional rants.
With each of them, there is no adopted persona, no pretense, just things from the heart –most often the pain from a life gone sideways. Each one of them is a recovering drug addict or alcoholic and each morning is a step on a path toward future possibilities.
Amazingly (and some say miraculously) their immediate path after the meeting takes them into perhaps the unlikeliest of places: the barns on Taylor Made Farm taking care of very expensive horses at the world’s largest consignor of Thoroughbreds.
The farm has been entrusting their horses to men like these – all from live-in rehabilitation centers or prisons – since June 2022. They are part of a program, appropriately named Stable Recovery, that is a companion program to the farm’s School of Horsemanship.
Both programs dovetail to accomplish two objectives: Stable Recovery builds recovery from addiction through a community of men living, working, and finding sobriety as they help each other grow mentally, physically, and spiritually. The School of Horsemanship helps them find purpose through the work of caring for Thoroughbreds.
Hands-on with every horse
The work immerses them in horse care and they are hands-on with every horse from newborn foals to mares and stallions.
An ancillary benefit from both programs is Taylor Made is fully staffed for the first time that anyone can remember, even with 100 more horses than the corresponding period 12 months earlier. Recently other Thoroughbred farms in Central Kentucky and a racetrack stable, Ready Made Racing, have begun hiring men from Stable Recovery.
The program is the brainchild of Frank Taylor, one of four brothers who established Taylor Made Farm in 1976. He is also a close friend of a recovering addict who directs Stable Recovery and whose name, ironically, is Christian Countzler.
Witnessing the struggles of a family member with alcohol and realizing his own struggles, Taylor wanted a way to give something back.
DV8 Kitchen in Lexington, a restaurant employing former addicts, planted a seed with Taylor for what became Stable Recovery. “You need a purpose and you need to work,” he said.
A partnership with Countzler, who lives on the farm with the men of Stable Recovery, began when he and Taylor met at a live-in rehabilitation center in Lexington, Shepherd’s House. Countzler entered Shepherd’s House five years ago, homeless and addicted; he recovered to eventually become the vice president.
In that role, he was looking for what he called “second-chance opportunities” for recovering men when he heard about the School of Horsemanship at a meeting where he and Taylor were in attendance.
‘Wow! That could be something special’
“I thought, ‘Wow! That could be something special,’” he explained. “We’re right here in Lexington and I know the therapeutic value of animals in general but horses especially.
“I was seeing far too many guys get sober, do well, and then have some doors slammed in their faces. Then they relapse.
“Getting a job at a fast-food place or a factory floor is absolutely the right mix to cause a guy to fail in recovery when financial insecurity hits along with depression from doing something you don’t feel good about.”
Taylor’s idea had to be approved by his three brothers, all of whom own the farm together. “There was pushback,” acknowledged Frank Taylor.
Speaking of his brothers, Taylor said: “They are very charitable but they had a real hard time about me bringing in a bunch of drug addicts and alcoholics: ‘What if somebody gets hurt?’ ‘What if somebody ODs and dies?’
“I said, ‘Yeah, but what if you save somebody’s life and reunite a bunch of families and you get a bunch of good team members out of it?’”
The brothers reached a compromise. Frank Taylor bargained for a program that he presented as an experiment. “I said ‘Just let me start small and the minute something goes wrong, I’ll pull the plug on it.’ Let me try it for 60 days.”
Things couldn’t have gone better. “The first group out of the box was one of our best-graduating groups,” said Taylor.
‘He was a natural’
Mike Lowery, part of that group, had never touched a horse but, according to Taylor, “he was a natural”. After achieving 90 days of sobriety in Stable Recovery and graduating from the School of Horsemanship (also a 90-day program) Lowery went to work for Ready Made Racing,
“He ended up running the shedrow,” said Taylor, shaking his head in amazement. “He’d never put on a bandage starting out, but he could go right now and run a shedrow for anybody.”
Lowery has returned to the farm from the racetrack to take a position as broodmare division manager. Another Stable Recovery grad, Drew Miller, impressed Taylor as someone who was “getting sober and a damn hard worker. I put him with these horses here and he liked everything he did.”
Assigned to the farm’s maintenance crew, after only a month he was named manager of the maintenance division.
Countzler, like Lowery and Miller, went through the School of Horsemanship. “I spent every day in the barn learning exactly what these guys are going to learn because there’s no way I can teach or lead guys doing something that I haven’t done myself,” he explained.
‘We vet our guys pretty tough’
“This is for men that are truly trying to make a change,” he added, noting that admittance into Stable Recovery is not automatic for those interested. “We vet our guys pretty tough. I tell guys I’m going to take their cell phone first thing. That weeds out about 80 per cent of the guys that call to get in Stable Recovery.”
Once admitted, there are very few such ‘weed-outs’ in Stable Recovery, said Countzler. This is despite a tough daily regimen. “We push these guys harder than anybody,” he said. “6.15am in the morning? There’s nobody else in this town getting up that early to do this.”
Taylor nods his head at a tough regimen for men. “It’s very structured, very disciplined,” he said. “You get up early at 5.30am. You make your bed. You go to that meeting at 6.15 and you finish at 6.45. You’re working at Taylor Made at 7. You work till 
4. You get done. You come back to the house. Sometimes you're required to do another meeting or do chores or eat dinner together. Their day is totally full.”
Chores are in the house on the farm property that houses 12 men and a second house in downtown Lexington where another 16 men live.
Dismissals are infrequent but they do happen – and the reasons extend beyond relapses from sobriety. “You don’t have to drink or drug to get kicked out of Stable Recovery,” said Countzler.
“If you’re not pulling your weight, if you’re not making the man next to you better, we don’t need you here. That’s the only way this works.”
Stable Recovery, by any measure, is a success. Currently, 80 per cent of the men achieve at least 90 days of sobriety – a success rate that dwarfs national statistics for other live-in facilities. Drug addicts, according to statistics from addictiongroup.org, relapse multiple times in the first 90 days in a recovery program.
Equally important, 100 per cent of the men in Stable Recovery who graduate from the School of Horsemanship find employment at Taylor Made or Ready Made Racing or other horse farms in Central Kentucky.
Four watchwords
Success is attributable to many things. Watchwords for the program painted on one wall in the house on the farm are ‘accountability’, ‘structure’, ‘discipline’ and ‘responsibility’. They are the standards for relationships, behavior, and work. The secret and key ingredient, however, is found on the rolling fields and in the barn stalls: the horses.
Taylor has watched new men, who have never touched a horse, instantly respond to mares who will hang their heads over a fence to be rubbed by the men. “There is definitely something about a horse that’s good for a man,” he said, turning to Winston Churchill’s oft-quoted line expressing appreciation for horses.
Countzler, as well, has seen ‘horse therapy’ that, he believes, is spiritual. “There’s just something about being around an animal that’s completely reliant on you – that’s completely loyal to you – that helps a man,” he said, “especially a man suffering from trauma, substance abuse disorder, anxiety, and depression.”
Ready Made trainer Will Walden, a former addict who lived in the Shepherd’s House where he met Countzler, talked about what he has seen on the racetrack with men from Stable Recovery.
“It may take a week, it may take a month, it may take four months, but there will be a time when a horse looks them in the eye and they know they are accepted,” he said.
There is no timetable for when men leave either the house on the farm or the home downtown. “We like to see guys stay a year,” said Taylor. “Some of them may stay there forever.”
Already, plans are in the works for an additional house on the farm to accommodate more men. Additionally, there are talks with the racetrack chaplaincy at Saratoga to replicate Stable Recovery there. One plan under discussion would bring men from there to live at Taylor Made and then return home.
“The program just works,” said Taylor. “Recovery can happen without horses, but it’s just an extra little seasoning in the recipe of recovery.”
• Visit the Stable Recovery website and the Taylor Made Farm website
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