Animal Abuse, Inc.

Though she hadn't spoken to Brooks in weeks, Smith — a longtime horse owner with the controlled demeanor of an emergency-room nurse — threw on a jacket. Knowing time was scarce, she raced the 10 miles from her Litchfield home to Brooks' Lodi barn.

Once there, they hustled through the large barn and into a stall, dry hay crunching beneath their feet like dead leaves. The scene was worse than Smith had imagined. The horse — his name was Dash — was lying on his side, flopping about just as Brooks had described. He was so emaciated you could see his muscles contracting beneath his dull, spotted skin. And he was clearly in pain, struggling like an asthmatic for breath.

Smith knew the situation was dire, that the thrashing could cause the horse's intestines to twist up and cut off circulation. She threw her body on top of his, hoping to stop the flailing.

"You need to get a vet here," she told Brooks, "or he's not going to make it."

The women worked the phones. But they couldn't get a vet to the farm. "I don't like what's going on there," one of them told Smith. "That woman should not be allowed to own horses," another said. Besides, the doctors knew they might never get paid. Brooks owed thousands in vet fees.

So Smith did the best she could. She helped move the horse to another stall and made sure he had enough water. But around 10 p.m., she had to leave. She had children and a husband to tend to. She asked Brooks to stay with the foal until the morning. The breeder agreed.

Finally back in bed, Smith spent the next few hours wrestling with her covers, and early the next morning, she rushed back to Brooks' barn. She walked into the horse's stall to find what her animal-lover's instinct had expected all night: The yearling was dead. And Brooks was nowhere to be found.

Smith knelt, altar-style, beside the dead horse, smoothing the fine hairs of his coat and offering up apologies. That's when Brooks walked into the barn. "He's dead," Smith told her, weeping.

Brooks' face remained stoic. She was acting "like it was no big deal," Smith would later recall.

Smith looked around at the rest of Brooks' stable, taking stock of the situation: Fifty malnourished horses, their coats mangy, their hooves rotted and crumbling like stale cake. Some of the drinking water was so dirty you couldn't see the bottom of the pails. She quietly worried that this horse farm, if left to Brooks, would soon become a horse cemetery.

Smith knew that Brooks regarded her as a sister, a best friend. So as she left the farm that morning, Smith silently asked God to forgive her betrayal as she dialed the number of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

"I want to report a case of animal cruelty," she said.

She expected the professional animal lovers to be aghast at her story. But to her surprise, the investigators she spoke with that morning were more than familiar with Patty Brooks.

At 54, Patty Brooks has the look of a world-weary loner, a woman surrounded by 10 feet of invisible barbed wire. When she talks, her eyes dart around like searchlights; she has the natural suspicion of a woman who feels many times wronged. It's a disposition nursed during her long career as an LTV steelworker and a trucker. And it's this distrust of people, she says, that spurred her gravitation toward animals. "Animals are a hell of a lot more trustworthy than people," the sharp-tongued Brooks says.

And with the right combination of luck and finesse, she once believed, they just might be her ticket to a richer, better life.

In the late 1980s, Brooks quit her trucking job and opened the Sudsy Dog Grooming and Boarding Kennel in a small stand-alone building on Route 18 in Medina. The grooming business, she figured, would pay the day-to-day bills. But she knew the profit was in breeding. Show dogs could sell for $6,000. And Brooks had a gut feeling that she'd be good at the job. Successful breeders "have a love" of dogs and a "desire to always improve on what [they] have," she says. Brooks prided herself on both qualities.