Filly Makes Ride From Neglect to the Racetrack The bettors may not like what they see when they come across the name Notinrwildestdremz, scheduled to race Sunday at Aqueduct. The filly is 4, late to be making her first start, and her morning workout times suggest she is in no hurry to get to the finish line. She is by the sire Griffinite, who has never produced a horse of any note; she is not much bigger than a Great Dane; and her trainer, Billy Turner, usually does not have his horses peak in their first try. But what the horseplayers will not know is that Notinrwildestdremz is a feisty little thing with attitude and that she has overcome long odds just to be alive. Sometimes horses don't have to be runners to be winners. Notinrwildestdremz began life as one of the 177 horses that were starving and all but abandoned when authorities raided the Climax, N.Y., farm of the prominent owner and breeder Ernie Paragallo in April 2009. At the time, no one gave a thought to any of these horses as racing competitors. The only goal was to save as many of them as possible. The local Humane Society and other horse rescue and welfare groups did just that. Only a handful did not make it, and the vast majority were nursed back to reasonable health and given homes. "For any horse to just make it out of that place and prosper is just fantastic," said Ron Perez, the president of the Columbia-Greene Humane Society and Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, who oversaw the rescue operation. To think that one could actually race would be unbelievable considering what the place looked like when we got there. When I heard that this horse was going to run, I almost fell out of my chair. Perez needed to find good homes for the Paragallo horses, and a Brooklyn couple, Sean and Angelika Kerr, were among the first to step forward. Like many others, the Kerrs were horrified when they heard the story of an owner who had amassed more than $20 million in purse earnings and owned an early favorite for the 1996 Kentucky Derby yet could be so callous when it came to his horses" welfare. Paragallo was subsequently convicted of animal cruelty. The Kerrs were asked to adopt three Paragallo horses, all of them yearlings and the last three to find homes. "Given that it was four months after they took Paragallo's horses from him, they certainly weren't as emaciated as what you saw in newspapers," Sean Kerr said. Still, they were absolutely underweight. You could see bones and they didn't have a lot of flesh. They were pretty spindly looking, but not as bad" as the pictures that had surfaced when the situation became public. Many of the survivors were broodmares past their racing age. Perez said about 25 yearlings were among the rescued horses, but apparently none of the new owners besides the Kerrs believed any could be patched back together and race. Notinrwildestdremz, who has been training at Belmont Park, will be the first Paragallo rescue horse to race. "I saw this as an opportunity," Sean Kerr said. There were a lot of people that were horrified by the story but also absolutely love horse racing and were horrified at the idea of what might happen to these horses. I thought there was a chance that we could get a lot of people behind a project, take a risk and try to turn these horses around. The Kerrs had dabbled in racing as breeders but had been unlucky, never getting a horse to the races. Rather than take on this project themselves, they reached out to friends and to strangers through Facebook. They asked people to put up whatever they could to go into a partnership that would attempt to race the three Paragallo horses they had adopted. They wound up with 120 partners, one of whom put up only $25, in what they called 5R Racehorse Stables, for rescue, rehabilitation, racing, retraining and retiring. 5R Racehorse Stables had a daunting task. The first two years of a horse's life are crucial when it comes to future success because that is when they are growing and being molded into racehorses. Without proper nutrition and care, they do not grow or develop properly. "She has to overcome her upbringing, which appeared to be an insurmountable issue at one time," said Turner, who trained the 1977 Triple Crown winner, Seattle Slew. Anytime you have a nutrition problem as a young horse, your career is compromised right there. The whole idea of this is, is it possible to bring a horse back that had been stunted in their growth from birth and for a considerable time? It's an uphill climb. Some of those issues have already ended the racing careers of the two others the Kerrs rescued. One, a colt, developed hydrocephalus, or water on the brain. The affliction is a result of the horse being denied water and then drinking in excess when having access to it. The Kerrs retired the colt and still care for him. Despite the signs indicating Notinrwildestdremz may struggle on the track, the Kerrs believe she has the ability to compete on the tough New York circuit. "One thing about her is she is extremely competitive," Sean Kerr said. When she works out, she tries to intimidate the other horses and it doesn't matter if the other horses are twice her size. She's breezed with older geldings and gone neck and neck with those guys. The consistent thing we hear from everyone is attitude; she absolutely has the attitude. The Kerrs are looking to expand 5R beyond one horse and recently bought another. They want to bring people into racing who otherwise could not afford it by offering them small shares in their horses. And they want to focus attention on the sport's more contentious issues, like horse welfare and retirement, and the proliferation of drugs. The Kerrs have vowed that none of their horses will race on any medications, including Lasix, a legal antibleeding drug given to about 98 percent of all horses that race. "Yes, this is an industry, but I want to take the industry out of it and make people understand that we have a stewardship with the horses and that's something we should take very seriously," Angelika Kerr said. The Kerrs expect about 40 partners to be at Aqueduct in New York on Sunday, as well as a good-size group of people who have helped along the way, like veterinarians, farriers and the trainers who prepared Notinrwildestdremz for racing before she was given to Turner in January. "Every single person in the stable is of the opinion that we have succeeded already," Sean Kerr said. The fact that she has even gotten to Belmont Park and is in training, we have already succeeded. If she races just this one race, she's already won, and everybody feels quite strongly about that.