Nov. 19 (Bloomberg) -- There’s a gated community on Long Island’s south shore where valuable real estate is set aside for the homeless and unemployed, former professional athletes, now too old or injured to compete: thoroughbred horses.

“Most of our rescues are off the racetrack,” says Nikki Giorgetti, a trainer at the New York Horse Rescue operation in East Moriches, New York. “They are living, breathing animals that require care every day, and we have a waiting list of about 40 horses that want to come here.”

The community has fenced off 15 acres -- once potato and duck farms -- for the thoroughbreds. On a recent visit, I find eight horses stomping around the paddocks, with racy names like Magic Lady Luck and Exalted Cat. The nonprofit’s main facility is at Butler Farm, a 50-acre spread in nearby Manorville, which has 42 rescued horses, though both populations can change from week to week, Giorgetti says.

“I started the sanctuary because I realized there was a need for homes for horses after they couldn’t race anymore,” says Mona T. Kanciper, president of New York Horse Rescue and co-owner, with her husband Judson L. Butler, of Butler Farm. “There are owners out there who want to do the right thing for their animals, but there are too many who just drop them, or drive them until they totally break down.”

She persuaded the East Moriches community to provide the 15 acres, for which she pays $1 annually.

Every year, about 3,000 racehorses in the U.S. lose their jobs because of age, injury or both, according to the Thoroughbred Retirement Foundation. About a third find homes; the rest are abandoned or sold to feedlots, joining the 100,000 or so horses that are trucked to slaughterhouses in Canada and Mexico. Often the finish line is a restaurant table in France or Japan.

Working Retirement

Many of the Butler Farm horses have working retirements, as Kanciper has a riding school there. Some continue to compete in horse shows, though their racing days are over: Adopting a horse requires both $500 and an agreement to keep the adoptee forever off the track.

A white stallion they call Opie, taken from the animal’s racing moniker, Officialposition, is the farm’s biggest money winner, having raked in more than $300,000 at Belmont Park Race Track on Long Island, New York.

“He’s one of our best jumping horses,” says Giorgetti. “A real athlete.”

Not all the castoffs here are former racers. In one paddock are the offspring of mares used to produce Premarin (an acronym from “pregnant mare urine”), a drug used in estrogen- replacement therapy. According to the Humane Society of the U.S., there are 64 PMU farms in North America, most of them in western Canada. Kanciper has made the trip north to purchase the inevitable byproduct -- foals -- and here they are.

Wild Mustangs

Besides racehorses and pharmaceutical offspring, there are also tens of thousands of wild mustangs in captivity in the West, rounded up by the Bureau of Land Management (largely to keep them off grazing lands used by cattlemen). These captives are waiting for Madeleine Pickens, wife of T. Boone Pickens, the billionaire energy investor, to open her proposed million-acre sanctuary, which she says is coming soon.

Pickens plans to house unwanted thoroughbreds as well. “We’re getting closer and it’s so exciting,” she told me in a recent phone interview. “I help the mustangs first, and it will really help my credibility.”

A former thoroughbred breeder herself, she is aware of racing’s dirty little secret -- that so many of these magnificent animals are discarded every year. “After a while you can’t shove it under the bed. The bed isn’t high enough.”

Funding Down

The New York Horse Rescue will have a fundraiser on Dec. 5 at Butler Farm. Funding is hard to come by these days. The sanctuary’s annual fundraiser at Belmont Park brought in about $10,000 less than in recent years.

Kanciper’s Long Island farm isn’t just an equine do-gooder, it’s also a conscientiously green facility. She has installed solar panels on a barn roof that supply all the electricity on the property. She has even known that most satisfying feeling: selling surplus electricity back to the utility company.

“We have respect for the planet,” she says, adding, “We have two Priuses.”

Horse lovers can adopt a horse, donate or even arrange to volunteer at the New York Horse Rescue Web site, http://www.nyhr.org. To help out the wild mustang, see Madeleine Pickens’s site at http://www.madeleinepickens.com.

(Mike Di Paola writes about preservation and the environment for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this column: Mike Di Paola at mdipaola@nyc.rr.com.

Last Updated: November 19, 2009 00:01 EST