News Feature
Spurring Change
The aftermath of the NY Times horse-racing exposé
The thing that hooked Debbie Coburn into nonprofit horse care: a 50,000-horse-long pee line. That’s the odd name for a controversial practice. Coburn explains that pregnant mares excrete a hormone in their urine that can be readily absorbed by humans. “There are pharmaceutical companies who buy the urine from farmers who collect it,” she says. The companies extract the hormone from PMU (pregnant mare urine) and put it in hormone replacement therapy drugs.
The Bugman
The Crawlies
Got you under my skin
Twenty years ago, pest control expert Richard “Bugman” Fagerlund would get maybe one call a month about someone who said they felt imaginary bugs crawling on them. Today, he gets them almost on a daily basis.