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For years, she worked closely with The Fund for Animals founder Cleveland Amory, who she calls “the father of the modern animal protection movement.” “I started to realize that my life was really somewhat different from most people’s,” Branigan says. After a career spent rescuing and caring for animals ranging from burros hoisted out of the Grand Canyon to retired racing greyhounds, Branigan wrote the story of her friendship with Gamal, and of Atlantic City’s diving horses, in her recently published memoir “The Last Diving Horse in America.” Gamal went to live on a nearby farm where, for most of the next decade, Branigan would care for him and a series of other rescued creatures for The Fund for Animals. “It was one of those things that had always been there, and nobody stopped to think, ‘Wait a minute, is this right?’ For me, worse than the act is what happened afterward – the idea that those horses were just discarded.” “The diving horse act was such a big part of Atlantic City for almost 50 years, but it is shocking to think that up until 1978 they were still doing it,” says Branigan, now 68. That left Gamal.Ī few weeks later, at an auction in Burlington County, Branigan bid $2,600 for the horse who would change her life.

Another, Shiloh, had been sold to a woman who planned to ride her. One, named Powderface, had already been sold at auction and was almost certainly destined for a slaughterhouse. The woman on the other end of the line told her Steel Pier had been sold, and the remaining diving horses were headed to auction. Two years later, Branigan, then working in New York City at The Fund for Animals, got a phone call.

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People came from miles around to see the horses and their riders, the most famous of whom – Sonora Webster Carter – was blinded in a dive in 1931 and later became the subject of the Disney movie “Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken.” But by 1978, opposition from animal rights groups and plummeting visitor numbers in a struggling Atlantic City shut the show down. The horse ran up a steep ramp and then dove, 40 feet straight down, into a pool of water.įor nearly 5 decades, the diving horses were one of Atlantic City’s premiere attractions. Instead, what sticks in Branigan’s brain is the memory of standing at the end of Atlantic City’s Steel Pier watching a woman in a bathing suit and cap sitting on a horse with just a simple harness on its back. Cynthia Branigan, then 11 years old, was there – but her attention wasn’t on the politics.

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Johnson, who’d by then been president for nearly a whole year, was nominated for a full term in office. Late in the summer of 1964, Atlantic City was bustling with attendees at the Democratic National Convention.