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Clear Admit Staff Update: Alex Brown Works to Combat Horse Slaughter

Jun 27, 2008 | 0 comments

A few weeks ago we announced that Stacey Oyler, former Tuck assistant admissions director, would be joining the Clear Admit staff. She’s settling in nicely and already working with clients for the upcoming application season. In other staff news, we wanted to take a moment to provide an update on a former Clear Admit staffer, Alex Brown.

Brown, who continues to serve in an advisory role while on sabbatical from Clear Admit, has turned most of his focus in the past year toward the important issue of horse slaughter. What began as a sideline blog about racehorse Barbaro’s preparations for the Preakness grew into a full-time crusade against unnecessary horse slaughter after Barbaro’s subsequent injury and death. 

Through his website, www.alexbrownracing.com, Brown is working tirelessly to educate the public about the issue of horse slaughter, which also includes many racehorses once they are no longer able to race. Driven by a demand for horsemeat in other parts of the world, somewhere in the region of 100,000 horses who could live long, happy lives instead find themselves bound for slaughterhouses each year, Brown tells us. 

Some are unwanted, but many are simply unlucky. As part of his efforts to promote horse welfare, Brown is helping support legislation that would make horse slaughter – including transportation of horses to slaughter in other countries – illegal at the federal level. Recent efforts of the anti-slaughter community have helped lead to the successful closure of three U.S. slaughterhouses, two in Texas and another in Illinois.

Brown has now moved his base of operations to Canada to help support horse welfare there, because as progress is made at the legislative level in the U.S., animals are being shipped to Canada and Mexico for slaughter instead. (In Canada, Brown also works as an exercise rider for trainer Steve Asmussen.)

While the shift from admissions counselor to horse welfare advocate may seem a strange one, it made perfect sense to Brown. Many in the business school admissions world know Alex Brown well. For seven years he worked on the Wharton Admissions Committee, serving as the senior associate director of admissions. He left Wharton to join us here at Clear Admit, where he worked for two years counseling prospective MBA applicants.

What some may not know is that all the while he was waking before the sun to put in several hours every week at a track in Maryland galloping horses before heading into Clear Admit’s Philadelphia office. In fact, Brown came to the United States 20 years ago from his native United Kingdom as a horse racer. His MBA – at the University of Delaware – and subsequent work in MBA admissions and as an internet marketing professor – were initially all mere sidelines to galloping horses.

As fate would have it, Brown’s current endeavors allow him to combine his passion for horses with his prowess for internet marketing and his other MBA-related strengths. “The project basically combines all of my interests,” he says.  “From a management perspective it’s interesting in how the community has grown and how we’ve been able to raise a bunch of money without being an official enterprise or even an official nonprofit,” Brown continues. “We are very well organized on the horse slaughter issue. I do think we would be a terrific case study for Knowledge @ Wharton.” 

To date, his site has helped raise more than $900,000 to rescue 2,300 horses from the slaughter pipeline. Brown continues, “I had spent the better part of ten years interacting with awesome people who have done great work in their communities, MBA applicants and students alike. This was an inspiration for me to work on this project full time.”

Not at all unlike the admissions committees at the world’s top business schools, Clear Admit seeks well-rounded candidates with diverse interests to serve on our staff. Who better to help prospective business school applicants convey to schools their own multi-faceted personalities and unique offerings? We congratulate Alex Brown for following his passion for horse welfare in the past year. At the same time, we feel fortunate that he continues to lend us his expertise in the arena of MBA admissions.

To learn more about Alex Brown’s work on behalf of horse welfare, visit www.alexbrownracing.com. You may also be interested in this Q&A with Brown published by Bloodhorse.com yesterday, in which he discusses horse racing, horse rescue, horse slaughter and other issues relevant to general horse welfare.

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