After head trauma, rider regains confidence on OTTBs
Stat Box Tattoo: 532283 Race name: JJ Silverheels Sire: Career Best Dam: Gusso JJ Height: 16.2 Color: Gray Trampled by a Thoroughbred trying to flee his stall, Jasmine Klunder was knocked unconscious when her head hit the barn’s brick floor. The last thing she remembered before everything went black was the first thing she thought of when she woke up in a hospital bed an hour later: where’s the horse. Jasmine was 14 years old. “My last memory was of him running toward the road, and I was worried about him. I just wanted to know he was okay,” says […]
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Pay Attention makes a mint, lands softly
Amanda Smith started to pay attention to the plight of ill-fated racehorses shortly after Barbaro broke down at the 2006 Preakness Stakes. That’s when Pennsylvania pharmacist and pleasure rider started to ponder the ineffably sad ending that can come when their racing days are over. Her curiosity led her to websites by exercise rider and anti-slaughter advocate Alex Brown, and soon she started following careers of horses who were once big earners before they dropped in class to run for relative peanuts in claiming races. She started to monitor Alex Brown’s Top Bunk List, which follows careers of racehorses who […]
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It’s (not) a hard-knock life
Stat Box Race name: Great Answer Barn name: Annie/now Willow Show name: Girl Talk Sire: Gimmeawink Dam: She Said Possibly Height: 15 1/2 The delicate filly, so tiny people say she looks like she was ‘shrunk in the dryer,’ had a laundry list of problems when Ted Mielcarz met her. Just healing from a left tendon tear, the horse named Annie locked a stifle three weeks after embarking on light training. So when Mielcarz got the call from the barn at 9 p.m. in late October last year, he started having second thoughts about adopting the horse at all. “But […]
