Bingo Helen was her perfect dressage prospect
When Lisa Croxton first saw a picture of Bingo Helen she just knew. True, the mare looked a little worse for having been put out to pasture with no foot maintenance. But she also possessed the tall, leggy conformation so desirous in a dressage mount. Eager to find a suitable horse to pursue her dressage goals, Croxton eschewed the traditional warmblood route after a friend suggested she try adopting a Thoroughbred from adoption agency New Vocations instead. “I checked the website everyday until I found her. I had to move fast because they go quickly,” Croxton says. “If you find […]
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Cheerful victor
Cheersto Glory got lucky. Several times. After ending up at a Hoosier Park paddock sale in 2005, the ex-racehorse was bound for slaughter when he caught the eye of volunteers with Friends of Ferdinand, a rescue organization formed earlier that year. Members loaded the gelding and three other unwanted ex-racehorses into trailers and drove them to safety. Before too long it became clear that something wasn’t right with Cheers. “He had a recurrent hoof abscess and he’d get very lame,” says Sara Busbice, a pharmaceutical company biologist and president of Friends of Ferdinand. “After the third time he went lame, […]
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Jewel of her heart
Lined up with other horse/rider teams waiting to try their hand at cowboy-mounted shooting exercises one February day in Indiana, Amy Latka and her ex-racehorse listened as the bang of six-shot revolvers and the pop of balloons ricocheted off metal walls. “There were no bullets in the guns, but they fired gunpowder and a piece of paper. The paper would light on fire and when it hit the balloon, it would pop it,” Latka explains. Just four years after first sitting on her off-track Thoroughbred Jewel to embark on “explosive” lessons that often left her in tears, Latka and Jewel […]
