Left on Fla. roadside, he was blinded, burned
On a desolate stretch of road slicing first through sugarcane fields and then everglades in the Homestead region of South Florida, it must have felt like burning hell last July to an ex-racehorse waiting for the next thing to go wrong in his young life. Emaciated and scared, Prodigioso shifted his weight gingerly on four painful feet that oozed with thrush. His back pasterns were flayed open with deep burns, probably ripped by rope, and a painful looking burn was raw and ugly on his lower lip. His right eye, freshly blinded, somehow, showed him shadows that must have scared […]
Share this:
Happy Bert’s gift to the suffering—smiles
If ever there was a racehorse appropriately named, it’s Happy Bert. Agreeable as Mr. Ed in the hit 60’s TV show, Happy Bert dispenses smiles the way the fictional white horse doled out advice. There’s nobody who doesn’t get along with Happy Bert, says Marlene Murray, executive director of Thoroughbred charity R.A.C.E. Fund. “When he first retired in 2009, his trainer contacted us and said that he had such a nice personality and was so sensible that he’d be really good with children, and she even thought he’d be good as a therapy horse,” Murray says. Fast forward through a […]
Share this:
Horse with a hole in his face comforts so many
This story was originally published July 2012. At Brigitta Bogen’s Texas farm, looks and disabilities don’t matter so much. Never was that single fact as clear as on a February day this year when a funny looking ex-racehorse came to live on her farm. Hammersmith was just settling into his large stall with Dutch doors, when a group of excited youngsters burst excitedly into the barn, wanting to get a look at the new guy. From over the top of his stall door, he peered at them face on, revealing, as if he’d been the poor loser in a fight, a one-inch hole beneath […]
