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Tabula Rasa and Jenn Shaffer enjoy a lighthearted moment at the Pimlico Totally Thoroughbred Show. Photo by

How a dangerous horse pulled her from despair

Over four short weeks in December 2009 Jenn Shaffer had become unmoored. The breakup with her boyfriend and the loss of the home they shared, the sudden loss of her job, and then the death of her beloved horse; now she sat in a friend’s apartment feeling shipwrecked. So devastated, so dazed, while contemplating where to turn next, she suddenly understood why people contemplate and sometimes even do the worst thing imaginable. To themselves! “I wouldn’t have done it myself. But I understood it in those moments why people commit suicide,” she says. That’s when her friends, her really good […]

Tommy carts around his owner's wee cousin at the Totally Thoroughbred Show at Pimlico.

A happy hunter who had them at ‘hello’

His chiseled head carried gracefully low, his lithe body in a perfect frame, the lovely gray gelding who cinched the High Point Hunter title in last year’s Thoroughbred Alliance Show series is a racehorse who’s inner hunter/jumper has found the perfect proving ground. “He’s a rock star!” says Lauren Moran of her ex-racehorse Tom (Jockey Club: Deep Threat). “He’s a natural. He has a beautiful form over fences, and when he’s flatting, he looks like a million bucks.” Deep Threat Show name: Allumination Nickname: Tom Sire: Buddha Dam: Sacred Promise Foal date: April 21, 2005 Earnings: $38,320Clearly, others agreed with […]

Habit and Kade strut their stuff

Anxious pasture pal is now unruffled sport horse

Habitworthaving once worried himself sick. He fretted about being confined to a stall after years living in a pasture, and was nervous around other horses. It got so bad, when he first came to live with Amy Bush, that the chunky gelding grew skinny with ulcers, and even opened up a deep cut on his leg after scuffling with other horses. “He’d been out to pasture for so long that I don’t think he knew how to handle the change. I have four children and it’s not exactly a quiet place,” Bush says. “I think he just wanted to be […]