SPCA rescue mare ribbons in Florida; hard won
In a squalid yard littered with empty grain bags starved a mare named La Sheikh. The name alone might have seemed ironic, even pathetic, given the state of deprivation that drove the hungry animal to forage desperately in the short grass, her ribs protruding. She was far from living a royal life. And the sad irony didn’t end there. The haggard 15-hand mare really was descended from royalty. Not way-down-the-family-tree nobility: both grandsires were pretty big. Storm Cat sired her father and Pulpit sired her mother. A.P. Indy was her sire’s grandfather. And the third branch of her family tree […]
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Rescued racehorse goes to jock who loved him
No sooner had the dusty black Thoroughbred landed at the Texas livestock auction Sept. 18, his old friends came running to help. Within 24-hours, Handsomely was identified by his lip tattoo, and rescued with the help of a jockey who won her first race on the good-looking fella, and a past trainer who once pinned his hopes and aspirations on the fine figure of a horse. “In no time, I had enough money to buy him, pay for his quarantine and his feed,” says Donna Keen, of Remember Me Rescue of Texas. She notes that she was once again touched […]
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She wins $200K on beloved t’bred, later buys him
Borrowing a friend’s old jockey saddle, Jackie Acksel, a middle-aged mother of two, swung onto the back of the luckless racehorse and folded into traffic heading toward the starting gate at Delaware Park. Ignoring the gentle ribbing of stewards yelling, “Don’t fall off!” the one-time jockey set her legs into an unnaturally cramped angle caused by leathers that were too short, and piloted Smalltownman to the scene of his comeback. It was August 2011 and just a month earlier, Smalltownman had put in a poor performance at Parx Racetrack in Pennsylvania. And as she watched from the sidelines as the […]
