Photo of the Week: Life Behind Barz
Life Behind Barz used to be a bad boy. He bit; he was difficult to ride; there were days his young rider was certain he was trying to kill her. “I told my mom he wasn’t a good boy and that we should take him back,” says Kaileigh Keller, 19, of Virginia. “We got him in 2009 from the Thoroughbred Retirement Foundation at James River. My mother adopted him because he was pretty.” Instead of returning him, mother and daughter put their plans for him on the backburner for two years and rode their other horses. And gradually, over time, […]
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Minn. Horse of the Year rescued from kill pen
In the end it didn’t matter how many titles Tubby Time earned, or how many fans were charmed by his endearing flourish to finish his turf races, win or lose, with his tail flared out like a champ. But after the cheers had faded and the trophies grown dusty, the racehorse immortalized as the 2011 Canterbury Park Horse of the Year had lost the fine trappings of an earlier life to wind up discarded like trash into the slaughter pipeline. Looking bewildered and unrecognizable from the horse he’d once been, the multiple stakes winner from Minnesota, named for popular basketball […]
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Largest illegal US slaughterhouse raided, closed
The nation’s largest known illegal slaughterhouse—a place where horse carcasses were fed to crocodiles as the final insult—was shut down in March in a large-scale sting operation led by Richard “Kudo” Couto of the Animal Recovery Mission (ARM). Following a five month investigation in which Couto documented severe conditions on the property where more than 9,000 animals could be found living in filth, hunger, and disease, the kingpin of illegal slaughterhouses known as Coco Farm was raided by 80 law enforcement officials, including officers from the Miami-Dade Police Department, State Attorneys office, and members of the Organized Crime Unit, Couto […]
