I have confirmed that Public Defender, a “pulled up abruptly, left track in ambulance” at Gulfstream May 16, is in fact dead. She was five years old. Her final, complicit-in-the-kill exploiters: Miller Racing, Saffie Joseph, Miguel Vasquez.
I have confirmed that Public Defender, a “pulled up abruptly, left track in ambulance” at Gulfstream May 16, is in fact dead. She was five years old. Her final, complicit-in-the-kill exploiters: Miller Racing, Saffie Joseph, Miguel Vasquez.
Miller Racing, with Saffie Joseph Jr. as trainer, has CLARET BERET listed as their top horse out of their top 20 horses. She was also a Five-Year-Old when she collapsed during a routine workout in Florida.
I don’t know why these people don’t “retire” a high dollar earning filly or mare from racing and transition her to being a broodmare. It seems like they’d rather kill them than produce more Thoroughbred foals, which I speculate is part of the reason why there is a lower and lower number of Thoroughbred foals born each year.
The breeders of PUBLIC DEFENDER certainly know how to pick a lousy name, assuming the breeders were the ones who named her.
Five years is about 25 years short of a horse’s potential life span. But when you have people who just see dollar signs in the horse business, it is not profitable to have a horse around for an extra decade or two if they are not at least breaking even after so many years in the “horse business”.
The IRS has specific criteria to determine the difference of having horses as a business or as a hobby. Is it a business? Or, is it a hobby?
I don’t feel sorry for these money grubbing horse exploiters and killers one bit.