Cornucopian broke down at Del Mar yesterday and is dead. I won’t spend any time on the obscene attention this particular kill is receiving – expensive horse, Grade 1 race, Del Mar, Baffert, and all that. Suffice to say, this poor boy is no more or no less worthy of our love and sympathy than the other 12,305 victims we’ve documented on this website.
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Steve, also good points. Those $$ mean nothing to a horse! They just want safety, good company of other horses & ability to move freely.All these trainers we have rode for had the same attitude! No relationship with the horses except dominance & control. We were the opposite. We established a relationship with each horse we taught to be ridden. Some of them we could ride with nothing at all! Bareback, no halter, lead or neck strap. Just our hands & feet. We feel for all those horses who trusted us & ultimately had that trust broken by this “Crooked, Crummy, Gamboling Game.”
Good points Wanda. Another trainer, Jim Gilmour,whose horses we have ridden at a Pleasure Acres farm has utilized his horses in the past as write offs against farm income on hundreds of acres he farmed with his brother on both sides of the Cascades. He always had poorly treated Hispanic workers or poorly educated white workers. Had not thought of it that way.
Regarding premature deaths of famous horses, as has been so aptly said here before, “All horses are beautiful, not just the fast ones”. To which I would add, All horses earn the same amount of money, which is nothing. What would a horse do with a million dollars? Eat it? Crap on it? They, like us, value life and good relationships, both of which are denied them in this industry.
Fred and Joan, it would be about the money as long as he doesn’t even care enough about the horses to relate to them but is using them as a business tax write-off. It’s still about the money even though he may not be rich. Granted he will never be in the top-tier of horseracing but as long as he’s using the horse business as a tax write-off, it’s about the money. He could be raising turkeys or hogs and it would still be about the money.
Wanda, Its not always about $$. Just look up a trainer who we used to ride for, Dennis Hurley. He`s been a low % trainer for years. He & his owner wife don`t even live here in Oregon. They just ply the rock bottom 1/2 mile bull ring tracks here. As near as we can figure its just a write off against outside income, In his case good retirement income from when he worked in the timber mill industry. He`s scared of horses! Our horse who we rode at Portland Meadows in 2004 he tried to roughly pat as a show of dominance. Gift tried to bite him! Everyone like him was nervous about the horse after that. Had a female jockeys son sleep under his feet while next to his old barn # 19 perfectly safely while we let Gift eat the little grass there was. We always hauled our horse back to our farm after riding him on the main track or training track. Yes, we know a lot of these people here in the NW. We have ridden for many of them over the course of the last 44 years.
For the love of money, not horses, is why these people do this. It’s only because they actually have a Hall of Fame for Animal Abusers-who-abuse-horses-for-money that this industry puts the Grade I & 11 levels of horse-abusing horse killers in their Hall of Fame. That is what Bob Baffert achieved as you know and that is what the shameless Irad Ortiz Jr. hopes to achieve. Whipping horses relentlessly to the finish line to win races is what? — his highest aspiration in life. Moral depravity knows no bounds. So that’s something to think about when you read about people in horseracing being Hall of Famers.
Please delete this if you feel it necessary. I really thought they would have done “everything” to save this horse for the breeding shed. The heartfelt condolences, poor me’s, he was so special and the list goes on…bullshit. what is it going to take to end this miserable travesty of a so called sport. You who have your beautiful race horses and run them into the ground for what? Sad sad sad.