Around the final turn, and heading for a home

Here's an excerpt from a New York Times article, highlighting the often sad lives of old race horses:

Just last month, Tour of the Cat, 11, was at Presque Isle Downs in Erie, Pa., competing at racing’s lowest levels. He had at least one sore ankle and raced for the 79th time, managing to beat only one other horse.

His odyssey from bottom-level horse to unlikely stakes champion and back again
illustrates how many in the racing industry routinely overlook their responsibility to aging animals.

Tour of the Cat might have made an 80th start if not for a group of racehorse devotees who know one another mostly through the Internet and who share a conviction that old horses should be retired with dignity. The group found a sympathetic horse owner, Maggie Moss, who claimed Tour of the Cat for the rock-bottom price of $5,000 on its behalf.

She then shipped him here to Old Friends at Dream Chase Farm.

“It was like finding Babe Ruth sleeping under a bridge,” said Michael Blowen, the farm’s president and founder. “They breed 36,000 of them every year, and three years later only one of them is going to win the Kentucky Derby. The question is, What happens to the rest of them?”

At least 3,000 racehorses come off the track annually in need of homes, the Thoroughbred Retirement Foundation estimates, and only about one-third of them are as fortunate as Tour of the Cat. Many more are abandoned, euthanized or slaughtered. Ferdinand, the 1986 Kentucky Derby winner, wound up slaughtered in Japan in 2002 after failing as a stallion. Even though the federal government closed the last United States slaughterhouse in 2007, horses are regularly sold at auction and trucked to slaughter in Mexico or Canada.

More here.

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