Videos | Partners In Thoroughbreds

Horse of a Different Career

By WILL SPRINGSTEAD springstead@poststar.com
Selling her racehorses and letting them fall out of mind was out of the question for Lois Engel.

But how were other partners in Pucker Ridge Racing and other acquaintances to know that? It seemed like they had their fill of bad headlines from the horse racing world to fall back upon – from champions ending up at slaughterhouses to owner/breeder Ernie Paragallo being arrested for animal cruelty to his own horses.

“All along, everyone would say, ‘What are you going to do with them when they get off the track?’ I wouldn’t let anything bad happen to them,” Engel said.

About that time, she met Becky Palmer and Tina Hance, who run The Barn Too in Westport, a boarding and horse-leasing farm that also gives riding lessons. Palmer worked with many horses in teaching them different jobs from the ones they’d been used to.

What it has led to is a partnership in which Pucker Ridge Farm is the only local breeding farm working on retraining thoroughbreds for different careers.

“As we chatted more and more, it seemed to me there was a market for these retrained horses,” said Engel, who owns the 300-plus-acre farm in Warrensburg with her husband, Paul Raymond.

Currently, the farm has anywhere from six to 10 horses in some form of retraining for a different career. Engel’s two, Halation, a maiden winner, and Little Speed Demon, who bowed a tendon in just her third workout and never made it to the track, are training to become steeplechase horses.

Patience is a virtue

As Halation kept struggling on the track, he would end up dropping in class and Engel wasn’t ready to see her horse entered in cheaper claiming races, so she decided to retire him and bring him back to the farm.

Of course, not everyone was happy with that idea.

“I dreaded (Halation) coming back,” barn manager Jill Murphy said.

Even though Halation had been on the track for a few years, he left behind his reputation. Still, the combination of gelding him and just letting him “come down” from the racehorse world gave him a better attitude.

“They have to be isolated for a while” after coming off the track, Engel said. “They’re in a barn close to 23 hours a day and they only know how to run one way.”

“You have to gradually get them re-acclimated. We don’t ask much of them the first two weeks,” Murphy said.

After that, Palmer added, it’s a question of trying the horse on different tasks and seeing what he is good at.

Once they determined that Halation liked to jump, they got the idea of making him into a steeplechase horse.

“Five is the ultimate age for training a jumper,” Palmer said. “Like dressage and other areas, the regular horse world starts at this age.”

“It’s being a weekend athlete instead of a professional athlete,” Engel added.

Finding their niche

Even when retraining two horses to do the same job, one has to remember they are still individuals, and an unseasonably warm day in January confirms that. Jennifer Habgood takes turns riding Little Speed Demon and Halation in the riding pen at Pucker Ridge, and the two react differently to the task.

Once warmed up, Little Speed Demon wants to go over the jump, but struggles a bit at first with her footing and pace. Once she figures it out, she does it willingly and repeatedly.

Halation is a different story.

Habgood is not his regular rider and he’s letting her know that, fighting her on nearly every request while warming up. One would think Little Speed Demon would end up being the better prospect. Not having tried it yet in an actual race, it might still be the case. But as far as natural jumping talent goes, Engel and Palmer said Halation dwarfs her.

“If he continues in his training, he’ll be a high-end jumper,” Engel said.

Halation has decided to stop “showing off,” as Engel put it, and clears the jump for the first time with an ease Little Speed Demon never had. He does so several more times, once messing up his footing, but making up for it by kicking his back legs extra high and still landing cleanly.

Of course, steeplechase is just one avenue for retired thoroughbreds. There have been others that have gone into such areas as fox hunting, team penning and police work.

Engel has tried to get the word out about her retraining efforts by putting posters up at Aqueduct and Belmont racetracks. Beyond her farm’s work, however, she hopes that more owners will consider retraining horses and not just selling them to whomever asks after their track career is over.

Noting it costs about $5,000 to rescue sick horses who are very bad off, Engel said if more owners would put that money toward retraining, it might solve a lot of the bad-ending stories the horse racing world has encountered.

“Now we’ve gone the whole cycle,” Engel said of her farm. “It’s nice they don’t have to fall through the cracks.”