Ex-race horse makes recovery after abuse
MIAMI (AP) – When rescuers found the horse, he was tied to a palm tree on a Northwest Miami-Dade County farm where animals die for meat: a skinny, diseased wreck with rotting hooves and hide. Only the tattoo inside his upper lip hinted at his regal bloodline: Freedom’s Flight, descendant of Triple Crown winners Seattle Slew and Secretariat.
“Anything that could be wrong with a horse was wrong with him,” said Richard Cuoto, now Freedom’s Flight’s owner. “He’s a fighter, but he had his head down, like, ‘Just shoot me.'”
Freedom’s Flight’s descent from the thoroughbred circuit’s pampered paddocks into equine hell took just three months after a mishap at Gulfstream Park. It’s not possible to document each step of his sad journey, but Cuoto, a board member of the South Florida Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, believes he was destined for the underground horse meat market.
“He was thrown away three, four times,” Cuoto said.
Freedom’s Flight was born Feb. 16, 2005, at Claiborne Farm in Kentucky’s Bluegrass region, linked to greatness by sire and dam.
His father, Pulpit, is the grandson of Seattle Slew, who won the Triple Crown in 1977. Freedom Flight’s great-great grandfather, the legendary Secretariat, won it in 1973.
His mother is Heather’s Flight, granddaughter of Nijinsky, great-granddaughter of Northern Dancer.
Herman Heinlein of Plantation, a retired New York landscape contractor, owns Heather’s Flight and expected great things from her foal.
“We had high hopes,” said Heinlein, 76, “but these things happen.”
After the horse failed to draw a six-figure bid at Kentucky’s prestigious Keeneland Yearling Sale, Heinlein sent him to Florida, where he raced for the first time Dec. 22, 2007, at Calder.
On April 4, 2008, after another two races, Freedom’s Flight made his only run as a 3-year-old, at Gulfstream. Seconds after clearing the gate, his front leg snapped but didn’t pierce the skin. He came from the back of the pack to finish third anyway.
“He’s a competitor,” Cuoto said. “When they’re on the track, they know where the finish line is . . . The jockey didn’t know he was injured. Right after finish line, he started to break down.”
Trainer Jose Pinchin called Heinlein to report the injury.
“They told me his racing career was over,” said Heinlein, who owns 100 horses. He faced a choice: pay to euthanize Freedom’s Flight or, as Pinchin suggested, give him to Marian Brill, a 44-year veteran of Florida racing and a horse rescuer.
To a racehorse owner, an animal that can’t run “is a broken machine that don’t work,” Brill said. “They get rid of it.”
Heinlein says he kept title to the horse “because I didn’t want somebody to get him back to racing.”
Still a stallion, Freedom’s Flight could have undergone expensive treatment for his leg then become a breeder, but “he never proved himself as a racehorse,” said Brill, and since his famous ancestors begat hundreds of offspring, “Why breed the one that’s farther down the line?”
Brill said she “started rehabbing him” but his injuries were too daunting. Then, she said, a man whose name she didn’t know bought him for $500.
“They loaded him on a trailer and left,” she said.
For the next two months, Freedom’s Flight endured both insult and injury. Based on conversations with state parimutuel investigators, Cuoto believes that for part of that time, he hobbled along on his broken leg as a riding pony for kids.
And someone gelded him – ruling out any future career as a stud.
He was among several distressed horses that Officer Debbie Puentes of the Miami-Dade Police Department’s Agricultural Patrol Unit spotted July 7, 2008, on Manuel Coto’s property, which the Florida Department of Agriculture oversees as a “garbage-feeder farm,” authorized to feed cooked garbage to swine.
Freedom’s Flight’s story has gotten global attention. Now the SPCA hopes he’ll become a star.
The group has entered him in a contest to play his famous ancestor, Secretariat, in a Disney movie.