“I get no money from it, which is crazy, I know, but I do it for the love of it.”
Bonnie Church is a local horse racing enthusiast who spends her free time re-homing ex-racehorses and she has re-homed hundreds of horses, doing so completely free of charge .
These are often retired horses whose careers have come to an end or horses that have been put through initial training but have not been good enough for racing.
Church also owns several of her own ex-racehorses that she keeps in her yard several of which have come from prestigious pedigree. For example, she is the owner of Creeping Storm who is a sister of the famous Cheltenham Champion hurdle winner Annie Power.
Despite coming from great pedigree Creeping Storm never went on to race and Church explained that: “I advertised her for about a year and no one wanted her. There is a bit of a stigma about chestnut mares that are thoroughbreds. People worry that they’ll just be scatty. So I took her on and she is lovely and gentle.”
There are several horses that are bred for racing but are ultimately not cut out for it, Church explained the process that trainers go through when picking out what makes a good racehorse. She said: “They pick out very quickly which ones are going to be any good, and they do a thing called pre-training.
“If they don’t make the grade in pre-training, it’s very expensive to put a racehorse into training and keep it in training so they won’t waste their money on something that has no potential.”
When this is the case and these horses are re-homed to people like Church the horses then have to adapt to their new life which is vastly different from what it would have been like at a racing yard.
Church said: “They need to decompress from racing. It’s quite hard because it’s a big routine change for them. They are pampered in racing. Despite what everyone thinks, they are really pampered.
“They stay in a lot. They’re fed very concentrated feed. They’re like athletes. They have a very routine based life, and then they finish racing, and they’re just kind of put in the field for holiday.”
The horses are then retrained so they can adapt to their new life, Church explained that: “They physically change shape, a bit like an athlete. If they suddenly stop training, they lose their muscle.
“There is a training process when you want them to turn them into riding horses, and you have to restart almost.
“A jockey sits with their knees up by their chest, they don’t have the legs wrapped around them like I would ride. So the horses have to learn a completely different way of being ridden.
“They go from being ridden in a very lightweight jockey with a racing saddle into a normal, conventional saddle, which is very different. It’s much heavier.”
Church also owns other horses that come from great pedigree, one of which is Fly With The Stars who is the son of Fusaichi Pegasus who was an American racehorse who won the Kentucky Derby in 2000 and then subsequently sold for $70 million, making it the most expensive racehorse to date.
Church explained that Fly With The Stars “Comes from very good pedigree but a rubbish racehorse, terrible.”. Fly With The Starts had 12 starts but only had two top three finishes which ultimately led his trainer to retire him in 2009.
Church said: “It just goes to prove you can have the most expensive racehorse in the world, and he doesn’t necessarily produce very successful offspring.”
Church also owns a few successful racehorses one of those being Hits Only Vic who was a Grade One race winner and had several wins accumulating £92,918 in prize money. Hits Only Vic now lives a more peaceful life after their racing career and has earned them self a well-earned rest.
Church explained what their life is like now after their racing career, she said: “They are not ridden that much and they are very pampered by me. Church said: “I feel like because they start working in racing from the age of two as babies, they’ve done more than most normal horses do in a lifetime.
“I try to think about what their life was like in racing and replicate that like, I don’t take mine out on their own, they’re much happier in the group or with one other horse.I just try to think about what they did in racing, and tried to sort of be sensitive to that.”
Church does what she does purely for the love of horses and makes no profit from owning and re-homing these horses, she explained that she does what she does because “So many horses leave racing every year to very uncertain futures. A lot in Ireland are just shot or put to sleep, which is tragic.”
