Thoroughbreds who don’t make the winner’s circle, are injured or simply too old to race are discarded by their owners, auctioned off — sometimes to the slaughterhouse.
Now these horses are getting new lives.The twist? Prison inmates looking for their own second chances are helping save them.
Each year thousands of racehorses in the United States are sent to slaughterhouses and their meat sold overseas, according to the nonprofit Thoroughbred Retirement Foundation.
That’s why the foundation funds programs in eight prisons across the United States to rescue these abandoned horses and train prisoners to "gentle" them so they can be adopted.
The program is also changing inmates lives, and helping reduce their chances of returning to prison.
To read the article, go to http://www.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/09/18/maryland.prison.horses/index.html