Regal's Story

Here is Regal's story, up to the point I met him. This is cobbled together from all I've learned about his past so I hope that it's fairly accurate and factually correct. I promised you a horse story and friends, you're going to get one.

Regal is an orphan - not just a retired racehorse sent to a re-homing organization but a genuine motherless child. His mother died when he was born and he was bottle-raised by his owner. Regal was her only horse and she raised him herself and took him to the track and basically did everything with/for him throughout his life there. Raising an orphan foal without a surrogate mare is extremely challenging and Regal's human Mom obviously rose to that challenge. The devotion she had brought him through and he survived.

Being an orphan, Regal missed out on learning a lot of the basics of just being a horse. Mares teach their foals common sense, manners and herd politics - they impart the equine language to their offspring and guide them through interactions with both horses and humans.

As foals grow and move out into the world of the herd they learn even more of this language from the other horses. Because Thoroughbreds typically enter training at such an early age they do the bulk of their socialization with other horses as foals and yearlings. Once in training they tend not to be turned out with other horses if they are turned out much at all.

There are a lot of blank pages in the story of Regal's early years. I know that his owner was his principal handler and that he ran as a colt. It wouldn't be fair to Regal's original owner to try to fill in the story here, but I'll bet she had her hands full with an orphan stud colt during his training both on and off the track.

I have searched the internet for info about his racing career to try to learn more about him but there isn't a lot out there. The only things I could find were from the CTHSBC Annual Reviews for 2007 and 2008 showing that Regal had no starts in 2007 and only 2 in 2008 and another blip from Equibase that said he had been scratched from a race in June of 2008.

Regal was retired in September 2008, injured. I'm still not sure what the nature of his injury was, but I guess it was obvious he wouldn't run again and his owner decided to place him with New Stride.

He was gelded on his way off the track and then delivered to Greg's shortly afterward. According to Greg, the poor kid was so wired that he couldn't stand still for a moment to rest his battered body. He ran constantly for two weeks and had to be tranquilized so he would eat, losing a considerable amount of weight in the process (not a good situation with winter coming). It was all very traumatic for him I'm sure, and Thoroughbreds are such highly sensitive creatures.

Once he had done a bit of a detox, an attempt was made to turn him out and just let him be a horse. Having had very little background in just being a horse, Regal promptly impaled himself on the nearest sharp object and then spent the fall and winter recovering from that accident, abscesses in his feet, the emotional pain of being separated from the woman who raised him and all the rest of the usual racehorse baggage.

We had a long, hard winter up here and there were several weeks when the horses at the barn had to be indoors because the paddocks were impassable and unsafe. Sometime over the winter while Greg was handling Regal in his stall (just general petting and friendliness) Regal threw a fit that knocked Greg (and one of his teeth) out cold. Greg came to with Regal pacing around the perimeter of his body on the stall floor. I've never asked if he found his missing tooth...