horses

News, discoveries and ... fun

Just like the rest of us, the magnificent thoroughbreds that will be running in the Kentucky Derby eventually will grow old. But unlike us, racehorses don't have Social Security, Medicare and 401(k) plans to rely on in their retirement years, and they don't have control over their own fate.

In 1964, then New York Times reporter and later book author Gay Talese wrote a short  profile of a man who had embarked on what seemed like a unique, exotic profession. Jim Buck walked other people's dogs - 30 or 4o of them a day - while their owners were at work.

Fran Burns of Baltimore County, Maryland, grew up on a horse farm, riding and showing horses.