Barn Buddies

Everyone has that one friend who celebrates every holiday with over-the-top enthusiasm, loads of decorations and themed outfits (down to the socks) for each event. Turns out there are animals like that, too. Butterscotch the Nigerian Dwarf goat is very into holidays. Kaymarie Kreidel, former jockey and current outrider at Laurel Park, has costumes for […]

Everyone knows the old adage about cats and their nine lives. For 16 years now, the orange and white cat that has inhabited the stallion barn at Airdrie Stud has been as determined as any cat Kelly McDaniel can remember to use up every one of the nine allotted to him. McDaniel, the longtime stallion […]

On one stormy evening last summer, a group of Darby Dan Farm employees gathered at Lexington’s Red Mile to cheer on a cherished four-legged athlete in his first race. They discussed running strategy and trained their runner to properly break from the gate. And when a herd of floppy-eared Dachshunds (a.k.a wiener dogs) came charging […]

If you drop by trainer Bret Calhoun’s barn at Churchill Downs and find the long-time conditioner away from his shedrow, you’ll probably run into his assistant, Dennis Geier. Tall, burly and kindly-spoken, Geier is known by one and all at the track by his nickname “Peaches.” If he’s not in the barn checking on horses […]

Cats get all the credit for rodent control in the barn, but when are goats going to get a little credit? During a visit to trainer Kelly Rubley’s Fair Hill barn this summer, I realized mouse prevention is a team effort. Yes, Pudgy the cat (a friendly fellow with a star-quality gray coat who comes […]

Sir Alfred Munnings was known across Britain for his brilliance and perfectionism as a painter of Thoroughbreds, feverishly sketching and practicing on Newmarket’s Warren Hill in an attempt to capture the poetry of horses taking flight. But while Munnings sat with his sketchbook at the start of a race, his wife Violet found herself in […]

When Southern California trainer Dan Blacker shipped his stable back from Del Mar to Santa Anita Park earlier this week, horses weren’t the only four-legged animals in the van. There was also a hand-me-down pygmy goat named for a Kentucky Derby-winning trainer and formerly owned by a Hall of Fame jockey turned trainer. The goat’s […]

Now that I am known far and wide as the writer of everyone’s favorite Paulick Report series, it’s not uncommon for me to get emails and Twitter DMs that read something like, ‘Have you done a thing on the Serpe kitties?’ (If you have a Barn Buddies tip, by the way, I’d love to hear […]

Although Hill ‘n’ Dale Farm is just as polished a facility as any other Central Kentucky Thoroughbred farm, with miles of fields and neatly-trimmed lawns, Hill ‘n’ Dale President John Sikura sees something a little different when he scans the property. Lifelong hunter and naturalist Sikura looks at the fields and woods as ecosystems, with […]