My First Horse

I got my first horse when I was about 10 or 11 years old. I was told he was an ex-race horse and he was 10 years old and retired. I was told not to let him go full gas because he loved to run as fast as he could and I wouldn’t be able to stop him. Of course, at 10 years old, I heeded the warning. I was also told he was a gelding. That’s when I found out what a gelding was. I was 10, I didn’t know about those things at that age. 

A few months ago I was watching a horse race on TV and the host said something about horse pedigrees being available online. Immediately, I wondered if my horse would be in the database, but probably not because it had been 50 years. So, I did a search for race horse pedigrees and looked up my horse whose name was Snipette Tag. To my delight, I found my horse in the database. However, surprisingly, it said that my horse was a mare. I was confused at first and thought they made a mistake but then it made sense because her name was Snipette and that sounds like a girl's name to me. Unfortunately, the records didn’t say she had any winnings but I found out that a lot of horses are trained as race horses but never run in an official race. That was okay, I was just happy to have found her records. It also said she was born in 1962 so that sounded about right.

I have done a lot of genealogy research on my own family so it was exciting to find the family tree of my horse even though she has been long gone. All of those childhood memories with my horse came flooding back to me. What a great day.