SHINING LIGHT ON THE HORSE INDUSTRY

In late July, a grainy video circulated on Twitter, purporting to show the impetus for the two-year suspension issued to trainer Amber Cobb by Delaware Park stewards for “improper or inhumane treatment” of an animal and conduct detrimental to racing. The ruling had puzzled racing fans and media when it was published, since it did not describe the nature of the incident that prompted such a serious penalty.

(The Paulick Report received a clearer version of that video in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in late August. It is embedded below.)

The video shows a chestnut horse tied either to the back wall or to the metal grating over a window of a stall, while a woman shouts obscenities at the horse and strikes at the animal with a plastic pitchfork until the horse, a 2-year-old unraced filly, rears and stumbles, then falls to the ground with the wall tie still attached to either her bit or her halter. She tries to rise and falls again, finally lying still while breathing heavily until someone unclips the tie.

Many people wondered, after watching the video clip, what prompted the Delaware Thoroughbred Racing Commission to shorten Cobb's suspension from two years to 60 days after an appeal hearing held July 14. A recording of the appeal proceeding, which stretched for nearly five hours, revealed the decision came down largely to the perceived credibility of the accused and a whistleblower.

The video in question, along with a Live Photo captured on a previous date, were both shot by Lisa Whittaker, former groom for Cobb, sometime in February 2021 at a private farm in New Jersey. Whittaker provided both the photo and video along with a written statement to stewards in May 2021, after she said she had secured employment in another barn and was no longer afraid of being fired by Cobb.

Whittaker painted an unsettling picture of life in Cobb's barn. She worked for Cobb in November at Delaware Park, and then again at the New Jersey farm beginning in January or February, and continued with Cobb through the time that she sent a string to Delaware Park for the start of the new racing season. Whittaker said she saw treatment from Cobb that began to concern her – both at her time on the farm, where Cobb was starting young horses, and back at Delaware Park.

“Her methods are brutal,” Whittaker told the commission. “She is very heavy-handed. If they are slightly out of line, and these are young horses, she's screaming at them to whoa and hitting them with a whip. They don't understand why. She flips horses over all the time. She'll pull on their mouths when they're ground driving. She's screaming at them, she's whipping them, and there's nowhere for them to go but up.”

At the beginning of the 2021 Delaware Park meet, Whittaker recalled a horse – a bay colt – who was being taught to use the automatic walker. The horse broke loose and ran around the Delaware Park property for an extended period of time. When they finally caught him, the overwrought horse didn't want to go into his stall. Whittaker testified that Cobb beat the colt in the head with a chain shank to get him to back into the stall. She also said Cobb told her to withhold feed from the horse for four days afterwards.

Whittaker said the live photo she took was the day before the video and depicted the same horse.

“If you look, she's pulling this horse down,” she said, looking at the photo in the appeal hearing. “That's what she does, she'll drive them forward and she'll pull so hard, they have nowhere to go but up … This horse reared up, hit her head on the wall, and came down and broke a tack box.”

On the day the video was shot, Whittaker said Cobb had tried ground driving the horse, an unnamed filly out of Bluegrass Ellie, outside in an open area for the first time, four days into her ground training.

(Ground driving is a common practice in a horse's early training and usually involves tacking the horse with saddle and bridle and attaching a driving line on each side of the bit. The handler will walk behind the horse or, for work at a trot or canter, may stand while the horse travels in a circle around the handler. The practice is a good way to introduce a horse to steering and the feel of the lines on the horse's sides can prepare them for a rider's legs brushing them.)

The filly bolted, and at some point, got loose. Whittaker recalled Cobb brought the horse back into the barn and tied her to the wall in the stall while Whittaker kept mucking a nearby stall. When Whittaker heard scrambling and commotion, she rushed over and began filming Cobb's outburst.

For her part, Cobb did not deny that she is the person shown in the video, or that she hit the filly with a plastic pitchfork. Beyond that, her and Whittaker's interpretations of what takes place in her barn differ. Cobb denies that she ever instructed food be withheld from any of her horses for days; she recalled the colt who was loose at Delaware but said she told Whittaker to withhold food only until the colt was cool to prevent colic. She denied ever hitting any other horses.

Prior to the video, Cobb said both that the filly had been very tough but also that she had been responsive and reasonably compliant over their prior three days of ground driving inside the barn. The Live Photo from the previous day, Cobb and another witness said, showed the filly spooking at the noise from a car outside the barn, and Cobb disputed that the filly had fallen over, saying she broke the tack box with one of her feet as she regained her balance and was uninjured.

On the day in question, she said the horse became agitated when she got into the open field, seemingly with no provocation, and bolted. Cobb let one of her driving lines go almost immediately and struggled to hold the horse with the other.

“Eventually I didn't have anything but to let her go because she was so tangled up,” Cobb said. “I didn't want her to trip or hurt herself so I let go and she freaked out and ended up rearing up so bad, she got tangled up in the ropes. It wasn't anything I did, she just lost her mind.”

Once she caught the filly, Cobb said she brought her inside to Whittaker, who was told not to tie the horse to the wall. The filly, Cobb said, had previously demonstrated a propensity for “climbing the wall” or scraping and striking it with her front hooves.

When Cobb discovered Whittaker had tied the horse to the wall anyway, she said, she went in to release the horse. Then, Cobb said the horse tried to kick her – that was not shown on the video. The video recording began, Cobb said, when she made a second attempt to enter the stall to release the horse, first by standing in the doorway with the pitchfork and yelling.

“I was upset and I don't want to say 'stressed' because that's not right, but I didn't want anything to happen,” said Cobb. “I just didn't want anything to happen. So when I tried to get her to move over my fear and anxiety overtook me. I didn't want to hurt her, I just wanted her to be OK.”

Whittaker didn't see the incident the same way.

“That was her losing control of her temper,” said Whittaker. “She was mad at the filly. She lost control and went after the filly. That's pure anger. The filly, you see she's standing tied to the wall. She tried to say she was kicking at her, and the filly is standing calmly and had turned her head to her. She showed no aggressive behavior whatsoever.”

Indeed, commissioners appeared shocked by the behavior in the video. One can be heard muttering during the first replay of the video, “Jesus. Shit. I can't see this.” When a commissioner asks a staff member to confirm whether there is any further video evidence, a commissioner mutters, “That's enough.”

Commissioners did press Cobb on her motives for approaching the filly the way she did, focusing particularly on the moments early in the clip where the horse appears to be standing calmly before Cobb begins brandishing the fork at the horse.

“I know she looks calm,” said Cobb. “She's come at me numerous times. I'm scared that she's going to come over on me again. I kind of wanted to set my barrier.

“I wanted to say, hey, I'm dominant here. I need you to submit a little bit to me here. She's fighting me tooth and nail.”

Cobb was asked whether she could have anticipated that threatening the horse would be more likely, not less likely, to result in the horse flipping over in the stall.

“Yeah, but I didn't hit her that hard,” Cobb said, who attributed the horse's fall to slippery stall mats.

Cobb said she'd never had another horse flip over with her before.

But in fact, she has. Cobb was asked about a horse who died in her care in 2020 after flipping over near a wash rack.

“Oh,” Cobb said. “I forgot about her. I try to forget about her. She bolted off the wash rack and flipped over. It was an older horse … they think it was semi-heart attack related. She was an older horse.”

The horse's name was not mentioned during the hearing, but Cobb had a 5-year-old mare named Diamond Darlin die while in her care at Delaware Park in July 2020. The mare flipped over leaving a wash rack with Cobb and fractured her skull. In June 2020, an unraced 2-year-old named Sky High Interest under Cobb's care flipped over coming out of a wash bay at Finger Lakes and sustained a head injury requiring euthanasia, according to a report from the New York State Gaming Commission.

Commissioners also focused on the time lag between when the video was shot and the time it was reported to stewards in Delaware. Alan Pincus, attorney for Cobb, brought up the whistleblower's personal life as a possible motivator, suggesting that Whittaker's ex-boyfriend had an affair with Cobb (who said she has been in a long-term relationship with jockey Jamie Rodriguez for the past decade). Whittaker laughed, seeming bemused by the suggestion when questioned by Pincus. That laughter, for two commissioners, spoke a thousand words.

“Quite frankly I found her to not be a credible witness,” said secretary-commissioner Ed Stegemeier, citing her laughter as “nervous.” “She's not on trial but if she really cared passionately about animals, which she does to a degree, why do you wait months to do something?

“I want to support our stewards … but I really feel we need to reexamine the decision that was made … Maybe this was an isolated incident. But God help you if in the future this ever happens again.”

At the same time, Stegemeier said, the horse's reaction suggested it wasn't an isolated incident.

“When the horse saw you had a pitchfork, the horse immediately reacted to you coming in, which said to me this has happened before,” he said. “This was not the first time.”

Character witnesses for Cobb questioned Whittaker's professionalism while praising Cobb's, reiterating that they'd never seen horses without food or water in her shedrow. Rodriguez also testified to corroborate Cobb's version of events. He can be heard at the end of the video, telling Cobb the filly is dangerous and needs to be removed from the barn.

By contrast, several commissioners remarked during public deliberations that they were impressed with Cobb, who studied equine business for two years before embarking on a series of internships at breeding facilities and training operations and sustaining a brief career as a jockey before a horse she was riding flipped over on her and injured her knee.

“You were articulate,” said chairman W. Duncan Patterson Jr. “You were an excellent witness. I believe you were scared but I don't know what was inside your head, that's just what I'm surmising. I believe you acted irrationally and I cannot ignore the video. It's too damning. I concur with what my fellow commissioners said that the stewards were correct in their ruling but the penalty goes much too far. I think that would put you out of business. But maybe being out of business for a couple months, three months might be a good thing. Let you clear your head. I know what this business is like because I've been in it.”

“I believe Miss Cobb is one of the most articulate people that I've heard from the back end of Delaware Park,” said commissioner Richard Levine. “Everything we heard about her was excellent except for one witness who I personally think was very flawed and had not-friendly motivations. But the film does show what the film shows. All the evidence we have is that it was a single incident.”

The stewards also could not corroborate any of the accusations Whittaker made in her written statement about other abuses, either in New Jersey or Delaware. William Troilo, acting chief state steward, said that the decision of the stewards was based only on the evidence provided to them, since Cobb disputed the majority of Whittaker's statement.

All commissioners agreed that two years would end Cobb's career and should be shortened. Per the official rules of meeting order, the group worked its way down from a two-year suspension until they could find a length of time that was acceptable to the majority. They settled at 60 days.

Henry “Jim” Decker was the lone holdout and abstained from the final vote, which without him was 4-0 in favor of lowering Cobb's suspension to 60 days. They also required that Cobb demonstrate proof of completion of a certified anger management program, apparently not realizing that the stewards' ruling had already included that requirement.

“Cruelty to animals, whether it's a one-off or not, is unacceptable anywhere,” said Decker, who had suggested a one-year suspension. “The fact that something is a death sentence for a racing career, I don't believe should have any bearing on what the penalty should be. The penalty should be commensurate with the crime, so to speak.”

Cobb appealed the 60-day suspension into the Delaware court system, but through her attorneys voluntarily dismissed that case on Aug. 24. She has not saddled a horse since July 21.

Pennsylvania had taken the unusual action of suspending Cobb's license for two years before the completion of the appeals process in Delaware. The Pennsylvania commission rescinded that ruling on Aug. 2.

Cobb and Rodriguez said the filly was sent back to her breeder, Saratoga Glen Farm, with the recommendation she not complete the breaking process over fears she was too dangerous. As of late June, Troilo said she was turned out in a field. She did not appear to be physically injured by the incident.

Editor's note: An earlier version of this story identified Sky High Interest as the horse prompting a question from attorneys during her appeal hearing; in fact, Cobb had two horses die in 2020 after flipping over and sustaining fatal injuries — one in Delaware, and one in New York — and it was not clear which she referred to in her answer. The story has been updated to reflect this.

EquiSport Photos (Matt and Wendy Wooley)

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