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Correspondent Richard Schlesinger contributes to 48 Hours and the CBS Evening News. He is based in New York.

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I am an unashamed animal lover, so I have a sort of love/hate feeling about the horse racing industry.

I think the animals are magnificent but I’ve always had trouble with the business side of the racing world. Bad things happen to horses who don’t measure up or can’t perform any more. So I was eager to talk to Michael Blowen who runs Old Friends, the retirement home for race horses to see how he squares his love of the animals with the reality of the business. Turns out he’s troubled about it too -- and that’s what motivates him to rescue as many horses as he can. You can see how he's doing it tonight on the Evening News.

It is important to remember that there are some responsible owners who do provide for their horses after the animals’ productive years have passed. But Blowen believes there aren’t enough.

His facility is amazing. He has about 20 horses there, many of them you might remember from their glory days. Blowen has this marvelous relationship with them. He knows each one, knows their personalities, and is eager to meet their needs. He uses words like dignity and respect when he talks about what he wants to give these horses.

I left there grateful for the opportunity to meet him (AND the horses!)

CBS News legal analyst Andrew Cohen owns and races horses.There will be no Triple Crown winner in thoroughbred racing this year, again, thanks to a great stretch drive by Curlin in last Saturday’s Preakness Stakes. The big colt blew past Street Sense, the winner of the Kentucky Derby, right at the wire, to the delight of his patrons but to the dismay of racing fans everywhere who are rooting for that one magical horse to take the sport where it hasn’t been in a generation.

That’s the bad news in the horse world. The good news is that it has been a remarkable week for opponents of the barbaric practice of horse slaughter in this country. From Texas, where two slaughter plants were forced to remain closed, to Illinois, where Governor Rod Blagojevich signed into law a measure making it illegal in that state to slaughter horses for human consumption. The new statute in Illinois effectively shuts down the third and last plant in the country that dedicated its operations to killing our horses to sell as food for humans in other countries.

Neither the United States Supreme Court, which turned down an appeal by the Texas slaughterers, nor the Texas legislature, which tabled a bill that might have allowed the plants to re-open, was willing to ride to the rescue of a practice that seems out of a different time and certainly out of place for a nation founded, for the most part, on horse back. And even from Congress the recent news is good. The American Horse Slaughter Prevention Act was voted out of committee in the Senate—last term it passed in the House of Representatives—and should actually become the law of the land before the current legislative session ends in 2009.

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