Her excellency will appreciate the tribute, but will note that when she gallops, she really makes the earth shake.
Advertisements
2017 Chicoteague Pony Swim
The annual Wild Pony Swim at Chincoteague took place this year on July 26th. The swim itself took 18 minutes. 62 ponies went through the annual auction, with the highest price pony bringing $15,000 and the average price running about $3,400.
The fire company uses some of the proceeds from the auction to provide veterinary care for the ponies throughout the year. Money raised from the sale of “buy back ponies” is donated to a chosen charity.
Perfect Day for a Ride
Ride along with Aachen Winners Ingrid Klimke and Horseware Hale Bob
Nothing like a free cross country lesson from Ingrid Klimke! She and Horseware Hale Bob won the Aachen CICO3* on his dressage score of 34.5.
Gotta love those vicarious cross country experiences!
Now that you’ve seen it from her perspective, here’s the spectators’ view.
Bug Off!
Zelda hates bugs. And for the past two weeks, the bugs have been out in force. It’s a conundrum: it’s been too hot and humid to ride in the sun but the deer flies and horse flies have made riding in the shade intolerable. Even riding in the ring — which has worked past summers — has been an exercise in frustration. Zelda spends her whole time focused on the biting bugs. Even when I soaked her in Deep Woods Off, the biting flies were all over her five minutes later.
So, I broke down and ordered an Amigo Flyrider. Suiting her I felt like I was putting on armor, which I guess, in many ways is an accurate description.
The good news is that it worked. We had a very pleasant hack both in the open fields and through the woods. The deer flies hovered over us but they didn’t really bother her. I think I got stung more than she did.
My only complaint about the Flyrider is that it wasn’t quite as large as I’d hoped. Zelda wears an 84 sheet and this was an XL. It fits, but there’s not a lot of room to spare.
Chalking the White Horse
The Uffington White Horse is the oldest of the English hill figures. For more than 3,000 years, it has run across the flank of a hill — a enormous pictogram the size of a football field and visible from 20 miles away. Of course, when this primitive drawing was first cut into the hill, the only way to see it in its entirety was from the valley below. The complexity of creating a figure of this size and shape from the ground is mind boggling.
The White Horse is maintained on Chalking Day, a ritual where volunteers are given hammers, buckets of chalk and kneepads. The chalkers kneel and smash the chalk to a paste, whitening the stony pathways in the grass inch by inch. It’s technique as ancient as the horse itself. If the horse wasn’t maintained, it would be gone in just a few decades, reclaimed by the hillside grass or erased by erosion. Archeologists believe that chalk figures were integral to the social groups of the time; that part of the benefit of the horse was the ritual gathering to maintain it and create a societal bond.
Excavation of the site in the 1990s confirmed its prehistoric beginnings. It also showed that the design for the figure was cut into the hill at a depth of up to a meter — not just scratched into the chalk surface. This made it possible to date the layers of quartz in the trench. The results of the testing showed that the horse was created at the beginning of the Iron Age, perhaps even the end of the Bronze Age, nearly 3,000 years ago.
Mystery surrounds the horse. No one knows why the horse was made. One theory is that since in Celtic art, horses were shown pulling the chariot of the sun, this horse was placed so that the sun crosses over it.
The shape of the horse has changed over the centuries, modified by erosion and repeated recutting. The present outline may be only a part of the original: aerial photography shows that a larger, more conventional shape of a horse lies beneath. Some believe that it wasn’t a horse at all — put could have been a dragon or a mythical creature. But it’s certainly been called a horse since the 11th century.
Not Afraid of Plastic Bags
This sales video is hard to top!
Another potential buyer for Pumba said to me, “so she’s ok with kids and llamas but what does she think of chickens and is she scared of plastic bags?” So I thought, well why would they ask that? Maybe they need her to help with the groceries… (No horses, roosters or people of Papakura were harmed during the making of this video…. incredibly.)
– Brookby Heights International
Flip Flops & Horses Don’t Mix
It’s oh, so tempting to leave your sandals on during the summer, even when you are working around horses. A young British woman paid a price for that decision a few weeks ago when one of the horses that she was leading spooked and landed on her foot. The result? She lost a toe.
I learned my own lesson the hard way two years ago. I slipped into the pasture to give Freedom his grain and something spooked him. He jumped three feet to the left and landed on my heel. I was lucky. Although it was very painful, he didn’t break anything but the skin. I was wearing slip on shoes that didn’t provide enough protection.
Lesson learned. I always wear boots around the horses. No exceptions. You should, too.
