Good news first: guess who’s going to Belgium?

Moving on…

Beka of The Owls Approve has started a cool new blog hop series centered around our ponies. I can’t resist that, because there’s nothing I like talking about more than my ponies. My non-horse friends and SO are painfully aware of this given that I struggle to come up with more than 5 words to say about anything non-horse related.

Before you met, where was your horse?  Who bred him/her?  What do you know about his sire and his dam?  What do you know where he came from?  Tell me about the time before he had a trainer.

I guess I’ll answer for both of my horses…

Sadie: I bred her. I leased her dam, picked the stallion, paid for the semen, had it shipped in from Canada, paid the vet, waited a year, and voila – baby horse. I knew her dam very well and felt like I had a good sense of the stallion from his owner and some friends of mine that knew him (Westporte). I was the first person to put my hands on her and there is zero mystery for me to Sadie, which is really nice. I know her as well as anyone could possibly know a horse… everything she’s ever done and everything that’s ever happened to her. There is no “before me” time.

 

 

Henry is obviously more of a mystery but I still know quite a bit about him compared to most of the other horses I’ve bought. He’s a 2007 Arkansas born and bred TB by the stallion Skeet out of a mare named Lona Thump. I have never been able to find anything on Skeet other than the farm he used to stand at and some old racing photos. Not a clue where he is now, and I don’t know anything about his dam. I was able to trace Henry back to his breeder though, found her phone number online and called her. She was a very nice older lady who just had him and one other young horse at the time, and she remembered him but didn’t seem that interested in staying updated on him so I haven’t called her back. She bred him and owned him until he was 4 but never raced him… she said he was always more interested in eating than running. “The only thing he ran to was the feed bucket”, exact quote.

Her vet found him a non-racing home, although I’m not totally sure who it was with – this is the only gap in his timeline that I wasn’t able to fill. From there he went to an eventing/jumper trainer who showed him in the hunters a couple times and had him for sale (for quite a bit more than what I ended up paying), then started doing some other stuff with him. She said he got kinda fried so she turned him out to decompress, and almost a year later I bought him out of the field sight unseen.

 

Hard to believe it’s been almost a year now!