Lipizzanner!
great special on the Dancing Stallions tonight. I love to watch those mothers jump.
Dad did too. He had seen specials but he had wanted to see them in person- he got news of them being at some Chicago venue or another but when he arrived he found he was a day late. Less than a year later he was dead.
Watching this, I wish he could have seen it. There is something about people who tend horses, and really care for them, that Dad would have liked a good deal.
Dad was born to tend horses, and we spent a lot of my youth helping people with them, but I don’t know shit about them. I know that it made dad sick to see people treat horses like cats- play withthem when convenient, and ignore them until you were interested in playing again. I saw things people allowed to happen to horses that were frankly miserable, and it destroyed my faith in humanity as a whole- and even now, I only have any faith in the very few people who have proven themselves to be trustworthy, and there are just a few of them.
Yes, I realise the people who watch over these magnificent horses are paid well to do so, but you can’t have a job like that without love for what you do, and it shows.
G-d bless anyone who holds the life of an animal in high regard, and acts as a faithful steward to that animal’s life. I hope Dad can see this.
I haven’t seen the Lippizzaners, but I’ve been to the Spanish Riding School in Jerez de la Frontera, Spain, where horses of similar breed are shown (Andalusian horses, of the sub-breed known as Carthusians – – same as the monks):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andalusian_horse
The Academy in Jerez is owned and operated by Alvaro Domecq, of the famous Domecq sherry family and also a famous rejoneador (bullfighter who fights while mounted on horseback).
Amen!
I came home from high school one spring day to see a horse in our barn lot. Sad looking animal. She was still in winter fur, head down, just standing there, didn’t even look up when I walked out there. Dad had worked an animal cruelty call and the Human society didn’t have room for a horse. Dad volunteered to board her for a while.
We took pictures every week for the trial. Started feeding her and after a couple days, her fur started to fall out. She was a golden Palomino. Beautiful horse. When I’d get home, I bolt thru the back screen down, and she’d run up to the corner of the lot and nicker…. Total turn around. I pulled old hair out and groomed her every day after school.
At trial, the judge was incredulous at the change in 6 weeks. She was a totally different animal. Short story: she would put this horse in a lot in winter, not feed her and barely water her. There wasn’t a horse biscuit in the lot when they found her.
We wound up with her, the girl payed for the vet bills and feed, and didn’t go to jail.
Registered Quarter horse named Honey Tamet, had papers going back several generations. And was a slick cutting horse. She almost left me sitting on air several times when we worked cows with her. Just drop your reins and hold on, she knew what she was doing…
Some fool shot her in the belly with a .22 and she died while I was in college. I miss that horse almost as much as I miss dad. They were inseparable. Can’t smell a horse without seeing dad.
Stx: G-d hold them in the hollow of his Mighty hand. In the afterlife, I hope I get to meet them both.