Horse Blog

So here’s the question I have for you today. Even though it’s not part of American culture to slaughter horses for food, should we outlaw it? I’ve been doing some reading on the subject today and there seems to be two issues here. The first is using horses as food, for human consumption or otherwise. Second is how well horses are treated prior to slaughter.

That’s Peaches our English Setter riding next to dad in the training cart behind Gilford, our 3 yr.old Arabian/percheron warmblood. I wrote about the Lyndeborough drive (Granite State Carriage Assoc.) in my July 11 post; thanks (again) to Tracey Turner, here are HER pictures of us in Lyndeborough!

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1953: Frank Hayes, jockey, suffered a heart attack during a horse race. The horse, Sweet Kiss, went on to finish first, making Hayes the only deceased jockey to win a race.

Among the eight runners left in the wake of Premium Tap and a game Second of June were third-placed Sun King, who had finished second by a nose to Invasor in the Whitney Handicap (Gr.1) earlier in the Saratoga meet; Andromeda’s Hero, the 2005 Belmont Stakes (Gr.1) runner-up; ’05 Queen’s Plate winner Wild Desert; ’05 Travers Stakes (Gr.1) winner Flower Alley, who was turning in his second consecutive off-the-board finish for trainer Todd Pletcher; and 2003 Kentucky Derby (Gr.1) and Preakness Stakes (Gr.1) winner Funny Cide.

I grew up in rural Ohio, so farms are nothing new to me. When people tell me about "Fresh Country Air" as if it were something sacred, all I can think of are the horse barns, and sheep pens of the county fair, which never ever smelled fresh to me. This farm, however, was vastly different than any I've ever been on. It didn't stink, for one thing. And another difference, as I said, was that there is no barn. The homestead sits at the top of a hill; the land was once a strip mine, and the views from the farm are amazing.

After dinner we walked a million miles to MGM. They wanted to bet on the mechanical horse races. Unfortunately, there was a perma-crowd around the races, so I ended up watching Dids play $10 blackjack and do well. Another guy in our group ended up running hot and made over a grand on only $30 bets. There was a lady at the next table over that kept yelling “One million dollars!” over and over again. I hope she got there.

I then pulled out all my brochures from the RV show we went to with some friends in February. I wanted an “expandable” camper. That’s a cross between a pop-up camper and a hard-sided camper. I studied the floor plans for StarCraft, which is the biggest maker of these things and settled on a 21-foot model with two beds and a slide out. The floor plan put the beds on opposite sides of the camper and the dinette and sofa in the slide out. The result: plenty of floor space — the one thing that was really lacking in the horse trailer.