Calgary stampede... here we come! 'The Squirt' has experienced a girth for the first time... and it triggered a brief display of a hidden talent (that I hope stays hidden)!



We would like to start teaching him to ground drive/ long line, and so we decided that it was time to introduce him to a lungeing surcingle. He flinched a bit when it first went over his back... but after a few twitches and head tosses, he settled down. Then we did up the girth... we flinched... but he just gave a… Continue

'The Squirt' was in a remarkably good mood recently, so we decided to try introducing him to a few new things. He won't be backed for awhile yet, but we figured that it was time to introduce him to the concept of tack. We slipped a nice light synthetic endurance saddle onto his back... nary a flinch. We cooed what a good boy he was and he just looked at us quizzically, wondering why we were making such a fuss about him. I'm sure once we try it with a girth, it will be a quite different story.… Continue

On Saturday when we went to get 'The Squirt' from the pasture, we noticed that he was under one of the apple trees. It was wet after a rainy Friday night, and he was standing fetlock deep in mud and poking his nose into the muck. Eeew! We watched to see what he was doing, and he was wiggling his 'prehensile' lips through the mud to dig fallen apples out of it. Once he had an apple on the surface, he wiped off some of the mud with a swipe of his snout, then he would pick up the apple and drop it… Continue