Good Morning Eventing Nation! I’ve got a feeling that today is going to be an exciting day. The battle for team leadership is getting pretty interesting; as we heard yesterday, Jimmy Wofford is applying for the Chef/Technical Advisor position. It’s hard to pick favorites when all the big names start raising their hands for the job, but I think the most important thing this process shows is how committed the applicants are to our sport and our country. All of them, David and Jimmy especially, have spent years serving the sport, not only in teaching, but in the many other leadership positions they’ve held simultaneously. These men wear many hats, and it’s not as if they’re needed to complete a wardrobe, but rather because the individuals wearing them are the only ones that fit into them.
That’s enough of my bad analogies, moving onto the real news:
An organization called TRAC (Thoroughbred Retirement and Adoptive Care) has been established in South Florida. According to
Horsetalk, TRAC is designed “to help in the retirement, retraining, and placement of horses at the end of their racing careers.” The racing industry in Florida is big, especially in the cold, winter months, so it makes sense that the program would be based there. There are many organizations and horse dealers that will go to the track and sort through the masses to find horses that have potential to be successful sport horses, but the ones with apparent soundness or temperament issues are left behind.
According to Celia Scarlett Fawkes, a member of the TRAC advisory committee, this group’s goal is “to make sure that no Thoroughbred is ever turned away from the program to face an uncertain future or tragic death.”
This article from the New York Times is a bit overdue as it was written back around Christmas time, but it gives insight to how the
poor state of the economy in Ireland is seriously affecting the horse industry. John mentioned the story back in December, but it was for paying NYT users only at the time. The old joke is that everything is always for sale in Ireland, but now everything is
really for sale. It’s sad as horses are such an integral part of the Irish culture, but according to
Horsetalk, the problem of abandoned and neglected horses in the popular Dublin area has gotten so bad that the Irish Horse Welfare Trust has joined forces with Fingal County Council to salvage the horses and the city.
You don’t hear this one often:
the local fire station was called in to extricate a horse from a swimming pool after he escaped from his field and fell into the pool. According to Horse and Hound; the horse, aptly named Mischief, was not injured and is recovering from the shock brilliantly. The pool was covered with a tarp since it is winter in England after all, but his owner stated that “Mischief grew up on water meadows and walking over tarpaulins as part of his natural horsemanship training, so he wasn’t at all afraid of crossing the tarpaulin over the pool.”
Lucinda and Clayton Fredericks were this week’s guests on the Eventing Radio Show. I don’t always have time to listen to the full hour of news coverage and commentary that the show provides, but this week’s is worth a listen. The Fredericks’ have gotten involved in the sport horse breeding scene in the last few years, they discuss on the show how their breeding program will play into their future plans in Eventing.
A good read: Putting down the vet clinic I loved [via JER]
That’s all for now, Eventing Nation. Check back later, the excitement never ceases.
Go Eventing.
