Step one: Teach your adorable pony to put all of its feet on something.
Step two: Teach your adorable pony to put all of its feet on something WOBBLY.
Step three: Allow your adorable pony to discover that it enjoys this weird little game.
Step four: Get famous on the internets.
Step five: Go Riding!
Comic courtesy of Kellie Lewis.
KickyBrand.com is an online horse lovers site currently selling clothing, greeting cards and stickers. It also routinely publishes a cartoon strip by Kellie Lewis that has a little bit of kick to it.
For this week’s 24-hour photo challenge, we wanted to see your horse wearing his dinner: hay in the hair, grain on the muzzle. As usual, our readers responded with an absolutely hysterical gallery of images of horses wearing their feed: here are ten.
Kristen Pierce: “Let me see your piggy face, Ace”. Photo by Kristen Pierce.
Jamie Parker: “Post-show Powerade was lots of fun!” Photo by Jamie Parker.
Kiley Moore: “Someone missed the bucket.” Photo by Hailey Arnold.
Jolynn Zinthefer: “Legacy and Sadie like to stand directly under the hay chute.” Photo by Jolynn Zinthefer.
Amber Brockhaus: “You can see how proud of himself he is!” Photo by Amber Brockhaus.
Jenna Stauder: “I’m pretty sure I can get a better pic than this. She doesn’t have a forelock- she has a museum.” Photo by Jenna Stauder.
Sara Frick: “Kaylee Vorenkamp captured this majestic moment of my horse!”
Kris Folmar Gray: “What? It’s a ‘Mash Mask.’ It’s great for wrinkles.” Photo by Kris Folmar Gray.
Hailey Petzoldt: “Two yearling pintos and their first experience with round bales. One wearing it, one made a bed and passed out in it!” Photo by Hailey Petzoldt.
Keep an eye out for next week’s 24-hour photo challenge! We announce challenge subjects on Tuesday around the middle of the day on both Instagram and Facebook.
Go riding!
Drives on Avenue 12 in Madera Ranchos in California must have thought they were seeing things — or perhaps had been transported into a magic story. 911 calls began coming in that there was a unicorn running loose.
They weren’t entirely incorrect: Juliette the pony, who regularly wears a false unicorn horn to pose for children’s photographs, had escaped from a job and was now running wild through orchards and along the roadway, still garbed with her mystical horn. For her five-year-old owner Tatum Boos, this wasn’t a fairytale but a nightmare: “I was afraid, and we had to catch her in the dark.”
Juliette led the state highway patrol as well as local residents on a merry chase evocative of the unicorns of legend: among the white blooms in an orchard, she essentially vanished as she blended right in with the scenery. Finally, by the light of a California Highway Patrol helicopter, a family friend rode in on her horse to lure Juliette into captivity.
As they say, a unicorn can be tamed by a fair maiden — or, in the words of Tatum, “get a time out because she was being a bad pony.” Sounds about right to us.
And they lived happily ever after, like all good fairy tales.
Go unicorns! Go riding!
After California Chrome blasted through the San Pasqual Stakes at Santa Anita in January, it was clear to the world that despite a series of setbacks in his four-year-old season, Chrome still had a few moves left in him. Team Chrome shipped off around the world to Dubai, seeking the biggest purse in the Dubai World Cup which had evaded the horse’s grasp in early 2015.
And this time, California Chrome seems to be leaving no doubt in anyone’s mind that he’s a bigger, badder version of his former self: while an abscess and bone bruising may have taken him out of contention for big titles in 2015, the big colt has clearly matured in his months of recuperation. He’s all filled-out muscle, and as he strutted around the paddock before the start of today’s Trans Gulf Electromechanical Trophy Handicap, it was clear that he was the horse to watch. (The race took place at 12:55 Eastern time, 9:55 in the evening in Dubai.)
Beautiful trip: nothing like watching this big chestnut just lope home under a hand ride. I don’t think Victor Espinoza even moved during the entire race, gate to wire!
Now, in the defense of the rest of the field, this wasn’t exactly a race stacked with tough competition — but Team Chrome treated this race as a final big prep, a good place to sharpen him up for the biggest challenge of them all: the Dubai World Cup.
As you might recall, Chrome gave the World Cup his all in early 2015, falling just a little bit short after a trans-Atlantic flight from the other side of the world. But after watching the above race, I have to believe that this time he’s as ready as he’ll ever be, poised to become the richest racehorse in the world.
The 2016 World Cup on March 26 will certainly be a more challenging field: traditionally attracting the world’s best racehorses for an incredible $10 million purse, we already know that 2015’s three-year-old stars Frosted and Keen Ice are planning to run. Both colts have been training at Meydan, with Frosted already winning a Grade II in early February. Trainer Todd Pletcher has also mentioned that Donn Handicap winner Mshawish will be making a bid, and there’s always a strong representation from racing nations all over the world.
We’ll be sure to bring you coverage of the Dubai World Cup as the fateful day draws closer, so keep it locked here on Horse Nation! Go Chrome, and go riding!
Yeah, let’s go with that. Free jumping can be a valuable experience to allow a horse to stretch its own jumping, figure out how to place its feet or to let the owners discover if a horse has real jumping potential. Often, free jumping is a source of beautiful images or videos of horses soaring over massive fences, their bascule picture-perfect, knees square as they take flight.
And sometimes, they prove to be perhaps a bit more of a disappointment: (note — must be logged in to Facebook to view).
Amazing Jumping Horse#WowJumping | PegaseBuzzEt là, tu sens que la saison de concours va pas être facile.
Posted by PegaseBuzz on Friday, February 19, 2016
Oops. As my husband stating while looking over my shoulder, “it’s like when someone goes to dunk a basketball and really, really misses.” (No horses were harmed in the making of this video!)
Go riding!
