Thank you to Jane Badger for this video of a speaker at the World Horse Welfare Conference, 2012. John Grant was raised as a traveller and now works as an RSPCA inspector. He talks about traveller culture and horses, from pride to fly grazing.
Category Archives: Harness Racing
Books for the Saddle Bag
Books I want to buy and read: Sometimes it’s tiresome when publishers try to ape a successful book by buying similar titles, but sometimes that policy opens the best of floodgates: suddenly writers get the chance to work on projects that would have been turned down as uncommercial till a forerunner proved otherwise. Laura Hillenbrand’s …
Whole Heap of Little Horse Links
I was away! Things happened! But first – a round up of curious happenings in the horse world! Looks like I got rid of the virtual racing stable I ran in the early 1990s far too early. An unraced imaginary horse from the Digiturf game has just been sold for $5,225. Yes, not only is …
The Right Way to Ruin a Horse
Insane footage of an illegal trotting race on a busy Irish road, with spectators jockeying to keep the Garda away from the sulkies. How these eejits avoided numerous head-on collisions I’ll never know. They were greater fools to film it all and load it on the internet. I hope there are plenty of arrests. (UPDATE: …
You Shall Go to the Ball. Even If You’re a Horse
The Viennese Opera Ball at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York features a surrey drawn by two greys circling the dance floor with two ballet dancers on board. There’s a nice little New York Times blog piece here – with photos – about the logistics of getting two 17hh standardbreds into an elevator, through a hotel …
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In Two-Four Time
On Sunday I went to the Trabrennbahn Mariendorf to watch the 2010 Deutsches Traber-Derby – my first harness racing meet. I saw a couple of exhibition trotting races at Hoppegarten last year and was fascinated – the horses so fast they seemed as low to the ground as the rocking horse racers in old paintings, …