I’ve been reading beautifully illustrated books about horses all my life and in the last twelve years I’ve trawled all sorts of academic articles and image libraries, so it’s always delightful to find an image I’ve never seen before. The Palazzo Pitti in Florence just opened an exhibit called Leopoldo de’ Medici: Prince of the …
Continue reading “Rapunzel Horses – the hot accessory of Early Modern Europe?”
The US House Appropriations Committee has just voted to lift the ban on funding for federal inspections for horse slaughter, thus potentially paving the way for new US equine abattoirs to open up. I wrote extensively about the history of horsemeat in the USA in The Age of the Horse in order to try to …
Continue reading “No, Horse Slaughter Won’t Solve the US Welfare Problem – Here’s Why”
(Just kidding – I’ll be on a horse)
The Trump budget cut isn’t well thought through. Firstly, there are no slaughter houses in the US processing horses for meat, and recent attempts to open new abattoirs have resulted in passionate local protests. Secondly, the horses could go to Mexico or Canada, but both countries are obliged to keep horses for six months before …
American Woman Riding Side-Saddle on the Road at Hommoku, Motomura, Yokohama, by Utagawa Hiroshige II (Japanese, 1829–1869). This woodblock print dates from 1861. It belongs to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, who have generously made many of their public domain images free for anyone to use.
Deanne Stillman’s Mustang: The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West came out in 2008 and remains definitive. It takes you from the arrival of the first Conquistadors’ horses – like Pedro de Alvarado’s “bright bay mare” “good both for tilting and to race” and the grey “Bobtail” who was “fast, and had …
Tennessee Walker or Saddlebred? What do we think?
Happy Christmas!
Cliff Yamashita, a retired tow truck driver, owns Miley and her new colt, Titan. Like most of his fellow boarders, he likes to go riding at nearby Point Pinole Regional Shoreline. He said he would probably have to sell both animals if he gets kicked out. “I can’t afford the other stables,” he said. “Nobody …
Continue reading “Another Urban Stable Under Threat – this time in California”
The theatrical and circus historian A H Saxon is the don of hippodrama history. I bought an old library copy of his Enter Foot and Horse when I was working on The Age of the Horse because I knew it would be the key to nineteenth-century equestrian theatre. I wasn’t disappointed. Hippodramas were, to quote …
