Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Northwest Equine Expo

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I try to go to this event every year. It's jam-packed full of interesting equine things. Including the cutest, pinkest princess on the tiniest pony EVAR:

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And agility burros:
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This was the first year I watched part of the 'Mustang Challenge' and I'm glad I did. Horse trainers have 90 days to do whatever they can with an untouched mustang. They show off the results at the expo and the winner gets a big prize and the mustangs are auctioned off at the end. The normal adoption price for a mustang is $125. Some of these were going for much higher. One went for $8,000.

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A lot of the trainers focused on tricks, which were impressive:

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But my favorite presentation of the day was a woman who kept it simple. She let the horse loose in the strange, noisy arena, then approached him with a saddle and tacked him up while he stood still on his own before mounting and riding him around. She didn't have the flashiest presentation, but it spoke volumes about her training technique and the how much she got the horse to trust her in such a short time.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

That palomino is just gorgeous. Wow.

~Sarah (Erik's gf)

admin said...

Hi Sarah! Yes, that's one of those horses that draws the eye. And the lens, if you happen to be holding a camera and don't realize until later when you look through your files that you took 14 gazillion photos of that horse and totally ignored the other (quite pretty) ones.