SpottedDemonPony

These pony-sized fuckers almost died out in the 1800s, but some german politician thought that they were pretty cool and rounded a few of them up. That dude was the Duke of Croy.

It’s a very primitive breed, and you’ll rarely see any coat color other than dun. Nowadays, there’s mainly one big wild herd of them living in some big ol’ fenced fields near Dülmen. Since there used to be less than a hundred, some Exmoor and Welsh Pony stallions were used to add some fresh blood to the breed. But apart from that the goal is to preserve the character and build of this old breed.

So they just let them chill there, you may ask? Eh, mostly. Once a proper herd size of roughly 400 ponies had been established, they quickly noticed that just letting them breed like rabbits wouldn’t be the best thing to do. To avoid inbreeding and a rapid population increase, the stallions only live with them for a fraction of the year. They are left alone apart from that. No vets, no medication and no training. Due to a lack of predators, the most common cause of death is starvation due to dental damage.

But you can’t just ask all colts to kindly gather over there, right? So each year, these horses are round up for the one year old colts to be separated.

So far, so good. The herd is right there, you just have to… find and capture the colts. Nothing easier than capturing the hormonal teenage horses!

Okay, this is just the round-up from a different angle, right? Yes. But look at those guys with red collars and blue shirts on the right. Those are the batshit insane lads who were selected to capture the colts. There’s a total of 30 mad lads from the nearby villages each year.

Their traditional method looks like this:

As a vet tech, equestrian, animal rescue coordinator, AND ZOOLOGICAL GENETICS SPECIALIST these feral ponies where the thesis to my masters where I worked off a thesis I started and continued for 14 years.

Anyways.

Maximum Security takes the San Diego Handicap by a nose over Midcourt

Once, some dillweed came tearing down the breezeway on a dirt bike, doing a wheelie through our entire farm. I watched horses spook like the wave going around a stadium crowd. I was riding my horse, bareback. I was pretty convinced I was going to die, but I just scratched her shoulder, told her it was okay. She was the only horse that didn’t spook out of 70 horses. Some horses on the property were seriously maimed by their spooked frenzy. This isn’t because she wasn’t scared but because we have experienced enough scary things together for her to know that when I tell her it’s okay, it’s okay.

You can’t control the entire world for your horse, so why try to control the small, manageable things?

Here are some things that have happened to my horse in the park:

-a bike with a dog crate on a wheel in front of it filled with barking chihuahuas in dresses

-a horse spooking so badly at said contraption he body slammed her and spun her entire body around

-a trained falcon landing on her head for some reason

-someone starting a chainsaw literally as we passed

-a girl whacking her on the bum with a giant stick on a dark covered bridge for no reason

-a dog running up between her back legs and licking her belly

This is why I don’t ask anyone to move their balloons or get upset about people making noise in the barn.

This is why I let her investigate things she finds scary.

Pigs are traditionally a way to convert farm waste and forest forage (grubs, mushrooms, nuts) into fat and protein, with pigs hardy enough to stand up to the forest's threats

Cows turn grassland forage into protein-rich milk, meat, and leather. Cows are sturdy enough to be turned loose to live freely outside of direct supervision for long periods in secured territory and then rounded up, so can be raised with little labor on large amounts of poor land. Can move long distances under own power, can be raised in remote areas and sold fresh in high-demand population centers. Dairy herds, by contrast, were kept right outside population centers. Quick-spoiling milk can be processed into cooking lipid butter and stable, transportable, marketable protein source cheese. Can be used as traction-generating and load-bearing beasts.

Sheep are similar to cows at smaller scale and requiring closer attention, process grassland into mutton, milk, and wool, once most important textile in world before cotton.

Horses convert grassland to service as traction-generating and load-bearing beasts. Intelligently trainable, nimblest animals practical to tide.

Donkeys convert grassland to service as traction-generating and load-bearing beasts. Size and output/consumption ratio makes more practical than horses for many applications, but intensely annoying.

Mules - we bred a donkey with a horse to make it less annoying.

Deer, Antelopes, Turkeys, Ducks, Pheasants, etc. - game animals. Sustain their own life cycle from undeveloped land, are hunted in regulated fashion to sustain stock.

Bees - plant-fertilizing function radically increases productivity of fields, yields rich, high-sugar, indefinitely stable honey

Doves - we used to fuckin' farm doves, we'd have big-ass birdhouses out in the fields. Not sure what that was about.

That doesn’t mean “not annoying”, just “less annoying than donkeys”. 

LORD ROBERTS AND HIS FAVORITE CHARGER, “VOLONEL

(”Volonel” is the white Arab upon which Lord Roberts rode during the Kabul-Kandahar march. The charger was awarded a special decoration by order of her Majesty.)

Photo by Glover, Dublin.

Extracted from: 

The battle is still not won -- environmental reviews can be tampered with and/or ignored, so it's super important that it's a transparent, honest environmental review that is done by actual specialists, not ex-oil employees who are being paid by the DAPL..... but this is a huge, fantastic step in the right direction.

And, so long as you Americans vote out your oversized sexist Cheeto In Chief and his whole party in November, then once the environmental review is finalised and the project comes to the government for approval/rejection, then there is a decent chance that the environmental findings will actually be listened to, and the project scrapped entirely.

So -- with love and desperation from an Australian -- get your American asses to the voting booths in November, and get the talking toupe out of your fucking white house.