A horse named Ford

Wouldn’t you love to find this gorgeous creature under your tree this Christmas?! Bill Fuller of Elizabeth, Colorado, created this lovely carousel horse (named “Ford” because it’s a combination of a bronco, a pinto, and a mustang); the detailing is just incredible. Story and more pix here.

A Hollywood ending for Yakamas’ wild horses?

After reading about overpopulation issues, Janet Wainwright, with 18-year-old Cotton, persuaded the tribe to open its herd for adoption using “Flicka” to promote the program.

At last, a movie promotion tie-in which doesn’t involve acres of Burger King tat…Janet Wainwright, a Seattle-based publicist for 20th Century Fox, has persuaded the Yakama Nation (in the state of Washington) to allow surplus horses from their wild bands to be adopted by non-First Nations people for the first time. The tribe joined forces with 20th Century Fox to promote the film “Flicka“, about a teenager who adopts and bonds with a wild mustang. The Yakama Nation manages and protects about five thousand wild horses on its reservation in central Washington, but the overpopulated herd is disrupting the ecosystem, stamping out medicinal plants and food for deer and other animals. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has a great article about the promotion here.

The Yakama Nation manages more than 5,000 wild horses.

New book: Nobody’s Horses

If you’re fascinated by wild horses, you may be interested in a new book by veterinarian Doug Höglund, Nobody’s Horses: The Dramatic Rescue of the Wild Herd of White Sands, which documents his efforts in 1994 to manage the capture and safe movement of nearly two thousand wild horses from New Mexico’s White Sands Missile Base to an Oklahoma wild horse sanctuary. As a former intermediary between the New Mexico Correctional System and the U.S. Army in a program that uses White Sands animals to help inmates become horse trainers, Höglund was in a unique position to work on the eleven-month-long relocation project. He provides a fascinating look at the history of White Sands — “one of the most desolate, unforgiving stretches of desert in the United States,” and the site of the first atomic bomb test in 1945 — as well as of the thousands of wild horses that have lived there since it was the dominion of Comanche and Apache horsemen. His chronicle effectively shows how his efforts, along with a team of herders possessing “steeled nerves and the hand-eye coordination of an explosives expert” resulted in a successful mission “to save lives and relieve the horses’ pain and suffering, not re-create an Old West roundup for the excitement and the spectacle” — though excitement and spectacle is exactly what they find, as will readers. Link

My little…witch?!

Yep, there are Halloween My Little Ponies; check ’em out at Muju’s blog.  Love the candy corn detail!