Horses and Ponies

08/26/2026

08/25/2026

08/24/2026

Please bare with me friends, I am really trying my best this week to keep up with everything, but I am quite sick for the first time in like, 10 years.

So please, don't at all think I'm ignoring your comments at all, I just truly am having even a hard time doing basic things this week. I am answering comments I have been able to get to & making posts from under 2 quilts while wearing full indoor winter gear lol. I have come down with a pretty bad case of tonsilitis/strep throat (like, my tonsil is completely white looking 😅). It is of course making it really hard to sleep or eat between the nasty fever that wont seem to quit (tonight I was only 101.8... so that isn't too shabby - and I'd truly take that over the horrendous chills that follow, as the added tension of shivering all the time is also making me so very extra sore).

Thankfully this week my mother has been off of work, so she's been able to pick up the slack around here - huge shoutout to her as I truly think I'd be crying every day trying to get this daily work done all alone in my current state. ❤

I haven't had tonsilitis this bad since I was a teen, and normally I have such a fantastic immune system - but going months at a time on 2-4 hours of sleep at night has really taken it's toll on me I guess. In total (not just while being sick) I've also lost almost 10 pounds without trying and overall feel as if I have burned through my reserves.

I'm also so thankful I have an amazing farrier, who was not only willing to reschedule tomorrows visit for me, but she also suggested I wait no longer & reminded me that I could go get some antibiotics straight from shoppers drug mart (yay for not having to go to a medicenter... which after dislocating my knee, having a client horse help me pop it back in & never having it checked out.... is not a place I like to frequent unless I absolutely have to - so that is on my to-do list tomorrow.

I think I will wait until I feel better to make any true decisions - but I think I am being faced with making some hard calls, if for nothing else but my health and wellbeing - and subsequently, my MW babies. Whether that is selling some horses I initially wanted to keep, or working towards bringing in another helper of some kind (probably a work away-er) ... I'm not sure exactly what this will look like just yet -but I wanted to prepare you all, just in case you see some horses available that I wanted to keep & have also made very clear I wanted to hang on to. I have so many oldies that need my protection & therefore can't leave my ownership, so it won't be any of them - so don't worry. However if I do go that route, that means it will be likely be my youngstock.

Like I say, I'm not going to make any rash decisions - who knows, maybe my lottery tickets I haven't checked yet are holding my big win? 😜 But I wanted to update you all on both fronts - I love all your comments and will get back to the ones I've missed as soon as I can & there might be some changes in the nearer future - hopefully for the better for everyone, overall.

I hope you guys are having a wonderful week so far - please have a pain free snack for me lol

Brandi

08/24/2026

🐴 Every Poitevin horse alive today descends from one stallion, foaled in 1960 and named Québec.

The Poitevin Mulassier of western France was never bred to be fast or fashionable. It was bred to be a mule mother. At the height of the trade France kept around 50,000 Poitevin brood mares, and between them they produced 18,000 to 20,000 mules a year, the animals that pulled the farms and armies of Europe.

Then mechanisation arrived, and the mule market did not decline so much as collapse. By the period between the 1970s and the 1990s, only 250 to 300 Poitevins were left anywhere.

When geneticists studied what remained in 1994, they found something startling. The entire modern population traced back to a single stallion, Québec, foaled in 1960. One horse standing between an ancient French breed and nothing at all.

Today around 300 breeding animals survive. Heavy, feathered, patient, with those enormous kind heads. A breed that outlived the job it was made for and is still here because a handful of people refused to let the last thread break.

What do you think it takes to keep a breed alive once the work it was built for is gone?

08/24/2026

🐴 A single leg bone frozen in Yukon permafrost holds the oldest genome ever sequenced from any living thing.

It was found at Thistle Creek in the Yukon. A horse bone, locked in frozen ground for so long that nobody seriously expected usable DNA to survive inside it. But permafrost is a remarkable preservative, and the researchers pulled a complete genome out of it.

The age came back at roughly 700,000 years.

The work was led by Ludovic Orlando and Eske Willerslev and published in Nature in June 2013, and it did more than set a record. It pushed the origin of the horse family back to around four million years ago, far deeper in time than anyone had previously established.

So the next time you are standing at a fence watching a horse graze, remember you are looking at a lineage that was already ancient before our own species existed. Whole ice ages arrived and melted away while that leg bone lay waiting in the ground for someone to come and read it.

Does knowing how old the horse family is change the way you see them?