A teenager was around on the weekend. You know – those young people that can still touch their toes on leaping out of bed first thing in the morning, kind of deal?

Ah, what a concept! I was doing pretty …

Charles Dickens nailed the situation I’m in right now with his opening lines from ‘A Tale of Two Cities.’ Dickens, interestingly, wrote his classics in installments, published weekly in Victorian England’s penny press – the whole books only were published …

There’s been constant correspondence chatter on social media for months now from those who took on ‘wildie’ ownership after bidding at Innisfail [auction] following the March 2015 government sanctioned capture/cull/sale. Some were stallions, mares, youngsters, mares-in-foal (one mare dropped a …

September’s started with a definite flourish after a disastrous August. By four o’clock after giving a long lining demonstration August 1st exactly, there was a hint of a scratchy throat, an hour later a raging temperature and one very nasty …

My, how the Internet can be useful these days! I do media advisory activism work sometimes behind the scenes – land conservation, headwaters, groundwater, clearcutting forestry – and yes, stacking up information about horse welfare issues, and Alberta wildies. The …

The wrens started it all, during a photo shoot capturing their quick-as-a-flash movements in and around the old farmhouse here.

This year unusually there are two pairs – unusual as they’re supremely territorial, even although in this case one tiny …

Recently I watched an informal workshop to the local ‘Geezers’ (an unofficial riding club that mentors, educates, and shares knowledge over nice lunches and nibbles, wine, coffee and cookies too). Ethelle Patrick was talking to this informal gathering about her …

Back seven years or so I was just wrapping up five years of writing a weekly newspaper equestrian column. I wrote about shelters in Chinook wind country, trick riding and ranch kids, saddle-fitters, bit makers, outfitters and probably darned near …

Mops hasn’t had much handling the last month (life and working with other horses!), so as an experiment, photographer Shannon Daly came along a few afternoons back to document if all those hundreds of groundwork hours in 2014 were going …

Last Monday, unlike today, which is cold and dank and overcast and snowing – was a daisy of day – sunlit, dry driving conditions and two sweaters warm as the Apache and I slid southwards a mere hundred kms to …

Everything about this book sings – the cover photography and layout by Robert Overholtzer, its authors, Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson, and cleverly named too: Animals Make Us Human. The prose is sharp, spare, to the point and a …

There are some days I feel like a prehistoric dinosaur, recalling events that happened before people I’m interviewing – or teaching – were even born. More recently I realized that although I write a weekly newspaper column about wildlife and …

As weeks go the last one pretty much rated on minus Brownie points. The Alberta wild horse cull (try watching a few YouTube videos of wildies being run down and roped), the sale itself – with distraught herd members being …

Horses and heartache. Saturday morning, brushing out Mops (who’s been shedding his winter coat ferociously for over two weeks now). He raised his head and looked straight towards the mountains and westwards, which is where this year’s gather of wildies …

Photographs are a wonderful gifting, of being able to capture ‘snapshots’ of a certain day and its memories, or a photo shoot session (as with this ridiculous Mops-to-rabbit interaction, with about 30 photographs snapped off so the illustrator can use …