Found Results from Adventures of a Wildie Colt

Antelopes into Horses or Horses into Antelopes?

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 …

Striving to Get Outside and Follow the Classical Path

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 …

Aches, Pains and Sobering Thoughts

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 …

Ghost Horses Indeed

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 …

Capturing the Moments

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 …

First-Ever Driving Clinic

Last week this time I was white-knuckling it over black ice (trucks in ditches everywhere) on the road up to Olds College where the Chinook Driving Club (a chapter of the Alberta Carriage Driving Association, links here and here.) …

A Passion for Teaching

Teaching’s fascinated me since the age of 19, when my first qualification came through as a British Horse Society Assistant Instructor at the Grade 4 sanctioned Harrogate Equestrian Centre, a very different animal to North American models. We are, er, …

Mops Shows The Apache How It’s Done

It’s late now, winds fierce and smelling almost of rain on these Eastern slopes this January night, although a friend telephoned earlier from Golden in B.C. on the other side of the Great Divide where apparently it’s dumping metres, just …

Pushing Past the Cold

January’s roared in like a lion, not unusual for Alberta but character forming all the same. The normal lined work gloves cope to about –20, but when temperatures seriously zero down, down, down fingers have about 10 minutes before numbing …

Giving Thanks, Getting Ready for Winter

Winter, say First Nation native people, is when nature slows down, sleeps, hibernates, re-charges itself, a time for reflections. Feeding this morning, just before the seasons turn into longer days again (oh yes please!), the hoar frost is spikily luxuriant …