Bare Foot Trimmer -
Above -
Photographer -
We had also given rides on the Saturday and as you can see from the Picture of Majors foot which was taken on the Sunday our horses are coming to no harm being worked on the road with no shoes on.. Our own tours from home involve going into the Battlefield Visitor Centre which has got a huge hill into it. I desribed it to someone as climbing a hundred feet over half a mile. I don't think they believed me. However, because the hill is so steep our horses slip going up it with shoes on and of course coming back down it. This was very apparenent one day when we did a tour with Major, who didn't have any shoes on and Ben who did. Ben was slipping but Major wasn't and the people on the tour noticed it becasue they were horse people themselves. The difference in the two horses was very noticeable and after that we bare foot trimmed.
I arrived at Dad's one Saturday afternoon in November 2007 just in time to see the Lord Mayor's Parade on SKY TV. I looked on in horror as 5 people push started the Lord Mayors Coach from behind as it looked as though the horses weren't up to the job. Once the coach was rolling the horses pulled it fine so the rest of the parade went ok. However the commentator did say that 43 tonnes of sand had been put on the road to stop the horses from slipping. I couldn't believe what I had heard and seen. I didn't take any action until I received a letter from the Shire Horse Society along with its most recent newsletter, thanking me for my membership for the past year and they hoped I would continue to support them. In return I wrote them a letter telling them what I thought about the Lord Mayors Parade and even offered some friendly advice on how horses should be trained for such a job. I even told them that a fairer way of sorting the job out would be to let whoever wins the National Ploughing Championships to do the job or whoever is highest placed who can cope with it from the point of view that it is a requirement that 6 horses are used, and not everyone has 6 horses. I thought that would be the last I would hear of that and wasn't surprised when I didn't get a direct answer for a few months. The answer I did get was a brown envelope with only a copy of the Shire Horse Society's latest newsletter with the article in it praising Waldburg Shires on a job well done and that they had made such a good job of things they had been asked to do the it for 2008.
My answer to that is you haven't done the job as of 12th July 2008, for 2008 YET?
And then there's always 2009 ? ? ? ? ? ?
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