Sunday, September 23, 2007

Well, John has a new girlfriend. He's been spending lots of time with her. She's a real pretty strawberry blonde young girl. He let me pick her out for him. Of course he had the option of picking someone else if he wanted to. Don't you think she's pretty?




She's from Black Hills HMA in Southeastern Idaho. Two years old, light sorrel sabino. I went up on Friday and fell in love with her eyes. She was also the temperament I was looking for, curious and not afraid. She was right up by the fence most of the time, checking people out while she ate. At one point she sniffed my hand and felt comfortable enough to touch me with a whisker. She also reminds me a lot of Tonka, which made me like her even more.

Yesterday she was a lot more standoffish. There were more people there and I think she'd had enough. The bidding started on the other side of the pens, so our second and third choices were bid on before we got to bid on her. I was so hoping we wouldn't get into a bidding war. When they started with the weanlings, it freaked me out. The dollar amounts were going so high I couldn't imagine being able to compete with bidders throwing money around like that. But as soon as they got to the older horses the bidding practically stopped. I think only 6 horses got adopted other than weanlings during the auction part of the adoption. I hope more were adopted later. As we got closer to our girl, my bidding arm was starting to really want to fly up in the air (even though John was to do the bidding) and my heart was beating like mad. Got our starting bid in, and nobody else bid! How could they not see how special she is? I'm not complaining... We got our girl. I was so happy.

They didn't take credit cards, although the handout said they did, so we were a little delayed in getting her paid for, but we got it done, and then had to wait forever to load. How dare they take a lunch break? Didn't they know I was dying to get her home? Jeez...

I was not really impressed with this group's horse handling. They were not near as gentle and patient as the guys from Burns. I got a sense when I adopted Tonka that those guys really liked the horses and liked their jobs. They had a real minimal stress way of moving the horses through the chutes. Yesterday they ran them fast and hard. Not that they're bad people or being mean, but they weren't slow and deliberate. She got pretty agitated. She didn't do anything stupid, but she did take a little bit to calm down enough to get her halter on.


Then they opened the door and ran at her with a flag and ran her into the trailer full speed. Poor thing.

She didn't trailer as quietly as Tonka did. Banged around and tried to paw through the floor. Her drag rope wasn't draped over her back like they managed to do with Tonka, so when she stepped on it her head popped up and hit the roof. Ouch.


Here she is at home:

1 comment:

nikki said...

She is BEAUTIFUL! I love her big white blaze! Sorry I decided to try and read some more of your blog and thought I would comment. Tonka is very handsome as well. He looks like such a ham! :)