This message is from: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
In a message dated 11/30/2006 2:47:00 PM Mountain Standard Time,
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
>
> This weekend my barn manager has asked Joe to ride in the small Holiday
> Parade in the same area. This is very low key, about a mile long course.
> He'll
> have his barn buddies with him, and he is pretty unflappable around the
> barn,
> and his trainer thinks he should do fine. But....aside from asking to be
> placed at the opposite end of the parade from the firetrucks, is there
> anything
> unusual I should worry about?
>
Having done ( and won ) our fair share of parades while in CA. I
think we may have seen it all, as far as scary entries in a parade. Instead of
avoiding the Firetrucks, like everything else, train for it. Plant yourself
nearby a busy station and let your horses experience the lights and sirens
before
running into them, either in a parade or just out on the roads and trails.
Hopefully, your little parade has some rules to help keep people safer.
We do not enter any parade that allows candy to be thrown from the entrants.
Nothing worse than a few hundred kiddies diving for those 10 year old TOOTSIE
ROLLS under your horses feet, while kicking, screaming and gouging a few
hundred of their friends and sibblings for better positions.
The time they kept us away from the Marching Band....they put us in front
of a " Funny Car " club.
It wasnt. I heard reving engines and backfiring for days.
Once we were in front of a drill team, who threw flags into the air while
high kicking and blasting hip hop music for 5 miles.
Given a choice, I would rather stick pins in between my toes.
The Shriners were OK, but the clown on a unicycle who rode up and grabbed
onto one of our teams tails for a
" tow " ( much to the delight of the kiddies, just now recovered from the
kicking and gouging.....) almost met his own demise from ME.
We have had Pot Belly Pigs dressed up and pulling wagons.....Camels and
an Elephant ( they SMELL really really bad says my Fjords ), a lion walking on
a leash, Llamas and a tame Long Horned Steer being ridden by a Buckeroo guy
with a trick rope. Thankfully for HIM, he didnt try to rope us.
The cowboys in a hot tub, on a big flatbed trailer shooting off real
enough sounding guns and throwing fake water from buckets onto the crowd got my
Fjords attention.
We dont parade any more. UTAH does not have alot of rules and there are
more people in the streets than on the sidewalk.
If you are going to be on pavement, have your farrier put a few drops
of borium on the bottom of their shoes to keep from slipping. When doing crowd
control last year for the UT Summer Games, Ayla almost went down more than
once just walking on pavement.....and my friends horse did go down hard.
Have fun, stay CLOSE to those Firetrucks ! ( Rescue guys, cute
Firefighters......) Lisa Pedersen
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