SHOWING OFF MY BOYS

Hello all fellow RACers!

On Feb 7th we took 2 of our curlies, *Rush River Slash and * Starbred Red aka Ruger to a local Ag Day. We were not only the only curly horses there, but the only horses!

Our boys got tons of attention and loved every minute of it!

We had also planned on taking at least one of our weanling boys, but they were so dirty and it was way too cold to give them a bath so we decided to wait until another time to show them off!

We started the day off by me staying up all night working on our Curly Horse board, which is a trifold board that has a digital photo viewer in the center and I made up several info sheets that I put in clear holders and put on the board with several pictures (thanks to all of you who told me I could take photos off your sites and those who emailed me picts I used a ton). Then at 4 a.m. hubby got up and did his job so that he could take the day off to work with me and talk to folks about our awesome horses! At 8 we loaded up and left for the fair grounds.

Once we arrived we set up our pens and our board on a table and brought the boys in! Boy were they a HIT!!

It amazes me how many folks have never heard about curly horses and how many of those who have have such horrible misconceptions about them. I think our boys did an awesome job of representing the breed as well as their respective bloodlines (*Slash is Fredell lined and Ruger is Warrior lined). Both boys were well behaved and totally enjoyed all the attention! Not so sure they enjoyed the Yakks next to them, they sure kept Slash's interest!!! LOL!

Just before lunch Dominic and Jordan came up to help! That made it nice, that put 3 of us answering questions and showing things about our horses and of course Dominic garnered his share of interest by telling about "his" horse (Dundee who we didn't have up there)!

The misconceptions about stallions amazed me almost as much as those about the curlies! Every time I turned around there was another small child climbing up on Slash's fence and he was loving them all up! When a parent would overhear me talking about my 13 yr old stallion they would ask where he was and when I said, "this is him" immediately the children would be taken off the fence....poor Slash had no idea why his new friends were leaving him.

The local paper took lots of pictures of my hubby (Fred) helping the kids to feed the boys treats (none of these made the paper). When the article was printed we were given 3 whole paragraphs! Whoo hoo!!

We have 4 local people interested in breeding their mares to Slash from this little adventure.

We learned a lot. I learned that I need better answers when I am questioned about my horses, especially the origin of the curly and what breed they come from. I also learned that you never go to anything like this w/o some sort of business card or flyer, so I am creating flyers that I can do on my computer (to keep costs down), I also plan to invest in a couple of banners that have my "farm" name on them and am having my son make a few wooden plaques with horses names on them as we know that Slash will always go and probably Ruger and I will have him do a few of the other horses names up.

This was our very first event and we are planning on doing at least 3 more this year, hopefully 4 or 5 if we can get the time away from hubbys job!!!

We are also going to join the back country horsemen and use our horses to demonstrate how to pack a horse and how to tack a horse up......might as well use our curlies to show how versatile they are and that they are just like any other horse!

One question that almost stunned me was "Do these horses get sore when you ride?" That one really threw me for a minute, until it was clarified that "because of the long hair, don't they get sore?" Not to my knowledge! I also got asked right off the bat how long it took me to curl their manes! LOL!!! I told them, "Not as long as it took to curl my hair!"

Well, my next post will be about working with my weanlings as I am trying to do so at least 3 times a week or more!!

I will add pictures to this at a later time.

I would like all of you to see the board we use as it might give those who are doing demos some ideas....I originally got my idea from Terry and to it I added the photo viewer!

This is our board! All of the pink pages and most of the picts are on with velcro so they can be taken off and kept in an envelope to be used again! All picts are in 4x6 photo holders that I actually took out of the little albums you can get at walmart in the photo dept.