Fairytales Can Come True…

Fairytales can come true. It can happen to you, if you are young at heart. Or, at least that’s what the song says. Enter Fairy, a new GHLHF pony resident.

One of my equine bucket list dream goals, could only be entertained by someone young at heart. Most adults don’t decide they will live out their six year old girl pony dreams and commit the time and resources to it that I have, but here we are. While many of my high school classmates have children graduating high school, I just gave birth to a one month old at the age of 42 and still continue to play with ponies. You only live once though, and I don’t think there is a requirement to actually grow up while you do it, so…

Darling Husband likes to pretend that the ponies are a cross he has to bear, when in all reality he is a major contributor to my habit and is my biggest enabler. So despite having brought two additional ponies home in the past six months to fuel my pony dream, when he came upon an advertisement for a pony on Craigslist that was a perfect color match for Summer Cloud, he showed it to me immediately, knowing exactly what the outcome would be.

We picked Fairy up from a delightful couple with a soft spot for rescue animals. They had saved a variety of animals on their small farm, but wanted to downsize now that they were getting older. They had rescued the pony from an animal hoarding/starvation situation. The couple believed her to be around 5 years old and were told that she was trained to drive. They had named her “fat girl” for how quickly she gained weight when given enough food.

Fat girl needed a real name once she arrived at GHLHF. Due to how tiny she was compared to the other ponies and her white “fairytale-esque mane”, Fairy seemed to fit her perfectly. The first few weeks on the farm were a bit of a struggle. The pony girls did not accept her into the herd easily. She spent most of her time hanging out with Johnny Cash, who was still serving hard time with the girls. She barely ate anything. Then one day I guess she had enough of playing the new girl. Following typical prison rules she picked a fight with the biggest bully in the paddock, and established herself as alpha.

Despite her introduction with the other ponies, Fairy was the most loveable little creature around humans. She literally comes running to anyone, and demands to be loved on. She would follow me along the fence line when I would drive the other ponies, making me think that she may actually have some driving back ground. Our equine dentist estimated her age to be closer to 11 than 5, and when I began to work with Fairy, I became skeptical that she had ever been driven.

Fairy was fine with harnessing, but didn’t seem to understand what was being asked of her when I attempted to ground drive her with a halter. She acted like she had never had a bit in her mouth before. When I did ask her to pull my training barrel without blinders, she was initially skeptical, but didn’t freak out and attempt to bolt like Summer. With a few sessions, she was ground driving like a dream, and after only about two weeks worth of work I hitched her to the easy entry and had her take me on a short ride.

Fairy and Tater are almost identical in height and stride length. Once I get Tater over her hatred of doing team activities, the two will hopefully make a decent pulling team.