Mini donk visit

[Carriage]

My family and I had a great time on Saturday visiting a family with 8 miniature donkeys. They found us on a fluke while looking for another rig. When she told me how hard we were to find, I had to admonish here NOT to get me started as we have had a horrible time finding competent web help.

The donkeys were so cool as they wanted to be close and just hang with the people including us. They found, in short order, that if they walked up to me that I would automatically start rubbing and scritching even while completely engrossed in a conversation.

I also had a chance to see one of them drive "a" cart and to see how they interacted with it. The gal spoke of many mini donkey people becoming interested in CDE's. It will be interesting to see how and if that develops.

Had a great time and made some new friends. In large measure that is a large part of what the business is about for us.

Bb

Graham Carriage Works

 

[hobbyhorse23]

I know Maureen is working on the mini donkey thing at Happ's, and it sort of surprised me that it was apparently felt they might need a division and speeds of their own. The last mini donk to compete at the CDE won the entire Training division quite handily! The VSE division was named "Very Small Equine" for a reason- the ADS was trying to include mini donks, mini mules AND mini horses without discrimination so it seems odd to me to now segregate out the donkeys. I'm glad they're participating though! I do love the little guys.

Leia (and Turbo and Kody, who does miss his Uncle Bob's scratching!)

 

[RhineStone]

I was under the impression that VSE was named for horses or ponies. You could have small Shetland Ponies in the VSE division as well as Miniature Horses, hence not calling it the Miniature Horse division. That would be a "breed" classification, like if we had a Morgan division, which we don't. VSE is definitely a size classification. Mules also compete in their respective size classification. We have a super pair of mules in the Midwest that are Horse-size, hence they compete in the Horse division, vs. Lg. or Sm. Pony., or VSE.

(However, after WEG, maybe carriage driving will burst onto the scene and everybody will want to drive, so that we will have to add "breed classes", then a "big" class will be 60 horses instead of a full 14

....or maybe not.

)

Myrna