A nation-wide search. Many readers are going to see that and wonder why NCEFT has to go so far to find our next driving horse. You may pass countless pastures on your way to our facility, each a bucolic scene of green grass and dappled horses, and think to yourself, “But there are so many horses in California?” As you break down the criteria of not just a driving horse, not just a therapeutic driving horse, but an NCEFT therapeutic driving horse, you may begin to wonder if in fact our search shouldn’t be global.
First there are the practical considerations. Weighing in at nearly a ton, a Percheron like Sunny could easily pull a carriage with four passengers. But what would happen if we put a smaller draft between the shafts? Only half as big as Sunny, our Fjord Sebastian could barely pull the same carriage with only two people aboard. If one little horse wasn’t strong enough how about two? Bonnie was able to modify our wheelchair-accessible carriage to be pulled by a pair and we set out to see if her Fjords, Stormy and Tonka, could share Sunny’s shoes.
They were certainly strong enough, but asking new driving students to manage two horses was a challenge. Not only did it take twice as long to get the horses harnessed and hitched, it was twice as hard to keep both horses on task and working in tandem. Imagine trying to get two children to walk side-by-side at the exact same pace without touching each other. Now imagine getting them to do that for half an hour while navigating circles, turns, and figure-eights. Even on their best behavior one horse was always a little slower, one horse quicker to turn.
No, using a pair was just going to be too difficult. What we needed was another Sunny, another Percheron. Like most things these days, horse shopping has gone high-tech. Gone are the days of flyers pinned to a corkboard at the grocery store, now it’s all about the internet. With this in mind, one of our first stops was DreamHorse.com. At the time this post was being written, there was a grand total of six Percherons listed for sale in California. Of those six only three had any driving training. Searching on Percherons trained to drive turned up only 31 horses in the entire United States. If we were to rule out all the unsuitable horses, how many would be left?
What characteristics and skills do we use to determine if a horse is suitable? Stay tuned for our next post that breaks down the criteria from age to training and everything inbetween!
