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Howdy!
Welcome to our ranch, we have owned Chincoteague ponies ever sense the Winter of 2009-2010 when I (Rebekah) was 13 years old and looking for my first pony to train from the ground up. Being an emphatic horse lover and owner for many years I had always had an interest in training horses and was ready to try training one of my own. But God had different plans and instead of finding a pony to start I found two solid bay Chincoteague pony mares an hour away, their names we Hope and Liberty. Being familiar with the breed, because of reading the famous book "Misty of Chincoteague" by Marguerite Henry, I was encouraged by my dad to consider buying them and possibly think about getting into breeding Chincoteague ponies due to their rarity. After going to see them we decided to jump head long into the Chincoteague Pony breed and brought them home a few weeks later. That Spring (2010) we found and bought our first stallion and drove him home from Arkansas. His name was Cherokee Thunder and he was a very flashy chestnut and white pinto yearling. |
Bryant's Farm Hope (left) & Bryant's Farm Liberty (right) our first Chincoteague ponies, they were full sisters. |
Cherokee Thunder (our first stallion) the day we brought him home, he was a yearling at the time. |
As with life, things don't always go as planned, Cherokee started displaying an unusual gate by the time he was a year and a half. Our vet diagnosed him with wobblers syndrome and we were told he wouldn't be able to sire any foals because he lacked the coordination necessary to successfully mount and breed mares. At the time horses diagnosed with wobblers syndrome typically had a life expectancy of under five years and Cherokee was no exception. One October day in 2011 we found him lying in the pasture, unable to get up. After consulting our vet we decided it was time to let him go, he was only 3 years old at the time. He had a wonderful personality and was a great first stallion even though he never had any foals. He taught me some very valuable lessons and his memory lives on in his half sister, my beloved Pixie.
When Cherokee had received the diagnose of wobbler syndrome late in 2010 and we realized he wouldn't sire any foals. We began casually looking for another stallion in the Spring of 2011. It just so happened that there was a breeder in Texas selling her herd of Chincoteague ponies due to a major drought. We decided to buy three ponies from her: Cyclone, Pixie and her month-old colt Moontide. |
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They arrived on our farm in August of 2011, two months before we lost Cherokee. I was ecstatic to add such beautiful ponies to our herd and was even more excited to have my first foal on the farm. Moontide was as pretty as they come and he soon earned the barn name "Bugsy" because of his large eyes (the name came from the hamster in the movie "Bedtime Stories"). He taught me so much about how to train a foal and was the third pony I ever started under saddle. He was a curious and mischievous fellow so I always had to make sure I left nothing of value out or he would be carrying it around. I distinctly remember one day, when he was only a few months old, Liberty got stuck rolling up a small incline and he decided her belly would make a great trampoline. He quickly ran over and before I knew it, he had all four hooves of his hooves on top of her belly and was starting to bounce around. She was madder than a hornet but could do nothing about it. I managed to help her shoo him away and get back on her feet all while laughing profusely. He certainly kept things interesting! We had Bugsy up until 2013, I had just started doing some super light riding and he was doing so well! One evening I was checking on the ponies and found him with his leg woven through the hay feeder. He ended up having irreparable damage to his rear leg and we were left with no choice but to put him down. He is still greatly missed!
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Even with loosing Bugsy, 2013 wasn't a completely bad year, we did have the excitement of welcoming our first two home bred foals "Misty's Dash For Freedom" (Cyclone II & Bryant's Farm Liberty) and his half brother "Hart's Skip for Joy" (Cyclone II & Bryant's Farm Hope). They brought us all great joy and were born exactly one week apart. Dash was a handsome pinto gelding who was later sold to a lady in New Mexico and Skipper is also a pinto gelding and still resides on our farm, he continues to bring me joy and laughter as he grows older.
We didn't breed any mares in 2013 so we had no 2014 foals. Instead, I was focusing on doing some open shows and participating in 4-H. We also had a couple of paint horses at the time and one of them I was training to ride. We didn't have another foal until Spring of 2015. that we had another foal, "Hart's Dancing Jubilee" (Cyclone II & Bryant's Farm Liberty). |
