Bo the horse and his friend Duke the pony visited the Galena Branch several times over the summer!
Their owner Ashley took the time to educate visiting patrons about horse facts, care, health, and demonstrated how to saddle and ride.
She also gave participants lots of hands on experiences with grooming, feeding, and listening to Bo’s heartbeat.
An interesting fact about Bo is that he is 95% blind and will soon be completely blind due to an illness he contracted about 5 years ago. Duke is his seeing-eye pony and helps him navigate around when Bo is not with Ashley. Ashley has retrained Bo to listen to special voice and touch commands that allows them to still compete in rodeo competitions.
Here are some book recommendations for the horse crazy people in your life in honor of those special visits!
That Book Woman by Heather Henson is a rare and moving tale that honors a special part of American history–the Pack Horse Librarians, who helped untold numbers of children see the stories amid the chicken scratch, and thus made them into lifetime readers.
The Wild Mustang: Horses of the American West by Chris Duffy. This History Comic tells how wild mustangs were first introduced to America and how they still roam free today. On the North American plains, wild mustangs have roamed for generations . . . shaping human history and struggling to survive it. For the Spanish, they were a tool of conquest. For Native Americans, they brought on a new way of life where horsemanship and horse-trading were central. And for the entire world, wild mustangs became a renowned wonder of the American West. There are still thousands of mustangs in the wild today, but they struggle to survive in an ever-changing landscape and their future is by no means guaranteed.
National Velvet by Enid Bagnold. Fourteen-year-old Velvet Brown is determined: every night she prays to be the best rider in England, and every day she trains to win the world’s most famous steeplechase, the Grand National. No woman has ever competed in the race, let alone won it. Velvet is skinny and frail, and her mount is a rough country horse that she won in a raffle. But she whispers her hopes and dreams into his ear, and the horse flies over fences at her command.
National Velvet was made in to a darling movie staring young Elizabeth Taylor and Mickey Rooney that is a must see if you enjoy this book!
The Perfect Horse: The Daring U.S. Mission to Rescue the Priceless Stallions Kidnapped by the Nazis by Elizabeth Letts. In the chaotic last days of the war, a small troop of battle-weary American soldiers captures a German spy and makes an astonishing find–his briefcase is empty but for photos of beautiful white horses that have been stolen and kept on a secret farm behind enemy lines. Hitler has stockpiled the world’s finest purebreds in order to breed the perfect military machine–an equine master race. But with the starving Russian army closing in, the animals are in imminent danger of being slaughtered for food.
With only hours to spare, one of the U.S. Army’s last great cavalrymen, Colonel Hank Reed, makes a bold decision–with General George Patton’s blessing–to mount a covert rescue operation. Racing against time, Reed’s small but determined force of soldiers, aided by several turncoat Germans, steals across enemy lines in a last-ditch effort to save the horses.
