I was looking for a happy story for the Thanksgiving Holidays and recently came across some information of a prosthetic limb being successfully used by a horse amputee. I am sure that this is not a simple procedure, particularly as horses do not make the best patients, but at least it gives them another option. Many racehorses are destroyed due to badly broken limbs. Such injuries are not life-threatening for humans and you often see dogs quite happily running round on three legs. I had wondered if prosthetics were an option for dogs but hadn’t really considered this for horses due to their much greater size.

I had hoped to see some of the TV coverage during the Equestrian events at the Olympics this summer but unfortunately didn’t see any. I was therefore glad to be in the UK during September for the Burghley Horse Trials as there is good TV coverage of this major UK eventing competition.

As usual, the cross country fences looked enormous to me and there were a number of heavy falls, although I did not hear of any serious injuries to horses or riders. The most high profile fall was Zara Phillips and she received a lot of criticism in the media, whcich I thought was unfair. She fell at what I thought was the worst fence on the course. It looked like a mushroom and had a false ground line which is confusing for the horse. There was also some rain on the cross-country day which made the conditions quite slippery to add further to the difficulty.

The competition was dominated by two senior British riders William Fox-Pitt and Mary King. They were first and second, and third and fourth respectively. William Foxe-Pitt’s win on Tamarillo was his fifth win at this event, which is a great record.

I recently visited The Horse Exhibition at The American Museum of Natural History in New York. It has been running since May and continues through to January 2009.

I’m not sure quite what I expected as I am an infrequent museum visitor but it was a relatively small section of the whole museum. There were six main sections in the exhibition. An Evolution section which showed fossils of the early horse species, which were only dog-size and originated in the Americas. These species eventually became extinct but the Equus species evolved in Asia and Europe, where it was domesticated. There was a Hunters section which showed a number of early cave paintings. Horses are seen more often in cave paintings than any other animal. One interesting painting showed horses with a range of different expressions. It looked like one of the horses had very small ears but they were actually just flattened back as a show of aggression.

There were sections on Domestication and the Nature of Horses. I found it interesting to see a horse and human skeleton standing up side by side where there were a large number of similarities. The biggest section was how horses and  humans have shaped each other worlds, such as travel, warfare, work, status and sports. The  final section was on the Enduring  bond that exists between people and horses. There was only a small area which showed all of the different horse breeds.

I didn’t learn much new information but think that the children with us did learn quite a lot. I’d be interested to know the target audience  for the exhibition. There were certainly a  number of people visiting it when we were there.

As a fan of Big Brown I had hoped that he would run at the Breeders Cup before retiring to stud. Unfortunately he was withdrawn a few weeks before the event due to a foot problem. Best wishes go to Big Brown. He had a great record with only the one defeat, the reasons for which will remain a mystery.

There are usually a number of horses from Europe in the Breeders Cup Championship races. They have had varying degrees of success but they did particularly well this year winning a number of races.

There were three main highlights for me. One was seeing Curlin who looked magnificent and I hoped he would win the Breeders Cup Classic to further enhance his reputation. He had already won more than 10 million dollars before the race and while he ran well, he was not in the main places.

I was very happy to see Midnight Lute winning the Sprint race for the second successive year. He looked great in the paddock and ran really well to win fairly easy. It was hard to believe that he had only run once since sinning last year’s race due to a number of injuries including a hock problem.

In my opinion, the outstanding performance came from the European filly Goldikova who sprinted through a gap in the straight and made the other horses appear to be almost stationary. I said ‘wow’ at the time and the first comment from the race commentator after the race was also ‘wow’. I knew she had a good reputation but her winter coat appeared to be coming through on her neck (not surprising with the recent cold weather in Europe) and looked relatively dull compared to the others. I have heard that horses, particularly fillies, can lose form when this happens, but it wasn’t the case here. If you haven’t seen this race yet, I would suggest you try to.