Look what we came home from Devon with..

Interesting. We met a couple of guys who only wanted the traditional looking dartmoors and they bought 2 from a group that were nothing but bay. Would these not have been classed as traditional bays then? They certainly looked it.

Scurry racing here we come - in about 5 years time, lol !
 
YAY well done you, thats 4 cuties saved from the meatman. I've been hearing lot's of horror stories that so many of the ponies are not going to market, but the meatman has been driving round to the farms and taking a load of them off to slaughter. Why don't they just take a few of the stallions off the moors and geld them, it would give the mares a well deserved break and we won't have this problem of far too many ponies on the moors that they end up going to the slaughter house.

If I had more room, I'd have more ponies, but my 17.1hh WB takes up a fair bit of room as you can imagine :D
 
Good for you, that's four more safe then. We are running a course for the Dartmoor Pony Training Centre in three weeks time taming 12 wild foals using gentle methods. In this way we hope that people will see how easy it can be to bring a wild foal round if you know what your are doing and don't jam a headcollar on it first thing. We get them happy with touch first and then the headcollar becomes nothing.

These ponies are fabulous for driving.
 
I have a 10 year old Dartie who was rescued from the sales as a foal. I wouldn't swap her for anything. They are four stunning ponies, I hope you have lots of fun with them.
 
You are worse than me - I last went in 2003 and came home with 3 of them. Cost me £42 after everything for all of them.

Our local slaughter man is killing a lot on the farms before running them through the sales due to the economic situation and I personally think its a good thing.
 
Laura1812 said:
Our local slaughter man is killing a lot on the farms before running them through the sales due to the economic situation and I personally think its a good thing.
Click to expand...

Definitely far kinder than stressing them out running them through the sales, especially if the end result with be the same.
 
We were there and came home with one too!
for £10 + vat, criminal

Brought her to keep a friends youngster company.

Full of worms (some 10 in. long :puke: ) but otherwise in good health. Vendor we bought from sold 2/20 and another we spoke to 3/30 odd. Trade was awful and the majority of the rest were off to feed the zoo animals :-(

Some nice vanner cob youngsters didn`t even make their £30 reserve, shocking waste.
 
Beware: rant coming up ..... !!!

I can remember back as far as the 1960's when decisions were made to allow shetland ponies to run on the moor alongside the Dartmoors, which resulted in ponies being produced which nobody wanted at that time, i.e. coloured ponies rather than the typical Dartmoor colours of brown, black, and bay.

This resulted in a dilution of the traditional, and much desired, Dartmoor type - and meant that there was a surplus, existing to this day unfortunately, of ponies which no-body really wants, whereas there is only one stud if my knowledge is correct, on the moor, which is breeding the traditional Dartmoors in an enclosed environment i.e. not on the open moor.

This is why there are so many poor little ponies going for slaughter: it all goes back to the sheer folly of those that made the decisions to interbreed with coloured Shetlands all those years ago. What they were thinking of I do not know.
 
I was hoping to have at least one coloured, but didn't realise that the majority there would be coloured. Had I stuck to my original plan of getting one black, one chestnut we would have been hard pushed. I didn't really see any black ones.

They're all about 6 months old. We paid £10 each for the boys and £15 and £35 for the girls, no vat, just commission plus the £15 for their passports and microchips. It cost us £160 in diesel for the 500 mile round trip, we had 2 hours sleep out of 24, left home at 1am on Saturday morning and got back home after dropping ponies at our yard at about 10pm. Absolutely shattered but no regrets. We adore our new babies and would do it all again in a heartbeat. And the best thing is OH is completely smitten with them and wants to do most of their training - result!

We plan to get them walking out in the forest as soon as possible, in hand showing next year and probably til they can be broken. Ultimately we want to drive them but will also get them broken to ride if we can find some kids to ride them. Might even try that new agility if we can find out more about it. The plan was never to just stick them in a field.

We're currently quarantining them but my warmblood gelding has seen them and is terrified of them, lol!
 
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