Grr Baby! Yeah!

It’s the swingin’ 60’s, baby! Filled with free love and… this guy?

“His sire is also listed on this site with a video, T Bar Ts Rowdy Royal Champion. The grandsire sold for $50K and the bloodline hasn’t suffered at all as you can see. This stud is in pasture condition, and very well put together he has never had his neck sweated and would benefit from that, but he has a nice length of neck and all else is in place. You can fix sweating a neck, you can’t fix the other finer points of conformation and it’s all there! He has a nice flat top line, good tail set. tiny head, good muzzle, big soft eye, straight legs, bite, and outstanding markings that lend themselves to performance classes such as driving. He is a beautiful horse with those loud splash markings, four stockings and a flaxen mane and tail! As a herd sire, he would make beautiful babies for you and put you in blue ribbons. He must go to a good home only. I need to reduce my herd, the first two to sell will cause me to take down the rest. I only need to reduce by two. AMHA/AMHR Registry Pending You tube video – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1QRrb4Stog

Breed: Miniature
Gender: Stallion
Birth Date: Dec 31, 1969

Call X at: ### ### ####
More information at: http://www.equinenow.com/horse-ad-490646″

OMFG that horse is 42 years old!  We are so astounded by this we’ve decided to enlist some help from the late, great Leslie Nielson to convey the depth of our amazement.

As a side note, if you go to their ad on equinenow.com (we copied the above from craigslist) it says the horse’s birth date is “unknown”.  *cough*bullshit*cough* ahem. Excuse us – tickle in the throat.

Alright, so either that is a typo or that is one virile old dude with stock in the equine equivalent of viagra!  People, check your ads before you post them.

Next on the list, and it seems almost trivial to include this now – probably shouldn’t have led with the age thing.  “Pasture condition”? Usually this would make us expect to see a dirty, hairy, out-of-shape, possibly skinny horse with chipped feet.  But if that picture is at all recent, that is clearly not the case.  So we’re guessing “Pasture condition” means that you have systematically and painstakingly used your presumed experience and expertise to train, condition and prepare this horse to… eat grass from a pasture.  Wow.  Congratulations on the rousing success of teaching your horse to eat grass in a field.   We’re sure we’ve seen that skill somewhere else before but can’t quite place our fingers on it right now – oh well, Shirley it will come to us later! 😉

And apparently he’d make a good “herd sire”!  Wooooo!  A stud that will breed in a herd setting.  Oh gosh, now we know we’ve heard that somewhere before!  Or if we use the other definition of “herd sire”, ie. that you use him to sire a herd, we’ve got a couple problems with that, too.

For starters, he’s not yet registered.  And they haven’t listed any show accomplishments or fabulous prior offspring to show that he’s worthy of siring more.  Dwarfism is a big issue with minis.  While we assume that by “good muzzle” and “bite” they mean he doesn’t suffer from dwarfism and isn’t deformed in any way that would affect normal eating or respiratory habits, we’re not convinced.  He appears to suffer from a mild form of achondroplasia.  It’s a form of dwarfism that causes shortened extremities; short legs are one symptom, but the tiny ears are a giveaway.  It’s possible he’s just got a slightly disproportionate build; since there’s no way of testing for dwarfism, we can’t be sure.  But it wouldn’t shock us if he produced some babies that looked like weiner dogs!

So to sum up: if you’re looking for a 42 year old, unconditioned, possibly unproven stud that is only suitable to get his funk on with minis in a herd setting, then this is the horse for you!

Can you blame us?  He was born in the 60’s and Austin Powers is the connection we have to that era!