pet connection

While I’m writing, which I am lots with a book deadline scant two weeks away, I take breaks to cruise the Web. That’s how I found this little horsey tidbit about a horse who’s anything but little. From the Adelaide (Australia) Advertiser:

Noddy the Victorian Shire horse isn’t any ordinary show pony.

In fact, the five-year-old gelding will stand head and shoulders above the crowd at this year’s Royal Melbourne Horse Show.

Noddy, or to use his full name Luscombe Nordram, is unofficially the world’s tallest horse, measuring in at 20.1 hands, or 2.057 metres (81 inches).

“We joke that when climbing up on Noddy we get altitude sickness,” owner and horse trainer Jane Greenman said.

“Every year I measure him on his birthday and we discovered that he’s getting quite big.”

Ms Greenman, who will lead Noddy out as one of the main exhibits at next week’s horse show at the National Equestrian Centre at Werribee Park, south-west of Melbourne, bought him as a six-month-old foal.

She said she did not know how tall her favourite charge would eventually grow, and had not yet sought confirmation of Noddy’s record height from authorities.

“We haven’t bothered with Guinness World Records. The Americans do that a lot, they seem to be quite into it, but he’s mainly a working horse for us,” she said.

“It seems to be, from the homework and research we’ve done and what people have told me, the nearest horse in Texas is 20 hands and he’s already an inch taller than that.”

Ooooohhh, I love draft horses. Here’s the rest.

In other equine news, UPenn’s Dr. Dean Richardson, who attended to the ill-fated Kentucky Derby winner Barbaro, talks with other equine specialists about what it’s like to treat a patient with the media over your shoulder and everyone in the world offering suggestions:

For the eight months Barbaro was in his care, Dr. Richardson essentially lived under a microscope; his every treatment decision was scrutinized and second-guessed by veterinarians and many others following the case. “Having your post-operative radiographs show up all over the world, and having people calling from Hong Kong, Italy, and wherever else, is a little bit daunting,” he said.

[...]

People who know nothing about equine medicine thought they could save Barbaro. Many of the countless suggestions he received bordered on the bizarre. It was recommended, for instance, that the colt drink water from various holy shrines as well as the Jordan River and soak his injured limb in Atlantic Ocean water. Dr. Richardson also received letters with pages torn from 19th century medical books and even pages from James Herriot books.

It’s an interesting read, the whole thing.

Not about horses, at all, or not all about horses, anyway: One of the nice folks over at National Geographic magazine sent us an e-mail to point out that the cover story on animal intelligence from the current issue is online. Cool beans. Predictably, they used a border collie to illustrate how smart a dog can be. My dog is smarter than a border collie. And her sister is faster than all the border collies in the world. Just sayin’.

Also, if you want to share stories of how your pet is smarter than a border collie (pictures, too), you can do that on the site as well. And speaking of smart critters, the story reveals that Alex the African grey parrot who passes away a few months ago liked men better than he liked women:

Alex dominated his fellow parrots, acted huffy at times around [Dr. Irene] Pepperberg, tolerated the other female humans, and fell to pieces over a male assistant who dropped by for a visit. (”If you were a man,” Pepperberg said, after noting Alex’s aloofness toward me, “he’d be on your shoulder in a second, barfing cashews in your ear.”)

OK then! Back to work …