Greenbelt Mustangs
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Greenbelt Mustangs
By PAT BRENNAN
Osprey News Network.
I think I will never see anything as lovely as a tree…or as strange.
That's what nine wild horses must have been thinking when they arrived at their new home in the Greenbelt last year.
"They stood for a whole day just staring at the trees. They had never seen trees before," said Albert Botha, who helped rescue the Mustangs from death row in Wyoming and brought them to Ontario.
There are 24,000 wild horses in holding pens in Wyoming facing death if they aren't adopted or purchased by volunteers and moved off the open ranges. Another 26,000 wild horses and burros still roam free on the high plains of western U.S.
Now some of them are roaming free amidst those strange trees on the Greenbelt near Grafton, 125 kilometres east of Toronto.
The U.S. Congress passed legislation two years ago to cull the herds of wild horses, called Mustangs, that roam the millions of Bureau of Land Management acres in Wyoming, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Montana and Texas. All wild horses more than 10 years old are to be rounded up and removed from the lands.
At about the same time the Ontario Government passed legislation creating the Greenbelt - a swath of 1.8 million acres of land wrapping around the Greater Toronto Area, to preserve green space in southern Ontario so a lot of animals can continue to roam free.
When Botha, a renowned Toronto film producer, heard about the fate of the Mustangs he rounded up a few friends and created the Save the Mustangs Foundation. Its purpose is to find new homes for as many of the doomed wild horses as possible by telling other land owners the Mustang story.
Four of the nine Mustangs were pregnant mares when they arrived on Botha's 70-acre farm near Grafton. They have since produced fouls that were separated from their mothers at eight months and are being domesticated.
The mothers are still wild, said Botha. They won't eat oats, they avoid humans and they're not even sure if they trust those trees yet. "A person can't get within 100 yards of them," said Botha. "I've been bringing hay to them for two years and I still can't get any closer than 50 feet before they bolt away."
The mares eat hay in the winter and graze in the green seasons.
The five stallions in the rescued group are no longer stallions. "They are geldings now," said Botha. "You could never gentle them if they remained stallions."
They went to the farm of horse trainer Randy Bird near Harwood, just below Rice Lake in the Greenbelt. "Randy is an exceptional horse trainer and he now has one of the geldings gentled enough to be harnessed and hitched to a wagon. He is trying to get the geldings gentle enough that they can be useful on a farm and have a long, productive life," said Botha.
You can see the four Mustang mares on pasture lands in the Great Pine Ridge area just west of the famous Ste. Anne's Country Inn and Spa on Massey Rd., which runs west off Highway 23 two kilometres north of interchange # 487 on Highway 401.
Jim Corcoran, owner of Ste. Anne's, is one of the sponsors of the Save the Mustangs Foundation.
It's redundant to call them wild Mustangs. Mustang is a Spanish word for wild horse.
The Mustangs have joined an estimated 325,000 other horses in Ontario, many of them living in the Greenbelt. The last horse census in Ontario was done in 2001 by Dr. Bob Wright, chief horse veterinarian at Ontario's Ministry of Agriculture. He found a 32,000 increase over 10 years.
Former Olympic equestrian Jay Hayes says Southern Ontario is one of the top five areas in the entire world for horse owners, particularly hunters and jumpers. That's why Hayes and his wife Shawn started the Collingwood Horse Show, which celebrated its 20th anniversary last August.
The competition attracts 1,000 horses from far and wide and is a qualifier for the World Cup. This summer it will be held at the new Thornbury Horse Park, which Hayes and realtor/developer Peter Lush have created on 250 acres up against the Greenbelt near Thornbury.
Hayes, who competed for Canada in the Barcelona Olympics in '92 and Sydney in 2000, says he is creating "one of the world's finest horse show facilities.
"About 160 acres of our park is zoned agriculture and nearly 100 acres is zoned light industrial and everybody is happy to see a horse park being created on those lands near the Greenbelt rather than light industrial," said Hayes.
More information about Thornbury Horse Park is available at www.collingwoodhorseshow.com.
The Royal Canadian Riding Academy is one of Canada's premier riding schools and it sits in the midst of the Greenbelt on Davis Dr. in Cedar Valley, east of Highway 404. Equestrian events happen there all year long as it has four indoor riding arenas. The school/farm hosted the 2006 finals for the Ontario Rodeo Association.
There are 15 rodeo events throughout Ontario each summer, many of them in the Greenbelt. Details are available at www.ontariorodeoassociation.com. More information about the RCRA is available at www.rcra.ca.
The Ontario Equestrian Federation has a list of all the horse shows and competitions in Ontario at www.horse.on.ca.
Jessica Di Genova is only 17 and already an internationally-ranked competitor in hacking. Hacking is like orienteering on horseback. It's cross-country horse competition spread over three days that takes place out in the woods and fields leaping over natural boundaries like fallen trees, creeks, stone fences and beaver dams.
Di Genova learned the sport while riding her horse in the Greenbelt near her family's home in Terra Cotta. Some of Canada's best hacking competitions, also called eventing, are staged at Ganaraska Ranch adjacent to the 11,000-acre Ganaraska Forest near Pontypool and at Checkmate Equestrian Centre on the Georgian Highlands above Collingwood.
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