Finding horses

Now that we’ve seen a bit of the farm on rented horses we wanted to explore it further. The rented horses weren’t in good shape. I’m by no means a horse expert but I feel they don’t get their injections and proprably are not fed well. They seemed weak. We thought we may be able to find a few better horses and even if those we are going to find are not in perfect shape we can treat them well and they might become good horse. So we did a couple of phone calls to find out who might be selling a horse around where we live. That’s in the mountains above Chame in the western part of the Panama province. There are many small farms and people who can’t afford a 4WD vehicle use horses as a means of transportation. So you can see lots of horses around here.

The only challenge left was to enlist the help of someone who knows about horses well enough to help us decide. Luis knows how to ride and has some basic knowledge but he is a young guy. In Latin America families are usually quite large. One of his uncles has some cattle of his own and he is almost a veterinarian himself. So we asked him for help.

After a few days of calling many people we got word that the owner of this little subsistence farm had a horse to sell. It’s located in a nearby valley on top of a small hill. Again the Jeep proved useful as it was a rainy day and people who were leaving the area on foot were telling us that other 4WD vehicles had turned around. After our past experiences we were confident that we will make it. Thanks to the magic button for the differential lockers we did! So thanks again Jeep for making such a great car.

This is Luis’ uncle Dimar. The horse is said to be a mix of Quarter Horse and Criollo. He looks a bit out of shape but Dimar thought with good food, some vitamins and medicine against worms he should get stronger and better looking soon.

I can’t tell whether this horse really has some Quarter Horse genes. They think it has because the head is larger than those of regular Criollos. But then Criollos are a mix of everything. He seems to be a nice animal with good manners so we put him on our short list and in the bought him.

This horse doesn’t have a name yet. Anyone has a good name for him?

We wanted to buy three horses in total. One for Luis, one for me and a third one for anyone who will accompany us. The next one we found is Luzero. On other pictures you will see in future posts he is quite a small horse. It turned out as well that he has a bit too much testosterone and in the end - I’m jumping ahead in my story - we had to castrate him. He used to put up a fight with all the other guys.

11 Sep 2009

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