I was more interested to learn about why there are a bunch of feral horses on this tiny island with a permanent human population of five. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say:
The first horses on Sable Island, off the coast of Nova Scotia, Canada were brought to the island during the late 1700s. Many people believe that they arrived on the island from off of the many shipwrecks, however, this romantic notion is false - they were in fact intentionally left on Sable to graze and multiply, and were most likely seized from Acadians during their expulsion from Nova Scotia at the hands of the British. Although often referred to as ponies due to their small size, they have a horse phenotype.
The whole island is a wildlife preserve, so the animals are left in their natural state. You apparently need special permission from the Canadian Coast Guard to visit.
As regular readers know, I’m a huge fan of Lee and Sachi’s awesome paper-based videos. As part of our blogger outreach strategy for promoting our ebook, we’ve created a number of personalized video messages. We created something particularly special for Lee and Sachi. It’s our own very awful parody of their videos:
In particular, I have no idea why Sachi acquired a certain Queen Elizabeth accent halfway through the thing. I take full responsibility.
Last night, as part of Rabat’s festa, Gozo’s main city hosted 36 (36!) horse races up it’s main street. The course was a straight-away, about a kilometre long and went up a seriously steep incline.
It was pretty fun, and definitely not a show for the tourists. There were a smattering of visitors around, but the majority of the fans were locals, drinking beer, smoking cigars and consulting race programs. I assume there was a schwack of gambling going on, though I didn’t actually spot any.
I’m sure it was pretty safe, but I liked the imagined danger of the horses (and harness racers) roaring past the crowds with nothing but a few feet between them. As you can see in this photo, the crowd actually stands in the middle of the road to get a better view until the horses get quite close.
I took a bunch of photos, and these were the fourteen best ones. It’s a busy day here, so I made extensive use of the poor man’s Photoshop–ye olde ‘Enhance’ button in iPhoto.
I was channel surfing the other day and happened upon a documentary entitled “Chasing Wild Horses”. It’s about Roberto Dutesco, a New York fashion photographer who visits the remote Sable Island, a windswept crescent of land off of the coast of Nova Scotia. He goes there to photograph some of the 300 wild horses that roam freely on this bleak, grassy islet: