Estancia Los Potreros

Born yesterday to ‘La Caida’. Like his dad, Record Boy, he has huge hocks and knees!

Pic to follow . . . .

The increased use of round corrals or pens has often been credited to Monty Roberts, due to the way that he brought natural horsemanship techniques to the forefront. One of the principles underpinning natural horsemanship is that the trainer mimics and uses natural horse behaviour to bring on the young horse.

Here, Humi has already established himself as the ‘leader of the herd’ with this young mare, and he has asked her to stop and come to him just using body language.

A lassoing practice session in the corrals results in some interesting techniques and some rather bemused looking calves. Despite this, one of our guests Ingrid managed to ‘catch her cow’ first time round, much to the embarassment of our experienced gauchos who took just a little longer . . .

Following an impromptu polo tournament on Sunday, player of the match award went to Niamh Maloney - which was pretty good considering she had got straight off a bus onto a horse after a 12 hour journey with no sleep!

. . .born last night, to a fabulous Paso Peruano stallion called ‘Lucas’ . . .he has taken his Dad´s colouring . . .

Arrival number 6, born to ‘Menta’, two nights ago . . .

The story starts earlier this year when Robin was told by a local that they had some horses to sell. It was the usual tale . . .around the corner came a motley collection of animals that could loosely be called horses, but none that were of good enough quality to come to the farm. Until the last one arrived - a pretty bay mare, who stood out head and shoulders above the rest. The mare was bought and became ‘Sorpresa’ because Robin was so surprised to have found her.

But that was only the first surprise. About a month ago, having had the mare for 4 months or so, one of the gauchos called Lou up to the corrals and asked her to look at Sorpresa´s teats. Sure enough, it looked as though they were swelling, and looking long and hard at her, it was decided that she may be pregnant. She was immediately turned out with the other pregnant mums so that we could keep an eye on her, and sure enough, almost overnight, her belly started to swell a little.

And then yesterday the local ‘experts’ (Lou, Humi, Kevin, several gauchos) all hummed and hahed about which mare was going to give birth next, and predictably we all chose different ones . . .but none of us chose Sorpresa.

But as we got up this morning, just look what happened to come along! Sorpresa surprised us once again . . .