“YOU CAN’T CUT a love out of your heart just because your body starts getting cranky,” Donna “Kit” Foote said.
I love her words and her positive attitude.
At 71, Foote is just as active training and showing her quarter horses as she was the years before undergoing bilateral knee replacements in 2009 and spine fusion surgery in 2012.
I can only imagine the pain she’s had to endure prior to and immediately after those surgeries, let alone the work and time she put into recuperating so she could get back on her horses to ride and ride with the precision needed to win championships.
Foote started showing at age 10.
She trains and shows quarter horses and is a longtime American Quarter Horse Association member.
She became a member of Washington State Horsemen and Olympic Peninsula Zone after retiring in California in 2003 and moving to the Peninsula.
Tilly is her current show horse and the second horse she has acquired since the move.
The mare is a registered quarter horse whose official name is Mostly I’m Ghostly.
Foote and her husband purchased Tilly as a weanling from Port Angeles resident Debbie Gores.
Foote said while some use professionals to train and show their horses, she’s trained Tilly, now 8, from the beginning and shows her herself “just as I have all my own horses for decades.”
She retired her former show horse, a quarter horse gelding named Barlnk On Easy Street, in 2013, referring to him now as “happy, retired yard art.”
I appreciate the fact she didn’t just cast off or get rid of her gelding once he was past the age of showing (as so many do) and continues to care for and honor him as a valued family member.
“Tilly, bless her heart, kinda fell by the wayside after my joints started falling apart,” she said.
Thus, she’s elated she’s been able to come back strong and absolutely thrilled to have won the championship in the ranch horse pleasure class at the 2015 Star Spangled Show hosted by Kyle Ellis in Port Angeles.
A new show
Ranch horse pleasure is a relatively new show class started by the American Quarter Horse Association a few years ago.
Foote said the class has “brought the fun back into showing” as the horses, riders and equipment used demand the natural way a ranch horse would be used, i.e., no banding, tail extensions or hoof black.
Silver adorning the tack is discouraged, while back cinches and breast collars are encouraged.
At the next show (the Olympic Peninsula Zone show that benefited The Wounded Warrior Project), Foote said, “We were able to win the high- point working horse award, as well as wins in ranch horse pleasure, trail and registered western pleasure.”
She’s looking forward to “2016 with fingers crossed” that the duo will keep winning.
Desire to push forward
I totally get her desire to push forward through not only the aches, pains and stiffness of aging but the surgeries themselves to keep pursuing her passion.
Foote said she’s had an “innate love of horses” all her life.
I’ve found most horse-loving folks are born that way, too, and that love usually only gets stronger for those of us who’ve actually gotten to experience horse ownership.
As far back as I can remember I, too, have loved their look, feel and smell.
And while non-horse lovers might find it repulsive, us lovers even enjoy the smell of horse manure.
Horse manure OK
And why not? Horses are vegetarians, not carnivores whose excrement I find extremely noxious and disgusting — and full of nasty bacteria.
But with horses, I figure it’s just recycled grass.
When their little plops of fresh, green manure fall on a road, we call them “road apples.”
People tend to apply what they learn about their own excrement, or their carnivorous pet’s, to horses and can feel repulsed.
So whenever I can, I try to educate folks: The truth is, horse manure carries no harmful bacteria.
It’s made up of grain, grass and hay. That’s it.
Events
■ Baker Stables Schooling show: Oct. 25 and Nov. 8 at 9 a.m. at 164 Four Winds Road, Port Angeles. Contact Dana or Tom King at 360-457-6039 or 360-460-7832.
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Karen Griffiths’ column, Peninsula Horseplay, appears every other Sunday.
If you have a horse event, clinic or seminar you would like listed, please email Griffiths at kbg@olympus.net at least two weeks in advance. You can also write Griffiths at PDN, P.O. Box 1330, Port Angeles, WA 98362.
