Meet Spears Kool Girl.

The autumn of 2023 and early 2024, I began a series of horse introductions focusing on the horses that we had on our farm at that time.  I introduced all 27 of the horses that we had on our farm in November of 2023.  This year, I'm going to do some time traveling and go back through the ones that have left our farm over the years before introducing the horses that are new to our farm this year (foals and acquisitions...some of those foals have already left our farm).

I am now on the last few weeks of foal training and final foal care checklist items before all our 2024 foals leave for their new homes by the end of the month.  It's a bit of a sad time, since we soon will not have any happy little hooves on the farm, but it's also a time to reflect on the past year while our mares are cooking up next year's batch of tiny hooves over the winter.  It also gives me back a little bit of time in my daily schedule to focus on this reflection.

We delved into other breeds before settling on Gypsy Horses as our focus.  Spears Kool Girl was a registered quarter horse that we had acquired at a local auction with a filly by her side.

We didn't know what kind of barn name to give her because anything based on her name was very awkward to say verbally (and "Girl" just doesn't seem like a good name, either).  After handling her for a bit and finding out more about her history, we settled on the barn name of Nicotine (due to Kool being a brand of cigarettes).  The name suited her personality, since she had spent most of her life untouched as a broodmare.  We were able to dig up some very old pictures of her being a trail riding horse, but she was definitely a pasture pet left to make babies for most of her history before we owned her.

She was a beautiful grullo mare with a grullo filly by her side (I've been told grullo for quarter horses and grulla for Gypsy Horses, but everyone uses what they are accustomed to).  For a year plus, she was a free roamer on our nearly 60 acres with our Tennessee Walking Horses and miniature mule (and, at that time, some of our Gypsy Horses who we later found were too curious to be left wild and free due to their propensity to find trouble).

We had to temper our expectations for her, since she was an older mare that just had not been extremely well-acclimated to constant human handling.  We moved her up from pasture ornament status to being more easily handled, but after discovering Gypsy Horses, she became less of a good match for the direction of our farm.  She was gifted to a local boy for his 18th birthday, since he was in love with her, and several of the local boys had a history of giving us a hand with random jobs around the farm.

Fast-forward years later, and we just connected with her new owner who purchased her at an auction up in Ohio.  Her new owner is 100% into quarter horses and especially grullo quarter horses.  She is bred for a foal next year with a grullo quarter horse stallion, so Nicotine will be continuing to do what she does best, and we believe she's in very good hands where she landed.  We do not know what roads she traveled to get there, and we've lost contact with the local boy that we gifted her to, but we do always love to hear of happy endings for those horses that have left our care.  All of the ones that leave take a piece of our hearts with them when they are absent.