Terri Farley

Friday, July 30, 2010

Auction Day: Calico Mountain Mustangs

Dear Readers,
Ghost Dancer will be traveling with me to the Wild Horse Sanctuary in California.
Shell Flower won't.
I'd never been part of ANY kind of auction, before (except fictional ones!), let alone an EBay style Internet auction, but my friend Anne advised me to hang back.
I made initial bids on Ghost Dancer and Shell Flower to make sure my computer worked on the Auction website, then waited 'til the last minutes of the auction to bid again.
That doesn't mean I wasn't WATCHING from the minute my eyes opened Wednesday, and I noticed (so did lots of you!) that a Texas bidder -- if you're reading, wow, you have fast fingers! -- had replace me as high-bidder on both horses.
My hands were shaking. My neck got stiff. I spoke harshly to Sherlock the cat when he sat on my lap and tapped the computer keyboard with a gentle gray paw.
And I worried. It wasn't likely, but what if the other bidder had Bad Intentions? I decided I had to make GHOST DANCER my first priority. At fifteen years old, she was listed as a sale authority horse. BLM discourages bidders from selling such horses for "commercial purposes" but she could legally be headed for out-of-the-country slaughter as soon as she was in the wrong hands.
BLM, in theory at least, is supposed to keep an eye on adoption horses like SHELL for a year.
But Ghost Dancer won't be traveling to California alone :) !
At the advice of a nice woman in BLM's Eastern States office, I picked a "safety net" horse.
I narrowed my choices down to mares no one had bid on.
Among them, I searched for one captured on the same day, in the same place as Ghost Dancer. I found her!
Little sorrel #0795, is now named Sage.
Hug your horses,
Terri

p.s. GHOST is 15 and SAGE is 2.
Who knows? They might even be mother and daughter.

Labels: Calico mountains, ghost dancer, Internet auction, mustangs, Sage, Shell Flower

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Posted by Terri Farley @ 5:09 PM 5 comments