Midway through 2020 was the first giveaway that something was off when I noticed that my days seemed to be ending sooner than they should have, with evening chores, dinner, and bedtime rolling around before I felt I even got started. That was odd because it was summer and our daylight hours here in southern Spain are long. It also seemed that very little progress was being made on my “To Do” list: day after day it was sneering at me, growing longer. Not only was there the feeling of getting little accomplished, I was also forgetful, frequently walking into rooms without remembering why; my cell phone even had a brief stay in the fridge.

The remains of her newly purchased 12-year-old CSI**** level show jumper Phedras de Blondel lay in a sea of blood. All that was left were his head, neck, and ribcage. On October 25, 2015, the thieves, believed to be part of a criminal ring marketing illegal horsemeat, had entered the property, walked the horse out with a rope, and led him to the furthest paddock where they slaughtered him.

It would be some 700,000 years before Duane Froese, an earth sciences professor with the University of Alberta in Edmonton and his team excavated a metapodial (cannon) horse bone from permafrost in the Thistle Creek gold mine in west-central Yukon in 2003. The team was hunting fossils embedded in permafrost while gathering data on the sediments that preserved them. Many other horse fossils found in Yukon had been pony-sized, but Froese and his team knew this find had come from a larger horse.

Developing guidelines for health and well-being of horses transported by air.

By Mark Andrews