More Subscriber Benefits in 2011
Foxhunting Life loves its subscribers! To show our appreciation and to give you more value for your annual subscription, all FHL subscribers now receive an automatic ten percent discount off the list price on all items in the Bookstore: books, calendars, videos, and CDs. This new policy goes into effect immediately. (And don’t forget, subscribers can post […]
Where Do the Articles Go?
Readers will notice, we hope, that FHL’s Home Page is continually being updated with new articles. As new articles are posted, the older material is pushed lower on the Home Page until it disappears. Or does it? No, it doesn’t! Not completely, anyway. Note that each article on the Home Page has a category heading […]
British Hunting Ban Will Go Unchallenged in 2011
England’s Hunting Act will go unchallenged in 2011, despite Prime Minister David Cameron’s earlier pledge for a free vote in Parliament and despite former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s admission this year that passage of the Act was a mistake. Although the government claims there are more pressing issues requiring Parliament’s attention, there is doubt now […]
Thousands of Horses Abandoned in Ireland
The Daily Mail reports that thousands of horses—perhaps as many as one hundred thousand—are being abandoned in Ireland as a result of the financial crisis there. Many are brought by their owners to common grazing grounds, such as Dunsink tip near Dublin, and left to fend for themselves. Some too weak to survive have had […]
Nation’s Top Horse Trainers Gather for Michael Richardson Benefit
I spent a grand week in Aiken, South Carolina recently and had a chance to hunt with George and Jeannie Thomas, MFHs of the Why Worry Hounds (See Hunt Report below). I stayed with my friend Art Richardson, ex-MFH of the Wayne-Du Page Hunt in Illinois. Art hunts with the Aiken packs and brings his two grand-daughters, Mackenzie and Virginia, to visit and hunt with him as often as possible. Life is good for us.
Well…for most of us. For Art’s son Michael, life could be better. Michael is a horseman and was a foxhunter in his younger years. At the age of twenty, Michael was involved in an automobile accident that left him paralyzed from the waist down. That’s not the current problem, though.
A Gift Subscription to Foxhunting Life
If you’re scratching your head for another gift for your favorite foxhunter, how about a year’s subscription to Foxhunting Life? Your lucky recipient will enjoy total access to the next twelve months of constantly changing articles; news; book reviews; sporting artist profiles; hunt breakfast recipes; access to our Panel of Experts; calls on the horn […]
Horse Tales and Hunt Talk
Where else but in the hunting fields of Ireland could you have found such larger-than-life and totally disparate characters as Lady Molly Cusack-Smith, Elsie Morgan, American John Huston, and Thady Ryan? Sadly, those four have passed on, but others—Michael Dempsey, Willie Leahy, and Aidan O’Connell—wear big shoes as well and are very much with us still! Also included in this delightful book of personality profiles are North America’s Nancy Penn-Smith Hannum and a smattering of French and Australian characters whom you should also meet.
Photo-journalist Noel Mullins is a regular contributor to The Irish Field, and his work has also been published in Horse and Hound, Baily’s, Hunting and Country Illustrated in England, and The Chronicle of the Horse and Foxhunting Life in the U.S.
“I started hunting with the Galway Blazers with Michael Dempsey when I was eight years old in 1952 on the milkman’s pony, Teapot, but only after I helped him on his delivery rounds!” recalls Mullins.
Why Worry?
Charles Sainsbury-Plaice photo
“Would you like to ride up with me?” asked George Thomas, MFH and huntsman of the Why Worry Hounds. Thomas is a direct descendant of the Bywaters family of Virginia—renowned foxhound breeders of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—and he hunts a pack of Crossbred hounds, most of which carry the old Bywaters bloodlines. The meet was at Basset Hill in Aiken, South Carolina, home of Ward and Mary Lou Welsh. I was being offered a chance to watch a lovely pack of hounds work their country.
Horsey Book Wins National Book Award
Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon won the National Book Award for Fiction last month. The book’s title is taken from the name of a horse at a seedy, fictional racetrack in West Virginia. As a novelist, Jaimy Gordon has been championed by a few during her years of obscurity, and was, as the New York […]
Sporting Art with Punch
When I look at Susan Smolensky’s oil paintings I hear horses splattering brush, I feel the jocks’ precariousness as they go airborne. Grass flies and a horse grimaces momentarily as it’s snagged in the mouth. There’s not a strip horse in the lot, but the artist’s exaggerations add to the dynamics of the instant.