Jim’s legs at birth are the same height as they will ever be, apart from a slight spacing of the knee joints.

Thumb is 14 and a good working draught horse, said her owner Anita of Lower Longley. She had brought the pair to the Tasmanian Forest Festival at the Heritage Park at Geeveston over the weekend of 24-25 March.

Anita was there to compete, with other peoples’ horses to make it trickier, in the obstacle course. Here the draught horse moves between orange cones and over logs pulling a sled carrying the reinsman standing behind a bucket of water.

The team with the most water left in their bucket at the end is the winner.

Thumb’s sire, Morgan Dale Black Friday, bred in South Australia, still works, as does Thumb. She is involved in ploughing, using a scoop, spreading super and harrowing.

Bred for it, she enjoys it, her owner maintains. She can work, and she does work, but it’s not her whole life.
Has Anita ever come across anyone objecting to using the horses this way?

‘Never’.

But her Dad has.

He was heading up a long steep hill with a friend who said she thought it was cruelty to make the horse ahead of them drag a sled.

Half way up the hill she accepted a lift on it.

Jim is for sale for $2000 — which means Anita is in this for love, she says.

It’s costing about $250 a month to feed mare and colt — on pellets, copra, lucerne, chaff, bran and molasses — as well as hay.

Jim, born in December, will continue to suckle from Thumb until he’s about six months old.

On maturing, unless gelded, he will, like any stallion, lead a comparatively solitary life.

Natalie Stanley, Secretary of Tasmanian Draught Horses Association Southern Branch, says stallions must have their own very securely fenced paddock and don’t get to socialize like mares and geldings.

Horses, according to Natalie, are the only mammals in which the males have no female hormones at all, and thus no nipples.

Altogether she thought, looking at her own mare Amy and its colt Hudson, the mares have a better time of it.

Margot Giblin

Thumb is the mum.

Jim is her colt …