1-2-21
10:37 am Saturday
Thank you all for joining the Taz Team and for all the support.
We appreciate you all!
Meet Team Taz :
Jennifer Hedrick
Patricia Belyea
Melissa Condensa
Celeste Ingram
Barbara Bailey
Peter O. Gonder
Lyndsy Barber
Nichole Neff
Stanley Shaufler
Here is what the team contributed too:
We are a small family farm on beautiful Whidbey Island in Washington State, dedicated to breeding, preserving and promoting rare, heritage breeds of livestock. We raise high quality registered Dales Ponies, which are a critically endangered native breed from northern England known as “The Great All Rounder.”
Our mission is to promote the importance of maintaining genetic diversity amongst livestock through educating and increasing awareness of the breeds we raise, including the unusually capable, beautiful and personable Dales Pony.
Our current breed ambassador, the lovely imported stallion Taz (Kingmaker Talisman), carries forward the rare Wheatside line of Dales Ponies. Since joining our family in 2018, Taz has flourished and gone from being an unknown, unridden underdog to competing successfully in open dressage competitions, further convincing us of this breed’s importance.
On July 1st we delivered Taz to WW Equestrian Center for Jessica Wisdom to train and show so Dales Ponies can become better known. Because of restrictions due to COVID-19 and the wildfires our region has experienced, showing opportunities have been very limited. However, Taz was able to go to two USDF Dressage shows in August and not only started winning fans for the breed but also qualified for USDF Region 6 Championship competition with two scores of 71 in Open Training Level Dressage! This was very unexpected. Although a paperwork oversight prevented him from officially competing in the Regional competition, he competed in the Open Competition at Regionals, and won one of his classes with a score of 70. For a breeding stallion who first had a rider on his back two years ago, just before he turned 11 years old, this is quite an accomplishment.
Taz is a very special Dales Pony stallion, currently fit and ready to show more, and our investment in his training and showing since July has already been well over $10,000.
Plans for a Working Equitation show in October fell through due to the event being overbooked. There is another Working Equitation show in November he could go to, but the additional cost of close to $4,000 is more than we are comfortable with at the moment. If any Dales Pony fans (or Cascadia Heritage Farm fans) would like to help make this additional month of training and showing possible, we would greatly appreciate the support.