My husband and I were recently out for a ride our horse, Shaker, and his buddy, Shaker Jr. We rode horses in the mountains, in the woods, and up the beach. The horse business cards that came in the mail from a friend helped us get our horse ready for the ride.
We’ve had some interesting horse business cards over the years, but this one was the coolest yet. I was surprised to find, in addition to a picture of Shaker and Shaker Jr., it also included some horse-related facts. When I first read the card, I was not at all impressed. I guess the fact that it included a picture of a horse and a brief fact about its history made my jaw drop. I had to look it up.
According to Wikipedia, the Shaker horse was invented by the American Civil War general, John Shaker, who was the first president of the American Thoroughbred Horse Association. The Shaker horse is still used today, mainly to race and stage races.
The Shaker horse is a descendant of both the Thoroughbred and the Paint Horse, although no one really knows which ancestor was the ancestor of the Shaker horse. The Shaker horse is also a descendant of the North American Wild Horse Preservation Act of 1971. This law allowed the horse to be used in racing. The law was passed in 1971, but the horse was used in racing from 1973 until the late 1990s.
In the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, the Shaker horse was banned from racing in North Dakota because they didn’t like the horses doing it. They were claiming that the horse was being used as a racehorse in order to maintain its wildness. It was a hot topic in the horse industry at the time, and for a while, the state of North Dakota banned the use of the Shaker horse.
The North Dakota legislature passed a bill in 1999 that outlawed a few things that had been going on for a few years (the Shaker horse and other wild horses). The last bill was passed in 2001. The reason the bill banned the use of the Shaker horse is because people from the Shaker Horse Foundation would come in and claim that the horse was being used to raise money for the foundation.
The foundation was established by Paul Shaker, the great-grandfather of the Shaker founder, Mary Shaker. The foundation owns and operates a ranch in North Dakota that is the source of the Shaker horse’s name. The foundation has a website at shakerfoundation.org and is run by former Shaker horse and cattle rancher Tim Baker.
The foundation website says that the Shaker horses are “for the use of the Shaker Horse Foundation in its efforts to raise funds and awareness for the preservation of all Shaker Horse Heritage.” In other words, the foundation is actively trying to “save” the Shaker horses, but it’s not because it’s a charity, it’s because they are a way of raising money to preserve the history of the Shaker family.
The website also says that the Shaker’s original mission was to preserve and breed horses. That mission doesn’t seem to be going very well in today’s world.
But it is. The Shaker Horse Heritage has a very difficult history. The family that founded the organization was a bunch of slave traders and slave traders. The organization was founded to help the Shakers escape this fate, but that mission seems to be in danger as well. The Shakers were also the first family to use the term “nigga” in their founding document, but it’s only just starting to be an accepted term.
