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Recently, I accompanied Katie's Girl Scout troop on a trip to Cumberland Island. Cumberland is one of Georgia's barrier islands on the Atlantic coast and is quite beautiful (I highly recommend a visit if you're near Savannah or Jacksonville, FL). One of the things it's known for is wild horses -- technically, feral horses -- that populate the island. During our visit, the troop hiked out to the ruins of a mansion built by the Carnegie family and we were breaking for lunch, so Katie and I had a chance to chat. We found a picnic table that was away from the group and watched the horses while we ate. There were no foals that we saw but Katie began asking about the horses having babies. We had a wide-ranging discussion with a lot of questions about identifying mares and stallions, how to tell if a mare is expecting, and so on. I ended up explaining in the briefest terms how horse babies are made. Katie became fascinated by the relationship between the mother and father horse (or dam and sire for you horse folks). Katie seemed bothered by the idea of the single mother horses and the deadbeat dad horses.
"So they get together, have horse sex, and....?" she asked.
"Yes," I said. "The dad goes on his way while the momma raises the baby."
"That's just rude," says Katie. "They should at least date before they have a baby together."
Of course, a discussion of horse marriage ensued but we reached no conclusions about how to solve the challenges of single motherhood in the horse community before it was time to move along on our hike. Perhaps we'll solve that on another visit.
