Favourite moment from the Royal Agricultural Winter Fair Horse Show, this past Friday afternoon: A demonstration of fox hunting was being given in the Ricoh Coliseum before an audience of perhaps seven thousand somewhat bemused spectators in attendance to watch show jumping competitions. The fox hunting demonstration involved several horses ridden by the various guys all decked out in the their fancy fox hunting regalia, and a pack of about thirty to forty hounds who were trained to do what hounds do during a fox hunt. The demonstrators showed us how the hounds forge ahead, looking for a fox in response to certain horn blasts, and how the hounds quickly return to the hunters in response to another set of horn blasts. Actually, that’s not quite how it worked. As it happened, the horn guy, seated on horseback at the south end of the Coliseum, played blast number one and the pack of hounds went yelping and whorlping in a flash down to the north end of the building. Horn guy then did blast number two and most of the hounds yelped and whorlped and wagged their tails back to the south end. There were two dogs, however, who stopped – right in the middle of the ring, approximately where the red line would be when the Marlies take to the ice, mind you – hunched over, and defecated. The end result was that there were seven thousand people gathered around, at least for a few minutes, watching two dogs take a crap.
These are the precious memories.