"Failure Is Not an Option"

Annette Stapenhorste is determined to find a lasting role in modern society for a breed whose original purpose has vanished.

by Denise Flint

What happens to an animal when it’s no longer necessary? When it appears to have outlived its usefulness and its very reason for existence? If it is to continue to survive it needs champions. The Newfoundland Pony is one such animal and, over the years, it has found some worthy advocates. The most recent of these is Annette Stapenhorste, a woman dedicated to preserving and protecting the animal, as well as giving it a reason to prosper again.

Since the late 1990’s, when the pony received legal protection under the Heritage Animal Act, interest in its promotion has been concentrated in breeders and owners from other provinces, specifically Ontario. Newfoundlander Annette Stapenhorste, however, is bucking this trend.

Stapenhorste is, to use the local terminology, a CFA, or Come-From-Away. She grew up in Germany and came to Canada twenty years ago. After living in various parts of the country she settled in Newfoundland. In the 1990s she learned that the Newfoundland Pony Society was looking for people to shelter ponies in distress. Spurred on by her son Dylan’s love of animals and living on an acreage with plenty of room for animals, she and her husband decided to adopt one.

It was the beginning of a relationship which shows no sign of abating. She now owns eight ponies and has five living on the property. The area around Torbay, where Stapenhorste lives, has traditionally been a farming community and, until recently, ponies hauling produce to nearby St. John’s were a common sight. If it weren’t for the fences containing them, her little herd would look exactly as they have done for hundreds of years, standing in a companionable group on a hillside between the crashing ocean and the town.

Ironically her son, now twenty, no longer has any time for the animals.

“First they were fun, then they were work and fun and then they were just work for him,” Stapenhorste explains. She also suggests that what she freely calls her obsession with the animals may have caused some resentment for him in his teenaged years. So why does she continue to work so hard for them?

“Newfoundland Ponies belong in Newfoundland,” she answers simply. “Sometimes you see a need for something and you know you are the person who can do it.”

Through the years she, and other members of the Newfoundland Pony Society, have done all they can to raise both money and awareness to support the animals.

They are working hard to secure Evolving Breed Status for the animals. There’s barely a tourist shop in St. John’s that doesn’t have a stack of Newfoundland Pony Calendars for sale on the counter. Over the years they’ve sold cards and hosted benefits. But Stapenhorste and the others realize that, realistically speaking, if the pony’s future is based strictly on charity, it won’t have a future at all. Therefore, they are working hard to secure it a place first as a recreational animal and secondly as a tourist attraction.

A local riding academy uses Newfoundland Ponies in lessons for the younger riders. The pony’s easy-going temperament and minimal maintenance requirements make it an ideal backyard pony. Through 4H clubs and school programmes Stapenhorste has amassed a small cadre of young girls who are learning how to take care of the animals and are passing on that knowledge to younger ones. Some of them have persuaded their parents to let them have a pony of their own. For the first time in a number of years ponies are making their way back into back yards.

However, the Newfoundland Pony Society also has more ambitious plans. In the small community of Pouch Cove, just outside of St. John’s, there are 1,000 acres of underutilised common land. The Newfoundland Pony Society wants to establish a permanent Pony Park there with proper facilities for the animals and their maintenance. They would keep a resident herd of ten to twelve animals and other ponies that are boarded elsewhere in the winter could come for the summer pasture and tourist season. Several revenue generating programmes, including pony rides and a gift shop/cafe/museum as well as local corporate sponsorship would ensure the stability of the project. Those girls Stapenhorste has trained to care for the ponies would constitute the park staff.

Stapenhorste insists the park would be self-sustaining.

“We only want the land and access to the same public programmes that every group has,” she says.

So far the new Minister of Natural Resources, under whose auspices the project would have to go forth, appears to be favourably inclined towards it, as is the local member of the provincial legislature and the people in the surrounding community. Stapenhorste is optimistic that the park will soon become a reality.

It’s been a long haul even getting this far. When pressed about the reasons behind her continued fight for the survival of the animals Stapenhorste admits: “I love them. I want to see them in their natural herd context.”

When she started out, Stapenhorste didn’t expect to get so swept away. By the time her work with them began to become overwhelming she says: “I was too far gone in seeing the potential for high quality recreation to stop.”

She means that she’s not just working for the ponies. “Their behaviour is so interesting. Children deserve to see them in their natural environment. And anything that draws kids, especially girls, outside and away from their computers and the malls is a good thing. They need healthy recreational opportunities,” she says, adding that there are still more recreational activities available for boys than there are for girls. But a pony facility can go some way towards redressing the balance. Horses routinely attract girls, who are generally indifferent to the siren song of the ATV.

The Pouch Cove site, adjacent to the spectacular scenery of the East Coast Trail, is only the most desirable one. If it falls through, the group will look elsewhere on the Avalon Peninsula for a home for the ponies.

“Failure is not an option,” Stapenhorste says adamantly.

The Newfoundland Pony clings as tenaciously to survival as it clings to the stony paths of its island home. On the brink of extinction, it may finally have found a place to call its own.

On The Brink of the Continent; From The Brink of Extinction

Newfoundland Ponies might be the ‘purest’, most primitive, strain of Moorland pony in existence today, in the world Newfoundland sits on the very edge of the new world. Cape Spear, half an hour south of St. John’s, is the easternmost point of North America. From the western end of the island it’s an eight hour ferry ride to the nearest mainland port. Yet despite its isolation European settlements were established here while the rest of the continent was still largely unexplored. For over 400 years hardy fishers and farmers have struggled to wrest a living from the harsh environment, and for most of that time they have been aided in their work by the Newfoundland Pony, a sturdy little work animal ideally suited to its rugged environment.

The first horses and ponies were brought to the island from Europe sometime in the 1600s. Lord Falkland, the island’s chief administrator, had asked to have sent out: “Some mares & some horses...as can live in hard grownde...and Cann live in the woode & without fodder in the winter.” The requested animals arrived and, for 200 years and in relative isolation, the ponies worked, and survived.

In the nineteenth century the population of Newfoundland grew dramatically and more ponies and horses were brought over. They freely bred with the ones already established. By 1874 there were 4,057 ponies on the island, a mixed collection of old and new. Their population peaked after the Second World War when it is estimated there was around 12,000 ponies on the island.

Yet, in 1992 when Dr Andrew Fraser, a veterinarian and the father of the Newfoundland Pony Society, wrote his book “The Newfoundland Pony” he subtitled it “The Lone Member of the Moorland Family of Horses in North America, now on the Verge of Extinction.”

Newfoundland ponies have traditionally been used to haul wood from the forest and fish from the shores as well as for transportation. Cars and roads came later to Newfoundland than to most parts of the country but come they did, replacing ponies for transportation. ATVs and Snowmobiles were able to penetrate into places that only the ponies had previously been able to go so they were no longer necessary for hauling.

The Ponies had always roamed free in their communities. The original requirements of the first settlers called for them to be able to fend for themselves and forage for their own food and they did so brilliantly. They have very heavy winter coats, can survive on very small amounts of grass, have flinty hard hooves and close set front legs for stability on steep narrow trails. When there was work to be done owners would separate their own animal from the herd. Many old timers in Newfoundland still remember when herds of ponies wandered at will beside the highways and on the hills. However, in the 1970s and 1980s, when the animals’ value as work ponies declined, many communities passed anti-roaming legislation which limited both their food supply and breeding opportunities. Instead of gardens being fenced to keep the ponies out now laws were put in place to fence the ponies in, making them harder and more expensive to keep and to feed. To further contain the population owners were encouraged to geld their stallions.

What really threatened them to the point of extinction, however, was the arrival of the meat wagons at a time when people were beginning to perceive the animals as nothing but a nuisance. The Newfoundland Pony became worth more dead than alive and most of them ended up on dinner plates in Europe and Japan. So by the time Dr. Fraser became interested in them, their numbers had declined radically.

Fraser’s interest in the ponies was spurred by their resemblance to the animals he had loved in his native Scotland and in England. The difference was that the Newfoundland Pony had never been deliberately bred to either promote certain qualities or to attain a degree of uniformity. Largely unconfined, the animals bred at will and the sire of a particular foal was often unknown. As a consequence, and with their isolation factored in, the animals were in some ways throwbacks who exhibited characteristics which had been bred out of their European cousins. In that sense they were a ‘purer’, perhaps more primitive, strain of Moorland pony.

On the other hand, this very lack of breeding standards meant there was a wide variability among the animals themselves. They can range from 400 to 800 pounds and stand anywhere from 11 to 14.2 hands high. Though usually brown, other colours are not uncommon. Interestingly, Newfoundland Ponies often have different colour coats in the winter and the summer with the lighter hued coat (in contrast to other animals which change their colouring), being displayed in the summer.

This lack of uniformity across the population was probably one of the reasons greater effort wasn’t expended to save the ponies. Though they had been around and been developing in their own unique way for four hundred years, without the status of an official breed designation they were not perceived as being valuable in their own right.

So Fraser went on a quest to bring the pony back from the brink and encourage the people of Newfoundland to recognize what a valuable part of their culture and heritage the little work horse was.

In 1979 the Newfoundland Pony Society was formed and two years later it was incorporated with Dr. Fraser as its first president. Dr. Fraser worked hard on the ponies’ behalf, trolling the countryside for stallions and breeding mares as well as for people to protect and shelter the last few animals. But by 1996, there were fewer than 400 of the little animals left from the approximately 5,000 in existence when the Newfoundland Pony Society began. To make matters worse many of those still left were either geldings or aged mares. At the lowest ebb there were thought to be only 200 Newfoundland Ponies left in the world.

However, just when it seemed that the ponies would be lost for good, a new initiative was brought forth. In 1996, just before Christmas, the Heritage Animal Act was passed and in 1997, in recognition of its role as a living part of the province’s cultural history, the Newfoundland Pony became the first animal to be given legal protection under the Act.

This caused a bit of renewed interest in the Newfoundland Pony and led to horse people and breeders off the island purchasing and promoting them as a bit of a speculative venture in the hopes that they would increase in value. The executive of the Newfoundland Pony Society now contains nearly as many names in Ontario as in Newfoundland. Ironically, attempts to keep the animal from extinction have led to the best breeding stock leaving the island. There are now more stallions off the island than there are on it.