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Wednesday, December 03, 2008
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News Detail
Big effort behind big horses
9/2/2008 12:46:20 PM
By Paul Hammel
WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER
STATE FAIR PARK -- Amanda Kruis peered up through the iron bars of the stall into the silver-dollar-size eyes of a 2,000-pound Belgian draft horse named "Chet.''
"Good night. I've never seen a horse that big, and I'm from Kentucky,'' said Kruis, of Lexington, Ky., to her boyfriend, Trevor Miller of Lincoln.
The admiration and exultation for the big horses is common at the Nebraska State Fair.
The stately draft horses turn heads, draw crowds of curious onlookers and inspire memories of the days when the towering animals were the powerhouses of the farm.
At the past five State Fairs, the "big boys'' of Hansen's Percherons of rural Lincoln have been providing fairgoers with a daily fix of draft horses by performing nightly in the fair's antique tractor parade.
It's a powerful display, punctuated by the high-stepping, "clip-clop'' of the dinner-plate-size hoofs of the horses, whose heads tower 8 feet off the ground, and the jangling of the steel-and-leather harnesses.
"Once you drive these horses, there's just a feeling of power in the lines. It's just incredible," said Joyce Hansen, the matriarch of the Hansen clan.
"Everyone is just fascinated by those
big horses -- they're beautiful, they're huge and they're majestic,'' said Joseph McDermott, the assistant manager of the fair, and the person who arranged for the Hansen horses to appear at the fair.
It is an expensive, labor-intensive chore to equip a six-horse team for a 15-minute ride in a parade, and the fair's subsidy to the Hansens doesn't come close to meeting their costs, McDermott said.
"They do it for the fair and the love of the horses,'' he said.
Dennis Hansen, a 64-year-old construction firm owner, said it takes about two hours, and a handful of helpers, to hitch on the bridles, 75-pound collars, back pads and britchens to the six geldings and hitch them to the wagon. It takes about an hour to reverse the operation, and wash down the horses.
During the day, the horses are fed and brushed, their hoofs painted black and their manes braided into a stylish show quality.
A six-horse hitch could cost upwards of $300,000 for the horses, hitch and wagon, and draft horses require almost daily training to reinforce the commands to turn ("gee'' and "haw''), get going, "whoa'' and back up.
Dennis Hansen said his late grandfather, William Paulsen, used to farm with draft horses and gave him the State Fair bug.
But it wasn't until the early 1990s that the Hansens began raising draft horses.
It took years, Dennis Hansen said, to learn from their mistakes and build up its hitch into an award-winning team. He credits the help of his family and Norman Yoder, an Amish-raised man who drives the Hansen team in competitions and helps select and train new horses.
"Those (Amish) kids are raised with horses, and they still farm with them," Hansen said.
Eight six-horse hitches, from as far away as California, are scheduled to compete at the Nebraska State Fair this year.
Competitions for the draft horses are scheduled throughout the day Saturday and Sunday, with the six-horse hitches competing at 6 p.m. Sunday at the Coliseum at State Fair Park.
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