Ponies: friend or foal?

Over the weekend, I was on the receiving end of some shocking information: a pony is not a baby horse. Up until this past weekend, I would have laughed at you and perhaps even accused you of witchcraft for having suggested such a thing. My friend, Jane, however, explained that, indeed, ponies never grow to be horses. I honestly had no idea.

Jane would never admit it, but she is quite the amateur zoologist, if only for a select group of species from the real and mythical animal kingdoms: ponies, unicorns, cats, kittens, puppies, and then the sub-species of cats wearing sunglasses and cats wearing funny hats. Clearly, she knew of what she spoke. Jane broke the news to me in the same way a person might sympathetically and cautiously inform an adult of limited intellectual capacity that it isn’t appropriate to pet the hair of a stranger, even if said hair looks especially soft and pettable. Obviously, at 29 years of age, being decades out of elementary school, and having visited numerous petting zoos as a child, I should have known this fact about ponies. What's more, one of my favourite songs is Johnny Cash’s “Tennessee Stud”, where one verse reads:

“Raced my horse with the Spaniard's foal;
Til I got me a skin full of silver and gold”

So “foal”, or baby horse, has been in my receptive vocabulary for some time. Yet the reality remains. I understand that it’s an important part of the human condition to be in a constant state of acquiring knowledge, but I’d rather not have the act of learning things be accompanied with the sense that perhaps I’ve been dealt a few cards short of a full deck. Tune in next week, when I discover that seahorses are not, in fact, equines with above-average swimming ability, and that dragon flies cannot, when caught and used skillfully, be used as inexpensive cigarette lighters.

FS