Sunday, February 16th, 2025

It was a small oversight that could have turned into a nightmare.

At 3 am on Thursday morning, Doug White was roused from his sleep by the sound of 40 tiny hooves beating in the dirt around his farmhouse just north of Creemore.
His daughter’s 10 miniature horses had got out of their pasture after leaning on an improperly latched gate.

Doug rushed outside where he caught two of the escapees and secured them in the barn.

Unfortunately, at that hour it was too dark to see the rest of the horses. So, Doug headed back to the house to wait until daybreak.

“Because there were two in the barn, Doug figured the rest would stay around the building,” explained his wife Brenda, who was out of town with their children at the time. “They like to be in a herd.”

However, when Doug left the house a second time in search of the horses, they were gone. Luckily, a trail of droppings led him to the group.

Four miles later, Doug managed to slip a halter over the nose of one horse, which he led home, followed by five more.

With seven of the horses back in the barn, Doug was relieved. However, there were still three miniature horses out there in the big wide world, missing.

“He couldn’t find them anywhere,” Brenda said.

Sophia, 11, her two-year-old son Blaze, and their friend Trixie, 3, had become separated from the rest of the group. Brenda wondered if perhaps a car had frightened them away from the farm at some point.

At 29.5 inches high, Trixie is the smallest member of the herd, but that has never stopped her from making a sight of herself. In recent years, visitors to Creemore may have spotted her at the Canada Day and Santa Claus parades.

But that morning, Trixie’s public appearance was unplanned. Doug’s mane concern was that if the horses were on the road, a car could hit them and injure both animals and people.

By 7 am, there had been a number of sightings in the village of the tiny trio. The horses had headed south on Fair Grounds Road into Creemore. One driver even posted a photo of the three ponies on Facebook when he spotted them running back up Fair Grounds Road (above).

After a door-to-door search of the area, Doug and his friends finally located the runaways in a neighbouring paddock where a mysterious and kind stranger had enclosed them.

“No one was home there,” explained Brenda, who still hasn’t been able to thank personally whoever led the horses to safety. “We were so thankful to be able to find them.”

Blaze, Trixie and Sophia are now back at Nature View Farm where Doug, Brenda and their children (Gloria, Sarah and Timothy) have lived for 26 years.

“The ponies are fine but tired,” Brenda said. “It was a lot of walking for all three of them.”

Hopefully, now that the horses are safely home, they won’t stirrup any more trouble for a while.

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