So welcome to week two of the horse course. In these welcome videos I just kind of like to do a wrap up of week one and then move into week two and, you know, the response to this class has just been phenomenal. Through the week I've noticed the enrollment numbers continue to go up. We're almost 11 thousand horse, donkey, equine enthusiasts enrolled in this class so. It's been pretty fantastic to see. And one of the things I'm, I'm really loving about this course is to wake up every morning, go to the discussion boards and I see, welcome to the horse course from Mustafa from Sudan. So, Mustafa, welcome, that was, it made my day just to read that and to realize, you know, not only the reach of this course. But that there are equine enthusiasts, you know, in every corner of the world it's just, it's amazing, and it's, it's really fun to, to watch and read the students as you all interact together. So it's been pretty, pretty exciting week. Been some, some really good discussion threads this week on you know, the evolution of the horse, and what really drove them from going from those four to three to, to single digit toes to the hoof. You know, you can go back and read those, but as we go into week two, you know, if you haven't been participating in discussion boards I encourage you to jump in there. It's, it's really fantastic. And to see the interaction between all the students is great. Even Emily Carter had a wonderful post this week you know, she was kind of talking about the history of the horse and then it kind of morphed into this discussion of therapeutic use of horses. If you don't know a lot about therapeutic riding or therapeutic use of horses, just very briefly, you know they're finding that people that you know either have some you know, emotional trauma or even physical disabilities. If, if they get involved with riding horses physically they improve because when you ride you use different muscles that you normally don't use. But also emotionally they, they improve, which is really fantastic. And it kind of talks about you know, this emotional bond we have with these creatures. It's just, it, it's really incredible. Some other things I learned this week. I've learned more about pony's than, than I have ever before. the, the, the most important thing to remember is, there's no such thing as an Icelandic pony. Martin from, from, I believe Iceland, brought that up in the discussion boards. In Iceland, you call them Icelandic horses, you do not call them ponies. If you call them ponies, they're going to throw you off the ca, their, their big island so don't do that. So I thought that was pretty fantastic. And, the, the post of the week has to go to Silke that posted about, unicorns creating unicorns by, you know, mixing the chromosomes of rhino's and horses since they're close relatives. I thought that was pretty humorous and a lot of other folks did too. So, so going into week two, this week we're going to to be talking about basic anatomy. We're going to jump into hoof anatomy, and hoof care, and then round out the week with coat color and markings. Now, don't forget, you know, to take the quiz. Again, the quiz hard dates is the last day in the course. So if you do fall a little bit behind on that, do not worry, you have time to take those. But we do start the, the hard close dates for the weekly assignments. So there is the, this week is the hoof care plan. I did do a brief video introducing that to you, so you can kind of see what the expectations would be with that, so watch that video if you plan on doing the assignments. And there is a hard due date. So, so check those dates. To make sure you, you do turn those in because we're doing the period vows so we had to kind of, keep hard dates with that. But other than that, I'm going to be checking in with you each week. I'm, I'm, I'm jumping in discussion boards when I can and, and I really enjoy the interactions and, and the feedback from the course. So, I'll check in with you next week and I'll see you then. [BLANK_AUDIO]
