EDUCATIONAL CLINICS Friday Evening & Saturday Morning
TARA PILONERO, STAY A WHILE FARM 7:00 PM (Fri) - Basics in Hereditary Genetics
Tara Pilonero from Stay A While Farm has been breeding wooly miniature donkeys since 2007. She has been involved with research at Virginia Tech in both the Biochemistry Department and the School of Animal Science for the past 20 years. Her research specialty has been in mass spectrometry, proteomics, and metabolomics with occasional forays into genomics. She became interested in color and coat genetics as a 10-year-old kid. That lifelong
interest and her background at VT have been useful in making decisions in breeding donkeys when there is a preference for coat colors or long hair genetics. She hopes to help others understand the basic principles of Mendelian genetics including how to predict potential foal outcomes from crossing various coat colors using information derived from pedigrees to make a Punnett square. If you were busy passing notes in biology class during this lecture, this is your chance for a refresher. Bring a pen and paper (not for passing notes). We are going to have fun.
MARY NISSEN - NISSEN’S LN RANCH 9:00 AM (Sat) - Microchipping your Donkey
Mary has had a love of equines and the outdoors since a child and it has been much of her life’s work besides being a crop and livestock farmer, with husband Jon and son Jay. Over the years much done and learned - training donkeys and mules, caretaking, maintenance and refining the LN mini donkey breeding program. She believes in making the world a better place - enhancing local habitat, raising companion animals and sharing knowledge.
RICK STORY - STORYLAND MINIATURE DONKEYS 9:00 AM (Sat) - An Easy Way to Trim your Donkey’s Hooves Rick from Storyland Miniature Donkeys was shown how to trim hooves when Rick and Cindy bought their first donkeys back in 2002 and has been trimming all of their donkeys hooves ever since. A few years ago he was told how to use Frisker trimmers to trim hooves and it really seems to work well for him with their donkeys . This technique may not work for everyone, but works well for their program Rick became interested in donkeys because of his wife Cindy and it’s pretty easy to fall in love with these special animals- it didn’t take Rick long. The Story’s interest
in micro’s evolved pretty quickly after they started breeding and raising miniatures. Rick’s favorite thing about raising donkeys is seeing the Storyland breeding program evolve and seeing the results in their foals. They also have met so many special friends and mentors because of these beloved miniature donkeys.
SPONSORED BY THE MINIATURE DONKEY HERITAGE ALLIANCE | 9
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