On our farm as a child, we "ate our pets" ! That's what several of my friends have said about me, when they call me a "farmer" when I make the hard decisions concerning life and death sometimes. I remember playing as kids in the pasture with the little ones, eating lunch between the legs of our cows, playing with the calves, leading them around etc.
My father "cured" our attachment to them by making the declaration that all babies have "food names". So we had little "rump roast", "sirloin", "chuck", "hamburg" etc. We just knew that ultimately they'd wind up in the freezer of family -- ours or my aunt's (We had 2 families living on the same 100 acre farm -- so had quite fun growing up close with cousins). And back then, as I'm sure you know, you didn't argue or complain with parents. They ruled, and you obeyed.
And we didn't process the meat ourselves, one day we'd come home and a steer was missing, and we knew what that meant.
I went from Arabians (as a child/young adult) to Peruvian Paso's actually. I raised them before the miniatures. And getting into miniatures was because I had a bad accident and broke up my hand requiring surgery and plates and pins and a bad concussion after a serious riding accident (not with my horses, but with a friend's horses on a group ride). My kids decided I didn't heal quite as fast "at my age" and insisted I get rid of the horses. To keep the peace, I did that......but not quite. I decided to be a little tricky and instead get into miniatures. They couldn't say I would get hurt because of how big they were, and so my life with miniatures began. I became fascinated with the Falabella Breed in the first few years of miniatures, after studying them and Chianti being imported to the US with Menelek going to England. I found it all very interesting.
I've always loved appaloosas -- just never had one as a riding horse. When I got into miniatures, my cousin who grew up on the farm with me said why wasn't I raising appaloosas now? She knew my fascination with spots, and so an appaloosa breeder was born. Then, after a bunch of research, and finding how few pure Falabellas there were in the world, and their story, I had a farm of American appaloosas and Falabellas and loved them both.