Women, Children & Horses

This week the National Horse Show opens in Manhattan's Madison Square Garden for the 58th time. Two changes in this year's show: all proceeds will go to the U.S.O.; only two foreign countries

(Cuba and Peru) have sent teams to compete in the international military jumping events. Some of its promised features:

> Vivacious Liz Whitney, queen of show-horse equestriennes, will show her four famed hunters--Bon Nuit, First Night, Spring Hope and The Bear--who have won 479 ribbons this year. She hopes they can make it an even 500.

> Daredevil Margaret Cotter, Washington socialite who yips like a cowboy when she takes the fences, will ride her high-jumper Rocksie, a bay gelding with whom she has outjumped the top civilian riders of the U.S. (amateur and pro) in horse-show competition. Last summer she and Rocksie skimmed the bars at 6 ft., 7 in.

> Owners of three-gaited and five-gaited saddle horses will continue to exhibit their pets with set-up tails, despite the crusade of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals to abolish an age-old practice recently outlawed in New York. To get around the law, exhibitors, with $10,000 to $20,000 invested in each of their plume-tailed beauties, have procured affidavits from veterinarians certifying that the tail-setting operation (in which muscles are cut and the tail forced up into an unnatural arch) was performed for the health of the horse. For some reason, this makes it legal.

> Only innovation at this year's National is a pony-jumping class for juveniles (under 17), a popular feature at Southern horse shows. Most of the entries are owned and ridden by minikin members of Virginia's hunt set, the youngest of whom is four-year-old Terry Drury, who has already scampered off with several blue ribbons on her three-year-old Punch.

But the Southern peewees will find tough competition in 14-year-old Francis Cravath Gibbs of Long Island. Young Gibbs owns 16-year-old Little Squire, the fabulous grey-white pony (half Welsh pony, half Irish thoroughbred) that has humbled America's best jumpers ever since he came to the U.S. with an Irish Army team in 1932. Once, at the Dublin Horse Show, Little Squire jumped 6 ft.,6.

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