This Girl’s Parents Said She Couldn’t Have a Pony, and What She Did Instead Will Amaze You
(Instagram/HannahSimpson)
Learning to deal with disappointment is one of the most important and difficult lessons a parent can teach a child, but the parents of New Zealand girl Hannah Simpson probably had no idea that’s what they were doing when they told their daughter she couldn’t have a pony.
Lots of kids want ponies, and most don’t get them. Many pout, some cry, most get over the disappointment eventually. Hannah Simpson started jumping cows.
According to The Guardian, Hannah Simpson was 11 when she was told she couldn’t have a horse because horses are too expensive. At that point, with some egging-on by her brother, she climbed on a six-month-old dairy cow named Lilac, partly to see what would happen.
Lilac didn’t care that there was a tiny 11-year-old girl was sitting on her back, so Simpson just kept doing it. That was seven years ago, and Simpson is still riding around on her cow. She even taught Leila to jump.
”I have always loved jumping, I always wanted to do show-jumping on a horse,” Simpson told The Guardian’s Eleanor Ainge Roy. ”And Lilac was always jumping out of the cow shed when she was young so I think she likes it, too. We started her off with stepping over logs and it just got bigger and bigger.”
Lilac is a cow, not a horse, so Simpson says she’s slower and pretty chilled-out, though she can get moving sometimes.
Like any rider, Simpson says she has been bucked off “countless times,” but she and Lilac are best friends. This doesn’t really work with other cows, though. Simpson has tried, but so far it only works with Lilac.
Simpson did eventually get a horse, though. She got a horse named Sammy two years ago, but at this point she likes riding Lilac better.
This is a pretty resourceful response to being told you can’t have a pony. I’m keeping this story in my back pocket for when I am inevitably asked for a pony. Then I will say, “If Hannah Simpson had gotten a pony, she would never have figured out that she could ride a cow.”
