This is the first of a series of articles focusing on local horsepeople and members of the Newtown Bridle Lands Association –

 

By Christina Kennedy

The young woman who looks directly at you in an uncompromising manner, who laughs easily, often at herself, with the self assuredness of intelligent people who are naturally unassuming, is Dr Toby Tamblyn, accomplished equestrian and renowned scientist.

Toby, a Senior Principal Scientist at Boehringer Ingelheim where she has been developing pharmaceutical products to combat the AIDS epidemic for the past seven years, happens to also love horses, and is a member of the Newtown Bridle Lands Association.

She obtained her Ph.D in biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin. After two years of post-doctoral work in reproductive biology, Toby, as she puts it in her self-effacing way, “got a real job” when she became Assistant Professor of biochemistry at Virginia Technical Institute.

As it happens with many bright young people who enter academia, the world of private research industry, with its less structured outlook on research, beckoned.

Toby says. “After seven years at Virginia Tech, Du Pont Industries made me an offer that I couldn’t refuse, so I started working in Delaware in bio-tech development.”

When asked what that meant, Toby explained simply that the job involved producing proteins for use in AIDS diagnostic tests, making it sound as commonplace as growing basil in one’s summer garden.

Toby remained at Du Pont for ten years, moving then to work for Roche Pharmaceutical Company, where she remained for three years. The next offer that she couldn’t refuse came from Boehringer Ingelheim in Danbury in 1996, hence her reason for her transfer to this area.

Toby’s love of horses started when her father took her for a pony ride when she was a young girl in California.

This love has never abated.

About seven years ago, just as Toby had moved to Newtown, a “brutish young horse, who knew nothing, who could not be led on a lead rope, who kicked, nipped, and made himself generally a nuisance” came into her life.

Enter Pappy, a black, 16 hands, 1800 lbs. “probable Percheron”, bought at an auction, almost as a lark, by the Wades, owners of Meadowbrook Farm in Newtown. Toby says that she looked at “this crude and rude animal” and felt immediately that it was going to be her horse and no one else’s. She said, “He nickered every time I passed by his stall, he must have been trying to say something to me, and I can’t resist a challenge.”

Years went by during which Pappy attempted to slam Toby into the wall, or bite off one of her fingers, “and he wasn’t even broke to ride, he had probably been mistreated,” she adds. However, horse and rider matured together, worked together, with infinite patience and love.

Toby recounts that Pappy never had shoes on, so he had to be tranquillized for the shoer, and one time he practically killed the vet with a powerful kick which barely missed the vet’s head. Eventually, at a friend’s urging, Toby put Pappy under harness, and suddenly the intractable horse relaxed and started pulling easily and calmly. Toby realized that Pappy was a born driver, that this was his element, that he had found his “raison d’etre.”

The horse has been put successfully not only to carriages, but to logs, stones, boats, trees. During the Christmas season, the team of Toby and Pappy may be seen happily dragging the pine trees which people buy at Foxview Farm from the cutting place to the customers.

They have become such a fixture for children and adults alike that a large number of people go to the farm just to see the big black horse, dark mane flowing, sleek muscles taut and bent under the strain, pull the trees up the slope.

Pappy is now a well-mannered and gentle horse. He and Toby ride on hunter paces, show under harness, and give demonstrations and lessons on driving.

The scientist who gives her contribution to the battle against one of the worst epidemics in the world, the soft-spoken woman with stellar curriculum vitae, tamed this giant horse, which trusted no one. He now knows and gives love, as only animals who have never had love before can do, without boundaries, unselfishly, forever.