This year was one full of change for me, my human family and horses. What is most significant to me about a year is that it encapsulates everything you’ve done, everything that’s happened to you, and all what you cannot control and that which you have put into action.
horse trainers
Reading your horse’s mind and thoughts
My mare Zuzka comes to stand beside me at the gate, ready to have her halter slipped on. She is one who often will want to play games about being haltered, suggesting, no, I’m too busy today to go ride. Or maybe it’s just the game she likes. But this day she really wants to go out. I can often tell if she wants to go out on the trail, by how she stands looking off in the distance, when there is no activity on the horizon that can be seen with the naked eye. A sort of longing to be out there.
Creating Sacred Spaces with Horses
I moved my horses recently, and I took the gravestone I’d had made for my departed gelding Khami with us. I was concerned that we would have to create a new sacred space at the new location, because the horses would no longer have Khami’s grave to roll on. A few days before the move I went out to the grave and it had rained hard so the center was squishy, smooth mud that took on the appearance of the surface of peanut butter upon opening a new jar. One of the horses had walked around the mud center, hoofprints marking the perimeter of the grave.
Teeth and hooves: working with the aggressive horse
One of the hardest things for people to grapple with is the fact that their horse is not always nice. I talk about good behavior and model that for the horse, but sometimes the horse does not exhibit good behavior in spite of all the modeling. Sometimes we get a dose of teeth and hooves.
It takes a horse and human village
The phrase, “it takes a village,” refers to the raising of a child and the “village” involved in raising him or her.
Support groups for people and their horses
Sometimes we find ourselves in communities of horse people that are not supportive of our goals and dreams with our horses. These communities can take the shape of boarding barns, performance horse groups focused on a particular equine discipline, equine riding clubs, and just people who are wedded to the notion that “this is the way we’ve always done it.”
Working with horse-to-horse bonds
Years ago, when I got my mare Zuzka, the trainer I was working with at the time was so happy when we were able to put her in the same corral space with my gelding Khami. The trainer said it helped her training because the mare would be moved around all day by him.
8 ways to catch a horse
In the book No Life for a Lady, the biography of Agnes Moreland Cleaveland, the children were put in charge of catching a horse and riding into town in order to get supplies. This was New Mexico in the early 1900s. The author said that they didn’t have corrals so catching a horse could take half a day. The horses would know you wanted to catch them and would hide behind trees.
In loving memory: A horse in a million
In Loving Memory – April 12. 1989-August 15. 2015 Khami, my bay Arabian gelding of 26 years, passed away quickly today of what appeared to be a heart attack. He was doing what he loved to do, running with his beloved herd, when he collapsed and died shortly after.