So early last week, I went out to the barn around 3 PM and found poor Sparky standing in his stall sweating and looking miserable. It’s been over 70 every day for the last week or so and he still had his full winter coat. I hadn’t had to blanket him at all up until this point because his fuzzy coat kept him nice and toasty since here in the San Francisco area we rarely even get close to “winter weather”. Typically we are in the high thirties to forties at night and 50-60 during the day. Which means he typically does just fine without a blanket or a clip job. Not this year though.
It’s been so warm that his coat was waaay too much fur for the daytime temps. So I broke out my clippers and generator (we don’t have electricity at our stables). Luckily he stood like a statue and let me tape the pattern and clip clip away. He now has a lovely trace clip and is much cooler and happier during the day. Of course, now that he’s clipped I have to blanket him so he doesn’t freeze his tush off at night. I tried leaving the blanket off at night to see if he’d be warm enough (Dusty spends all winter in the pasture happily with a trace clip and no blanket, but he has ALOT of hair). He was soooooo cranky the next morning when I went to ride him so blanketing it is. He’s much happier now.
Here are some great links to help you as you dive into the horse hair removal process:
Great wikihow article on clipping -
Pictures of Different Types of Clips
Stress Free Body Clipping
Horse Clipping Video
Clipping Your Hores Ears Video
Fantastic Clipping Tips From a Vet
Happy clipping!
I got this fantastic video that just blew my mind this week and thought I would share it. It’s a camel. Doing. Dressage. It does one tempis down the center line. Freakin amazing and puts my riding and training skills to shame! Enjoy!
Camel Pas De Deux
I’m usually a calm, collected rider. I often almost slip into a zen like state of mind. I lose track of time, of who is around me and if I don’t wear gloves I even sometimes ride to the point that my fingers start to get blisters and I never even feel it until I get off the horse.
That’s what usually happens. Today though, not so much. I was riding in a lesson with Sparky. Trying to get him to stay light instead of hanging on my hands. He gets so heavy, especially to the left, that I can do a big half halt on my inside rein and there’s no response at all from him. His head doesnt’ even move. It’s like his mouth is hard rubber. I can feel the bit on his tongue and bars and when I pull on the rein, I can feel a slight give on his tongue, but that’s it. His head doesn’t turn, he doesn’t move his head, heck, his ears don’t even flick back towards me.
It drives me nuts. Just pushes my buttons. I feel like he’s just ignoring me and I have no control. He’s not taking off or anything scary, except he kind of is because I can’t slow him down in any normal fashion. He just ignores me
Today when he did this rather strongly at a trot and I couldn’t get him to respond to anything I did with my hands I mirrored his hardness with my hands and made them super strong. While this did bring him to a screaming stop it wasn’t a particularly good idea. Certainly it stopped him and I almost had a feeling of “winning”, of making him give in to what I was asking for instead of him ignoring me.
The thing is, though that riding shouldn’t be about “winning” against your horse. It should be about working in harmony with your horse NOT fighting with him or her. When I let myself get angry and frustrated with him, I stopped thinking of other ways to get through to him besides what I was already doing (half halting on inside and outside reins while working on a circle). Instead when he pulled and wouldn’t soften I PULLED back slamming him to a halt and undoing all the work we had been doing on suppling and softening and relaxing.
I’m riding again tomorrow and I’m sure we’ll end up in the same situation with him heavy and hanging on me. Hopefully I’ll be more able to think things through and not just pull back on him. Maybe I’ll do a small circle or serpentine or something that gets him doing something different that was my idea but not a big huge disturbing change. We’ll see! Riding is humbling, but so rewarding.
Happy (and thoughtful) Riding!
Winter has finally arrived in California. For much of the country, winter means cold and ice, but out here in the San Francisco Area, it just means rain, rain and more rain. When I lived in Sweden for a few years, my California winters left me completely unprepared for dealing with ice and snow.
Imagine my shock when, as I prepared to go on my first snow-filled winter ride, my barn manager handed me a small hammer and chisel saying “oh! Don’t forget these! You’re going to need them!”. As I sat scratching my head with a befuddled look on my face she tried to explain by adding “For the snowballs of course!”
This raised some very concerning questions in my mind - Was I going to be using them to bat away snowballs thrown at me by pedestrians as I rode by. Why were people going to be pegging snowballs at me and my poor horse? Was this some ancient Swedish tradition? Couldn’t I have a tennis racket instead of a chisel? 
Turns out, when you walk a horse through snow, it gathers in their shoes in these ginormous balls so that after only a few minutes of walking, your horse is wobbling around on snow stilts. Barring a portable, battery operated hair dryer, the only effective tool for removing these stilts is a chisel and it’s accompanying hammer. You can put special shoes on them or vaseline on the bottoms of their feet but for going out in the snow before you can get the farrier out or find a thing of vaseline, don’t forget your hammer and chisel! 
In honor of winter finally arriving, here are some great links for tips on real winter riding and horsecare:
Winter Riding Tips
Maintain A Winter Riding Program
When to Blanket Your Horse
Managing and Preventing Winter Skin and Respiratory Conditions
Happy Riding!
I used to struggle with getting my horse to collect. It felt like a battleground with me pulling him into a collected frame with my hands and upper body while trying to push him forward into that frame with my legs and seat. All of this while my horse tried everything he could to avoid these conflicting cues. Talk about a pushmepullme!
Needless to say my horse and I weren’t exactly poetry in motion. He braced his neck and jaw against my hands which made if feel like I was holding up my horse’s entire front end with no help at all. The result was usually either a jackhammer of a trot which made my teeth feel like they were about to go through the top of my head, or a dragging, flat trot with as much energy as most of us are without coffee on a Monday morning.
Today, though, a whole new world of collection opened to me in my lesson. Instead of using force, leverage and every muscle in my body to try to get my horse to collect, I learned how to use gravity and circles to get my horse to collect on his own. Here’s how we did it:
I started out at the walk, keeping him light and soft and bending on a very large circle (about 25 meters diameter). Once he was warmed up on that - all nice and light in my hands and moving off my knees and legs (shoulder in, haunches in, shoulder in to check this) I started spiraling him in onto smaller and smaller cirlces. As the circle got smaller and smaller he started stepping under himself more and more with his inside hind - the beginnings of collection! My job was to keep him light and moving forward while paying attention to his level of resistance. At about fifteen meters he started getting resistant and sticky so I spiraled out just a few feet and then started doing shoulder in, and then haunches in, then shoulder in to really encourage him to stand up through his shoulders rather than lugging on my legs and not moving off of them. This lateral work helped him step under himself and hold himself in self carriage.
Once he was solid doing this in the walk, I asked him to move it up to the trot, again on the small circle. This was really really hard for him (he’s out of shape after a month off because of saddle fitting issues). He did great though! Whenever he’d feel like he was lugging in my hands I’d ask him to bring his shoulders or haunches in and then back out -causing him to step under himself and hold himself up - voila self carriage and collection all without me having any fight with him! If he really struggled I’d bring him onto a slightly bigger and bigger circle until he felt more comfortable and then bring him in just a bit and repeat the lateral work. Through all of this work I encouraged him to stretch down through the neck while bringing up his entire front end through self carriage and collection. This is great horsey muscle building.
He couldn’t hold it for long - just a couple circles each direction at a time. But what fantastic circles they were! He was light in my hands while he was stepping under himself with his hind legs so nicely in natural collection. The big bonus was that I never fought with him, or felt like I was pulling him into a frame or anything - the spirals did all the work for me - so he was relaxed and light and wonderful. Behold! Natural Collection!
Here are some of my favourite articles on Saddlefitting - enjoy!
On fitting the horse:
On fitting the rider:
And for just a ton of fantastic saddlefit related articles:
Happy (and comfortable) Riding!
Uncategorized | admin, 19 Jan 09 | 
Comments (0) 
