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!

Camel Pas De Deux

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!

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!

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!

It took me a little while to really understand what was upsetting him so much - he kept tossing his head around and getting very upset - nothing dangerous but it was very obvious he was upset.  My trainer kept coaching me to lighten up on the pressure and when I did and just did teeny tiny light half halts he was much happier.  It felt so weird though! Like I had no contact at all! I was kinda resistant to riding like that until I remembered a clinic with Susan Derr Drake I rode in almost 15 years ago.  She tied heavy sewing thread to everyone’s bits and had us ride around using the thread as reins.  Of course all the horses were very well trained, relatively relaxed beasties and we had the reins still available - they were just tied in a knot to keep them safely out of the way.  

The exercise taught two things. The first was how a horse can feel a very light contact and respond beautifully to it - if you broke a thread you were using too much contact.  The second was that most people, unwittingly,  put much more pressure on their left rein than their right reins.  This was proven to be true in the clinic as I saw left “reins” snapping all around me and barely a right one snapping at all!

Once I finished my first abysmal ride on my trainers horse, I started thinking about this clinic again, realizing that I had gotten into a very bad habit of having very heavy hands! Depressing, but fixable.  The next morning I saddle up my very patient Mustang Dusty who is trained through first level and very easy to ride.   I rode him for about half an hour with the words “Don’t break the thread! Don’t break the thread” repeating over and over in my head.  I wasn’t riding with threads, but I was trying to keep my contact so light that if I were I wouldn’t break them.  Dusty responded SO well! He LOVED it.  He was light and airy and soooo easy! His right canter transition which is usually our buggaboo was amazing! He never threw up his head in the transition, always got the correct lead and was up and moving through his back!  It taught me to use my legs and seat MUCH more than I have been to affect his way of going - instead of using heavy pressure on the reins to get him to soften when he threw his head up I’d use my inside leg to move his barrel into the right “shape” or bend along with light light half halts and his head would come down and his back would go up and he’d bend beautifully! He was truly in self carriage! I still had light contact but it was really and truly LIGHT!

Trying this on Sparky didn’t go nearly as well - apparently he’s very attached to me lugging his big ol’ head around for him! I have a lesson tomorrow on him and hopefully we’ll be able to figure out how to get him to be in self carriage instead of leaning on my hands….. My goal? To eventually be able to successfully ride him in contact, walk trot canter with thread reins….

On fitting the horse:

• Saddle fitting: the basics and beyond
• Fitting Horse and Rider
• Does Your Dressage Saddle Fit? A British Master Saddler’s checklist for making sure your current dressage saddle (or a new one you might be trying) isn’t causing your horse problems.
• The Nine Points of Saddle Fitting
• Hands on Saddle Fitting by Joyce Harman
• Saddle Fitting For Smarties
• The Importance of Saddle Fit
• Evaluating Saddle Fit: Gullet Width

On fitting the rider:

• Fitting the Saddle to the Rider
• Leg Length – How it influences your Position!
• The Feminine Mystique - Saddlefitting as it Relates to Women!
• Does This Saddle Make My Butt Look Big?

And for just a ton of fantastic saddlefit related articles:

• Schleese Saddlery Service Articles

Happy (and comfortable) Riding!

Then a funny thing happened. I was up working at Juniors (I volunteer at alot of the local shows) and I ran into the trainer who organizes the saddle fitting clinics. I chatted with her about what was going on with the pain and lack of circulation. She took one look at the saddle model and told me that there was a manufacturing defect with that model’s tree. It was a known issue and that the company needed to replace the tree in order to fix this! I was floored! I had complained about the hard seat for well, years at this point and they kept just charging me for fitting after fitting without ever telling me abut this known issue!

I called the company, they were very apologetic and helped me ship my saddle off to them. Then the fun really began. My saddle was gone for nearly a month. I don’t have a back up saddle cuz Sparky is so hard to fit! I was stuck with just a bareback pad for schooling poor Sparky who I’m trying to get ready for Prix St. Georges. Needless to say we did a lot of lunging and trail.

Towards the end of this saddleless month, I read a great blog post from BehindTheBit on long legs and saddle fitting (I’m six feet tall with a true 36 inch inseam. Long legs? I got ‘em.) In the post is an article written by my saddle fitter about how many people over 5′9″ need their stirrup bars moved back in order to be in the right position rather than in a chairseat. I immediately and excitedly called them to ask about moving my stirrup bars back for me. They were resistant first asking why I hadn’t asked about the “chairseat” before. Then they looked at my records and saw the multiple fittings for this problem. Then they checked my leg measurements and confirmed that I probably needed it done to fix the problem. The bad news though, was that my saddle was in transit so if this needed to be done, I’d have to send my saddle back again to them. AAAAAAAAAAAH!
When my much missed saddle arrived (second day air) I tested to see if moving the stirrup bars would help by putting thick hair rubber bands around the existing stirrup bars towards the front so the stirrup leathers were pushed back. Voila! My legs! They were under me! I could sit the trot without leaning back!

And away my saddle went again. They tried to charge me for the change but I pointed out that they had charged me for seat foam that was only needed because of a defective tree. They backed down and agreed to make the change for free. Phew!

So a week goes by. No news. I call in. They say the shop is running behind and it will be yet another week. That week goes by. No News. I call in. Oh it looks like it will be done by Monday! Fine. I call Monday. They can’t find the order. After searching and searching they find it. Bad news. They sent it ground instead of second day air - oops! Their mistake. Doh! So I have to wait another week before my saddle arrives. At this point I’m over two months without a saddle for my poor now out of shape horse. Finally it arrives.

I run out to the barn. Slap that puppy up on Sparky. Leap hopefully on to his back and go for my usual walk warm up in the hills. By the end of my 20 minute warmup my inner thighs were KILLING me and my feet were going to sleep. again. AAAAAARGH!

That was Monday of this week. Since then I’ve ridden in it daily and it still hurts me. It looks like the new saddle bars are pushing into my thighs, and hard! They’re metal, so I really don’t think they are going to break in… My position though is fabulous! No chair seat! I can sit the trot easily! Well not easily, it’s a huge trot, but easier! 

Tomorrow, I call the company to talk to them about replacing the whole darn thing cuz I’m tired of messing about with this defective model! 

I’ll let you know what happens! At least it still fits Sparky beautifully…..

I’ve seen too many people go out and spend oodles of money on their dream horses - huge fancy gorgeous beasties, only to end up 3 months later unable to ride the horse themselves and having to have their trainer ride the horse full time maybe because the gaits are just too big or because the horse is too sensitive to be happy with a less than perfect seat.

So the first step to successful horse shpping is to honestly define your goals. To do this you not only have to know what you want to achieve, but you have to honestly understand where you are in relationship to that goal.

is your goal to move up two or three levels in the next three years, but you still can’t quite SIT the trot? If so, then rather than looking for that super fancy Grand Prix fireball, maybe you look for something that is solidly trained with soft enough gaits you can learn a lot quickly on them instead of struggling for years to sit a massive trot.

Is your goal to ride a little dressage, but mostly just enjoy hacking around and trail riding? Then maybe you look for something that has been there done that – an all around horse that will keep you safe and go through mud puddles and scramble you over logs without batting an eye.

Is your goal to have a fancy horse that someone else shows for you but you get to enjoy owning? Then go look for that super athlete that maybe you can’t possibly sit the trot on just yet, but a professional would knock your socks off on!

Each goal has a different kind of horse that will help you along the way. It’s a difficult thing to decide to go with the less flashy, solid citizen but that solid citizen will help you achieve your dreams far faster than a horse you can’t or don’t enjoy riding yourself.

Last year I sold my wonderful schoolmaster, Schan, and started looking for my next upper level prospect. Last time I looked for a horse, it was a very slow and painful process - looking through small print ads and then calling a bunch of numbers to try to get more info. Most of the calls, of course, would go to an answering machine and which meant waiting for people to call me back which seemed to almost invariably lead to long-running games of phone-tag. Eventually, when we finally got to talk to each other, if the horse was still available, I got to ask all my questions and then, if I was still interested, ask them to send me (via snail-mail) a video, if they had one. Then, if I was lucky, a week or so later the long anticipated video would show up. If I liked the video then I coudl proceed with arranging a time to meet and ride the horse and go from there.

That’s a lot of “if’s” and a lot of time just for one horse ad and sadly I was never lucky enough to find my perfect match from the first ad I called on so I spent a ton of time on this process whenever I was looking for a horse! I suppose I could have outsourced this whole process to a professional trainer who could have used their network to find me that perfect horse, but I was always on a tight budget so I did it all myself.

These days, whatever my budget is, I still choose to do the search myself because it’s just plain fun to go horse shopping! The internet makes the process sooo much easier and faster. More and more ads not only have pictures, but have videos too. If you need more information you can have a quick email conversation rather than playing phone tag. Heck, these days I surf the internet looking at horse ads at least once a week just for fun - mind you, this behaviour is very dangerous because I fall in love and want to buy them all when I really can’t handle another horse right now!

While horse shopping is easier than ever, there are still some things you should be aware of and watch out for when looking for your next equine partner-in-crime. Remember it’s a lot easier to buy a horse than to sell a horse, so it’s super important to be careful!

Top 7 tips for successful horse shopping:

1) Know exactly what you are looking for, BEFORE you start looking.
2) Use your resources wisely.
3) Ask lots and lots and lots and lots questions.
4) Go look at as many horses as possible and take a friend with you!
5) Do a good vet check, no matter the price of the horse – Xrays can be so important!
6) DO Look a gift horse in the mouth!
And the hardest one of all…
7) Don’t Fall in Love!

I’ll dig more into these tips in my next few posts!

Happy Riding!