This is an update on Pamela, a horse I talked about back in February. Just to remind you, Pamela is a 6 year old Tennessee Walker who had been used as a ’show horse’ prior to being acquired by my client, Michele Williams. In the previous installment of her saga I had managed to reduce the catching/haltering process from 30 minutes to 5 minutes and I had gotten on briefly. The picture to the right is from that day. Not a pretty sight!
It is now 3 months later. Progress is slow but I generally only work with Pamela [more...]
Charlie is a 7 year old TWH. His owners, Jim and Donna Dehaas, who were relatively new to horses, just happened to find me after an online search for trainers in the area.
One of the problems the Dehaas’ had with Charlie was handling his feet. In fact, he’d already kicked Jim. And after slamming the farrier hard he had to be sedated for shoeing.
It didn’t need to be like that. The Dehaas’ wanted Charlie barefoot so the first order of business was getting the shoes off
Getting the shoes off would be Lauren (Gruber’s) job. But [more...]
Recently a couple of situations have come up that have caused me to reflect on how a horse feels about what we are asking him to do. Some horses we encounter make us look good by taking everything new in stride and never letting on that maybe they aren’t entirely OK with the process. Or maybe they do let on but they never do anything so dangerous that we can’t get away with letting those things slide. We can all attest to that sort of thing looking back, no?
Isn’t training hard enough as it is without having [more...]
