Fall has become wintertime, and wintertime is about to become Florida-time. It’s t-minus four days from my own departure, with the horses to follow a few days behind. This year I have a record number going—10—as well as it being my first year at my own farm, or at least at a farm I’m renting the entirety of. I’m a good sharer, but it does sound nice to have the run of the place.

This is, however, the first year I don’t really have a big competitive goal, at least the first in a really long time. If 2017 had gone according to plan, Danny would be thinking about his Grand Prix debut this January, and Puck would be schooling the changes. But 2017 did not, under any circumstances, go according to plan. And such is plans with horses: they’re to be written in pencil, and should have about 892 contingencies.

That isn’t to say I’m not looking forward to going. I have a fantastic group of clients going, all with exciting competitive goals. It’s a wonderful group of horses, and that is always great fun. And my own horses are moving forward, if not towards the goals I had in mind, at least off this summer’s plateau.

Read the rest at The Chronicle of the Horse!

I hate the process of buying and selling horses. It’s like speed dating but with a marriage proposal at the end; every horse is imperfect in some way; and even when done perfectly right, with adequate trial time, complete honesty on behalf of both buyer and seller and everything above board, you’re still buying a sentient being who is susceptible to change.

But it’s an inevitability. While I don’t take horses in to sell, I sometimes need to sell my own; I get my horses young and take them as far as they can go, or as far as I can justify taking them before rededicating my limited resources to the next one. My clients outgrow horses, and need new ones. It’s the nature of the business that, even when sales isn’t your business, you’re going to have to do a little bit of buying and selling.

When I’m selling a horse, the first thing I do is a pretty comprehensive veterinary exam. Depending on the price, age and level of the horse I’ll have x-rays taken in advance, but no matter what I have a basic physical exam done, including flexions of all the major joints. You can find something physically wrong with every horse, and training leaves evidence.

As such, whether I’m selling or helping a client buy something, I make sure that I consider any veterinary findings in context. When Ella was on the market, I can’t tell you the number of people who were shocked by the things I did for her prophylactically—joint injections, Adequan and Legend before there was a problem, rather than after. So many said something along the lines of, “Well, I’m looking for a confirmed Grand Prix horse with an extensive show record that doesn’t need maintenance.” Good luck and Godspeed to them! And sure enough, the veterinarian who preformed her pre-purchase exam said that not only did Ella have phenomenal X-rays for a 16-year-old horse; she had phenomenal X-rays for an 8-year-old horse.

Read the rest at The Chronicle of the Horse!

I started riding at 11. I took lessons on horses that were only vaguely sound, with ill-fitting tack, who received a bute a day to keep them teaching two lessons a day, six days a week. I rode in arenas where motor oil was used to keep the footing from being dusty, and at barns where horses were kept in standing stalls all day long.

Going to college in New York I went on a hack around Central Park where we rented livery horses who lived on the second and third stories of an apartment building. And now, as a professional, I’ve had clients bring me horses in trailers with holes in the floor, or who share their fields with barbed wire or rusty cars.

I’ve also seen horses in top performance barns, with phenomenal care, get hurt. Get sick. Die. I know of a horse who got cast in his stall, fractured his leg, sent a piece of bone through the femoral artery and bled to death in the middle of the day. I knew a horse who was put on the lunge line to get some exercise on a brutally cold winter day, too cold to ride, only to buck once hard, land just so, and shatter a pastern.

In 20-plus years with horses, if it’s two things I’ve learned, it’s these: 1) that the one Universal Truth in horses is that there are no Universal Truths; and 2) horses are livestock trying to become deadstock. If they can find a creative way to injure or maim themselves, they will.

Read the rest at The Chronicle of the Horse.