Month: January 2022

Yeah you’re right, that title was seriously a stretch. It’s 5am when I’m typing this, give me a break.

If you’re like me and have spent this latest cold front hiding inside trying to pretend that winter doesn’t exist, yet are still a huge nerd and always enjoy distracting yourself with horse-related educational material, you’ve come to the right place. Here are some of the videos I’ve watched lately that I thought were interesting!

Q&A with Dr. Barry Miller from the Virginia Tech Helmet Safety Lab. This lab is working on putting together a rating system for equestrian helmets that will finally give us actual safety rankings for helmets rather than just a pass/fail of pre-determined standards. You can learn more about the rankings, helmet safety technology (including MIPS), and the lab/testing itself in this Q&A.

I get people asking me pretty regularly for recommendations on sporthorse conformation/breeding books and reading material, so I thought this webinar might be of interest to some of you. It’s a pretty detailed and in-depth discussion of sporthorse conformation (and yes they do talk about differences between dressage horses and jumping horses) with KWPN judge Marian Dorresteijn.

If you’re looking for stuff regarding lameness, physical issues, colic, etc, Love of the Horse has a good On Demand library. You have to sign up to watch, but it’s free!

USEA has also been posting videos on their Vimeo account of various sessions they had during their convention last month, including but not limited to a couple of the ones that piqued my interest the most during their livestream:

Competing in Thermally Challenging Climates (applicable not just to eventers! This is a great one for us southerners especially… also kind of nice to daydream about what it was like to be hot…)

Equality in Eventing (and equestrian sports in general)

Hope y’all are staying warm out there. If you’ve seen any other good videos lately that are worth a share, drop them in the comments!

I think the initial little few week period when you first get a new horse is a really fun time. You get to learn who they are, what their personality is like, their likes/dislikes, and all the little quirks. Now that Gemma’s been here about a week and a half she’s settled and gotten to know me and is coming out of her shell a bit. For instance, despite being skinny when she came off the track, that girl loves her food. Like, I thought Henry was a screamer for food but Gemma might have him beat. She neighs when I have feed, when I have hay, when I have treats, or any time she thinks I might or should have any of those things. There’s a lot of hollering for food. She’s definitely put on some weight already too, so I’m hoping she’ll join the Chonk Club sooner rather than later.

Since she’s got a very good appetite she goes through hay pretty quickly (we’ve already made two hay runs for her, but as long as she wants to eat it I’m happy to buy it!), and since she’s also currently in ulcer treatment (because racetrack) we’re doing our best to make sure she always has hay in front of her. She didn’t really seem to love eating out of haynets though, but if I put the hay on the floor she drags it around and pisses in it, so Hillary brought out her Porta-Grazer. It took Gemma a few days to figure it out, but now it seems to be doing it’s job pretty well – she finishes most of her hay every night and doesn’t make a mess of it, and it helps the hay last longer through the whole night. I’m not sure that Gemma loves the Porta-Grazer, but she hasn’t really complained too much. Until yesterday anyway. Gemma’s got jokes.

I SWEAR I heard her laughing when I found the poo and said “GEMMA NO! WE DON’T SHIT IN THIS! PORTA-GRAZER NOT PORTA-POTTY!”. She just gazed cooly back at me from her pen with what I can only assume is the horse version of a smirk. Tell me she isn’t laughing.

She’s definitely got plenty of personality, and it’s slowly but surely starting to trickle out. I think she’s gotten to know me well enough by now. She’s still very polite most of the time – not nearly as cheeky as a certain bay gelding we all know and love who I swear whips you in the eye with his tail out of spite – but she’s coming out of her shell for sure. So far I quite like what I see. Enough sass and opinions to keep things interesting (would I even know what to do with a horse that didn’t have opinions?) but nothing extreme or ridiculous or rude. Even if/when she does have a spooky or naughty moment, which have been very few and far between, she’s quick to settle back down and get with the program. She doesn’t build or spiral into a pit of anxiety. Smart girl. I think she’s also very happy to be back on a quiet relaxed farm and not at the track. Her connections didn’t think she liked it there, and I think they were right.

Gemma still sleeps A LOT… whether that’s making up for the lack of good sleep when she was on the track or if that’s just her, we shall see as time goes on. I’m pretty sure she’d sleep through a hurricane though. Or a winter weather/high wind advisory like we’ve got today, at the very least.

GemmaQueenofNaps?

The world is nuts right now, y’all. Life is nuts. Everything is nuts.

I feel like everyone is getting covid. Like everyone. My whole team at work, my SO, his whole team at work, half of my friends and their families… it’s totally out of control right now. As someone who has yet to get covid (knocking furiously on wood) it’s starting to feel a little bit like I Am Legend out here. I’m quite glad that the SO doesn’t live out here and I told him not to come last weekend since he’d been potentially exposed. That’s the last friggin thing I need right now. As you can imagine (and have probably also experienced) it’s making work absolutely delightful, especially since we’re in our busiest time of year for our customers yet our workforce is severely depleted. It means my days are long and hectic, trying to make up for the missing staff. I worked both days over the weekend, and it seems like pretty much everyone is in the same boat at the moment. Not that it makes the customers any less irate. Good times.

In better news, a friend of mine let Hillary and I borrow some fence panels (thank you Sarah!) so we could make a little outside pen for Gemma. She was pretty unhappy in the barn by herself, which is totally understandable, but she’s pretty content outside in her pen. It will probably be another week or week and a half before we can get her up to Michelle’s place in Midland, so hopefully this can be a short term solution to get her through until then. So far she’s been pretty well behaved, but she’s still a young thoroughbred with lots of cooped up energy so I’m keeping a close eye on her. She’s still unfailingly polite to handle though, which is much appreciated.

The weather is still doing that really awesome yo-yo shit that I love so much (insert heavy sarcasm) which its basically been doing for a month straight now. Is it gonna be 30 today or is it gonna be 80 today or is it gonna be both? Who knows. It makes horsekeeping absolutely delightful. I’m going through both salt and fly spray at record speed. We’ve also gotten basically no rain to speak of so the ground is super hard, and the grass is just sad and crunchy. Granted, it’s a lot easier horsekeeping-wise to not have rain while Gemma is here, so I’m scared to complain too hard. It can hold off until after she’s gone, I’m ok with that. I also get the feeling that once it finally does start raining, it won’t stop for a while. I’m over it in advance.

Grace is definitely coming into heat already, so I’m probably going to go ahead and take her over to the breeding specialist this week. It’s earlier than I had planned, but with the ground as hard as it is and work being off the charts insane, I’m not able to ride her as much as I’d like anyway, so if they can get an early start on getting her bred and start trying to harvest some embryos, that would be fantastic. Having had her here for a while and ridden her, I’ve gotten to know her a lot more which has changed some of my breeding opinions for her slightly. More insight into the mares is always helpful.

Speaking of breeding, in all the time that I’ve spent playing with and handgrazing Gemma, I’ve started to compile a “long list” of stallions that I’m interested in for her eventually. Ya know, down the line. When we get to that. It never hurts to be prepared, plus if I already have a list going then I have lots of time to think about, look around, and whittle it down. Totally not crazy.

I’ve had time for basically nothing else. I have a lot in my “to do” for the blog that just keeps getting pushed off, and that’s probably just the way it’s gonna be for a while. I’ll tackle things as I get the chance, I just don’t know quite yet when that’ll be.

Hope everyone is staying safe out there and avoiding covid and all it’s related problems. Are we having fun yet?

Just checking in to let you know that I’m not dead, I’m just really freaking busy right now. Between work (oh the fallout from the covid surge, it is getting FUN is it not?) and the horses, I’ve rarely had more than a few minutes to spare here and there.

Gemma, due to no fault of her own, is really high maintenance at the moment. She’s fresh off the track, young, full of energy, and on stall rest, all at a new place to boot. That’s a lot. Trying to keep her happy and quiet and her stall clean and get her handgrazing/walking a few times a day is consuming every spare moment right now. She’s been wound a bit tight for sure, as expected, but has yet to do anything truly naughty or bad. I think when she’s in regular circumstances she’s gonna be a pretty chill girl.

I’ve gotten to know her a bit this week though, spending all that time with her, and I can say that I like her temperament and personality a lot. She’s very smart and catches on to things quickly, and she definitely wants to please. She’s sensitive, for sure, which should be no surprise, but I like her. As she settles in she’s starting to show a little more quirkiness and weirdness, which of course makes me happy. We’re starting to settle into a bit of a routine now so hopefully my days will be a little less packed. I’m definitely in dire need of a weekend though, I’m pretty sure I slept so hard last night that I didn’t move an inch.

I also did put a stick on her the other day and she’s a bit over 16h… almost 16.1 but honestly a lot of that is withers, so we’ll just say 16h. I remain really impressed with how she moves (her walk is probably one of the best I’ve ever seen in a horse straight off the track, she’s got a good 6″ of overstep even as tight as she is right now) and how she’s put together. There are some little things to nitpick for sure, like any horse, but it’s hard to find a ton of fault with how she’s put together. It’s possible that I’ve spent time while handgrazing her to make a list of possible stallion candidates for the future. I think this is the rare TB mare that could be worth presenting to one of the stricter warmblood registries for breeding approval. I can’t wait to see how she looks once she’s rested and has some weight back on.

Hopefully next week things will have settled down a bit and I’ll have more time to get back to regular content, but thanks for the messages making sure we’re ok. All good – just busy!

Surely y’all knew this was coming, right? I figured I might as well go ahead and do a post about Gemma’s breeding (and a bit about her history) while it was all still fresh in my mind.

Gemma’s JC name is Emily Who (all of her breeder’s horses names end in Who) and she raced 11 times starting in 2019 and most recently in December 2021. Astute observers may notice a gap in her race record between November 2020 and September 2021… this is because her breeder/owner retired from racing, brought all his horses home, and then an online herd dispersal sale was organized. That sale went live in the summer of 2021 (you can see Gemma’s sale video here… it’s nice to see what she’ll look like when she’s got some weight back on!), which I vaguely remember because Michelle and I had looked at the online catalog and bookmarked a few mares of interest.

We didn’t end up buying anything from that sale obviously, but Gemma was sold to racing people, bought back to the track in September, and raced 4 times for them. While she never won a race, she was second a couple of times. This race was probably her best performance, where she finished second. She didn’t seem all that interested in being a racehorse. To make it all even slightly more ironic, her breeder lives in Lamesa TX which is where the vet clinic is that Presto spent so much time at as a foal. The world is really small sometimes.

Anyway, on to the pedigree side of things. Her breeding is the thing that attracted me to her most. Her sire Abstraction was an unknown to me (which makes sense, he’s a New Mexico based stallion and his oldest crop is just now coming 6, so it’s a bit too early to have seen sporthorses from him yet) but I was very familiar with the rest of his pedigree: Pulpit – Quiet American – Nureyev. Pulpit of course is an AP Indy son (we’ll circle back around and talk more about Pulpit in a bit), and we’ve talked about AP Indy a lot on this blog in the various In The Blood posts. He comes up A LOT in sport, especially in eventers. Quiet American is by Fappiano, another big one for eventers, and Nureyev is also seen in sport a ton.

On the dam’s side she’s Crafty Prospector – Secretariat – Ack Ack – Forli. Her second damsire is Secretariat himself… you don’t see him up that close very much these days. Crafty Prospector shows up in the pedigree of plenty of sporthorses, including Jess Phoenix’s 5* horse Bogue Sound, Clark Montgomery’s 4*L horse Caribbean Soul , 3*L horse Banjo, and 3*L horse Outrageous Dance to name a few. And then of course on the bottom of the pedigree, Ack Ack and Forli are always good to see in an eventer.

What’s really interesting is that she’s bred quite similarly to two of my favorite thoroughbred sport stallions: eventers Saketini and Redtail Achiever. Saketini is by Bernardini, who is AP Indy x Quiet American. Saketini also has the mare Meadow Blue on his damline. Redtail Achiever is also by Bernardini so you get the AP Indy x Quiet American cross again, plus his damsire is by Mr P, he’s also got Nureyev and Bold Ruler, and they both have Ack Ack on the damline as well.

Ok now back to Pulpit himself, her sire’s sire. I was particularly interested to see him in a mare because two of my favorite up and coming 4*L event horses – Sorocaima (Buck Davidson) and Campground (Erin Sylvester) are out of Pulpit mares. You see plenty of Pulpit in eventing at all levels as well as jumpers up to 1.35, but he does seem particularly effective on the dam’s side of the pedigree.

I’ll stop there, otherwise we’ll be here all day, but that’s a brief peek into her pedigree and why it appealed to me as both a sporthorse and a broodmare. That combined with her conformation and her movement made her impossible to pass up!