Author: Amanda C

Alyssa recently told me that my horse stalking skills, especially when it comes to stallions or young horses, are really impressive. She asked me how in the world I remember all the different horses, bloodlines, what they’ve done, etc. The answer is pretty simple: I spend a ridiculous amount of time obsessively watching and looking. Also I have nothing else of particularly important use taking up space in my brain, so it’s totally possible for me to dedicate like 98% of my brain cells to the cause. Everyone’s gotta be good at something, right?

The weekend of stalking really kicked off on Friday morning. Mundial du Lion (which hosts the world championships for 6 and 7yo event horses, with a CCI* and CCI** respectively) was live streaming from France, and there were a few horses in particular that I really wanted to watch in the dressage. One of course being a Mighty Magic in the 2*, who’s ride time just happened to fall in the middle of my morning commute. No big deal… I just pulled over to watch on my phone. Technology is amazing.

On Saturday I was volunteering at a horse trial, running dressage scores in the morning and XC jump judging in the afternoon. While running dressage scores is not my favorite job (why was it 90 degrees? why was my ring so far from the office? why was I so sweaty?) it did give me enough free time for one horse in particular to catch my eye in warmup. I finally got close enough to see his number, looked him up on the sheet, found his name, and looked him up. Ah, he’s a 6yo by Diarado out of a Sandro Hit mare. No wonder I liked him (Sadie is in foal to Diarado for 2018!). I made sure to come up and see his showjumping round and then of course I got to see him come through my fence on cross country. He won the Prelim.

On Sunday morning I was up before to sun to watch the live stream of showjumping from Mondial du Lion. And when I say “watch” I mean with 3 windows open on my computer – the actual live stream, the order of go, and horsetelex – a European pedigree site. The order of go had the sire and the dam listed, but I want to see the whole pedigree and the blood percentage, and horsetelex is great for that. Sit there long enough, look at enough horses, and you start to see commonalities.

These championships have a fantastic record for producing future stars – fischerRocana, Horseware’s Hale Bob, fischerTakinou, Upsilon, Quimbo, Annie Clover, La Biosthetique Sam… I mean really, MANY of the best horses in the world competed at Mondial du Lion while they were up and comers. Oh, and someone we all know named Mighty Magic, who was 2nd his 6yo year and won his 7yo year. It’s fun to watch them all and try to pick out which ones will be the next Sam or Rocana.

Then last night I found myself clicking through the videos of the Goresbridge auction horses. Goresbridge is a big auction for young event horses in Ireland – lots of big ones have come through there, including Copper Beach and both the East and West Coast 2017 YEH 5yo Championship winners. It’s fun to click through for like half an hour, fantasizing about buying one, and then it’s less fun when you’re like “yeah this is never going to happen ever in my life”. I picked out my favorites though, so now it’s kind of a game to see how much they all end up selling for and to who.

I did pry myself away from the computer and volunteering long enough to ride my own naughty creature. On Sunday morning he waited to roll until I was literally parking my truck (I swear to god he made eye contact with me before he went down) and then after about 15 minutes decided he was done with letting me curry all the mud off.

There is so much sass in our relationship.

There is a lot of discussion among the breeding community right now about a suggested rule change proposal that would make it mandatory for people to keep a breeder’s prefix or suffix on a horse’s show name. You could change the name part itself, but not the prefix or suffix. So basically if you had a horse that was named Looney Tunes WTF, you could change the Looney Tunes part, but not the WTF part.

Like most things breeding related, I have a lot of feelings about prefixes and suffixes (this is shocking, I’m sure). I would never take a prefix/suffix off of a horse’s name, just because I know how important it is to breeders to have that easy recognition for their horses. It’s a nod of respect and recognition to where the horse came from, and all the blood, sweat, tears, money, and time that someone put into creating that horse. That’s not to say that there aren’t terrible ones like BRA or MF… I’d be less thrilled about those too, so I understand if someone wants to change a bad one. I still don’t think I personally would do it, but I would understand.

I also find it annoying how a lot of big sale farms just tack their prefix/suffix onto a horse they got in, jack the price up because it’s a (insert whichever one you want here – Fernhill, Cooley, RF, CR, FE, etc), and it becomes more of a “look where I bought this horse from” thing instead of a nod of credit to the person or farm that created the horse in the first place. Pretty brilliant for the seller though, since now everyone knows who sold the horse. I can hate it all I want, but it’s effective.

Even though I am a big fan of breeder prefixes and suffixes, I don’t really support this rule change proposal. I don’t think it should be up to USEF to monitor their useage and application. They got enough problems, man. Not to mention, what do you do about the fact that there are plenty of prefixes and suffixes out there that are used by more than one breeder. Who gets the “rights” to the letter R? What do you do with the ones that already have it? Sticky. Way too sticky.

I do have plenty of respect for the breeders who put into their sale contracts that the buyer can change the name but not the farm prefix/suffix. That seems totally reasonable to me. Granted, if that person sells the horse on, the next person isn’t bound to keep that.

All the new microchip recording stuff with USEF will help a lot of this, I think. Horses will no longer be able to just go *poof* and reappear under a new name with a new age. All of the information is much more likely to follow a horse throughout it’s career, and I think people will be a little less inclined to change the name. If nothing else, hopefully we become a bit more diligent about making sure the breeder information and the pedigree information get recorded with all the other microchip information too, and stay with the horse even if any prefixes or suffixes are dropped or names are changed.

But the most interesting thing that I’ve seen while following along with all these discussions in the last few days was that several people (non-breeders) said that they would not buy a horse with a prefix or suffix if they weren’t allowed to change it. Like even if the horse was otherwise perfect, it would be an absolute dealkiller to have any kind of prefix or suffix on it’s name. That seemed kind of crazy to me, but I guess names are THAT important to some people?

Presto of course is registered as Like Magic WTW – with the Willow Tree Warmblood suffix. Because I’m proud of my friend and her farm and the horses that she produces, and I want Presto to be a bit of a “spokesman” for her program, wherever he goes. He will wear his suffix with pride.

What do y’all think? Hate prefixes and suffixes? Love them? Would they be a deal breaker if you couldn’t change them?

Remember how excited I was last week about the dark purple breeches? Yeah well. They accidentally sent me burgundy. Burgundy is not purple.

Which wouldn’t be bad, because they’re beautiful breeches, but a) I already have a pair of burgundy breeches, b) they do not measure how their size chart said they did, so they’re too small, c) the company (QJ Riding Wear) is in Australia. I emailed them to see what they wanted to do, since not only are they not the color I ordered, they also don’t measure as advertised. They were not very helpful and asked if I thought I could just sell them here. They seemed to have no interest in getting me my purple pair that I was so excited about, or rectifying the mistake. I said I would try, and that was the last I heard from them. No gold stars for customer service. Or maybe I’m just accustomed to how fabulous Riding Warehouse is to deal with and my expectations are too high.

Too bad, really, because like I said, I quite like the breeches. Very very Animo-esque and a gorgeous merlot color. If anyone is interested in them, I’ll sell them to you for a bit less than what they cost with shipping from Australia to the US. They are AUS size 14, which was supposed to have been their equivalent of US 30/32, but the waist measures just a hair under 30 so they’re really more like 28. A slim-fitting 28. They have a sock bottom, silicone knee patch, and silver detailing at the back zipper pockets. I’ll sell them for $75USD including shipping anywhere in the US.

And I guess I won’t be getting the purple, since the company seems uninterested in my plight. Boo.

It wasn’t a total loss of a week for breeches though, because I got my hunter green Ovation Aqua-X breeches in the mail and absolutely love them. The color is stunning with my chocolate brown boots, and I like the new sock bottom a lot. As usual, they fit me perfectly. Ovation to the rescue! Maybe someday they’ll make the Aqua-X in dark purple…

I also bought Presto his first rope halter (or as I like to call them – MANNERS), and ordered him a yearling size in rainbow. Because he’s my unicorn, and I can torture him however I want.

I can’t wait to see him give me that patented Presto side eye while he’s wearing that thing. I won’t even be able to take him seriously.

Still trying to decide if I should bother buying him a winter blanket or not. He’s pretty impressively hairy, I dunno that he’ll actually need anything to keep him warm. But then again, it might be nice to at least have a waterproof sheet on standby, just in case…

No, not these kind of horse toys:

I’m looking for suggestions more along the line of these:

But better. A lot better.

A couple weeks ago when Presto was stuck inside due to weather, he decided to take his angst out on the wooden support structure in his stall’s run. He’s not the first to go for those things, but he went at it pretty hard and heavy there for a few days, despite having a huge pile of hay to eat. Bored Presto is Bad Presto.

Michelle tried spraying the wood with all the different things known to man to deter chewing. Presto is a) smart b) not a quitter, so he figured out that if he could just endure the flavor long enough to lick it off, his problem was solved. Eventually she wrapped all the wood in a few layers of chicken wire, and that finally put a kibosh on the chewing. The wood beams were saved, and now turnout is possible again, so it’s not such an issue anymore.

Presto will likely find himself stuck inside again at some point though, with winter coming, and I’d rather he not find other naughty things to eat or do.  He has a Jolly Ball, which gets played with a little bit, but it’s not interesting enough to keep him truly entertained. He hasn’t been super impressed with the big horse sized ball either. His diet is very very very carefully managed and balanced, so I don’t want to get him any of those stall toys with treats or food either. Plus he’s so smart I don’t think those would last long anyway.

I’ve heard of different homemade type horse toys, involving milk jugs or soccer balls or ropes… has anyone made anything like that before? Did they work? Or are there any horse toys out there on the market that helped at keeping a particularly smart and hard to impress baby horse entertained for more than 5 minutes?

For Day 2 and 3 of the clinic, Trainer was riding Henry. She’s just getting back into her normal riding routine post-baby, and really only has young horses at the moment, so she hasn’t jumped anything of much size or technicality for like… a year. Henry is kind of perfect for helping a rider knock the rust off, because he’s got a high tolerance for mistakes, but at the same time he’s a HUGE tattletale. If you do something even slightly wrong, you’ll know it. Basically they got a little bit of a teacher-student role reversal this weekend, and Henry got to return the favor to someone who has really been so instrumental in bringing him (and me!) along over these past couple years.

Her stadium lesson on Saturday went a lot like mine. Lots of working on rocking the canter back onto the hind end and lifting his ribcage UP to his withers, and lots of working on her own body control. Henry seemed kind of pissed about stadium 2 days in a row when there were a bunch of lovely XC fences just outside of the arena, but he tolerated his torture with nothing more than large amounts of Resting Mare Face. It was pretty fun to watch the lesson progress and see Trainer finding her “sea legs” again as things went along.

The weather was quite miserable, so freaking humid in the morning that everything had a layer of wetness to it. The day ended up being 92 degrees with 60% humidity by the afternoon. Seems pretty excessive for mid-October, Texas. Henry had to spend a while under the hose to get cooled down when he was done. I was glad that I had clipped him the day before the clinic, although I’m not sure how helpful it really was considering the humidity.

Sunday was cross country day, finally something Henry was happy about. They started with little exercises, eventually stringing together some courses and then some harder combinations. A lot of the focus was on the ability to quickly bring the horse back from an open XC canter to rebalance for more of the shorter bouncier stadium canter that is required for combinations… a little bit of a struggle in the beginning with Henry, but eventually she got it done. He was pretty pumped to be out and jumped everything she pointed him at, regardless of mistakes. The first time he leaped into the water I’m pretty sure he was screaming “CANNONBALL” as she had to quickly gather her reins back up to make the turn for the jump out.

Really cross country day heard a lot of the same concepts repeated from stadium day… especially “put him up into your outside rein”. Like if I had a dollar for every time I heard outside rein all weekend from Ashley, for real. She ain’t wrong, though. Another thing she really stressed was that it was important to keep a conversation going with your horse all the way around, instead of just sitting up there like a bump on a log (“bumps on a log don’t go cross country”) or setting your pace and then just kind of expecting the horse to gallop along on autopilot. It was important to continually check in with them, make sure they were with you, make sure they understood what you wanted, make sure the balance was always there and ready, etc. It really helped the horses not just perform better, but they seemed more confident in the exercises.

At the end, Ashley’s main takeaway for Henry (both for me and Trainer) was that either we could let him go around and be an average cute little horse, or we could really ride every step, create the powerful canter, improve the balance, and then suddenly he was a machine. Or more accurately, she said it like “MA-CHEEEEN”. He performs to whatever level he’s ridden, basically. Ride him averagely, and he’s an average horse. Ride him well and he’s a great horse. Which really is absolutely 100% accurate, so I need to make myself be a better rider so that he can be a better horse. What else is new?

But now I feel like I have a lot more specific tools in my toolbox to get that done. When we got home I unloaded Henry from the trailer and immediately drove out to my jump field to set up some exercises while everything was still fresh in my mind. I will be riding around thinking about straight bouncy canters, outside rein, my core, separating my hands from my body, quicker reaction times, and riding his girth uphill to the base. Maybe we’ll actually even succeed and get better.

Either way, I can’t recommend Ashley enough. She isn’t just a naturally talented rider, she’s also a really excellent teacher, and it’s hard to find both of those things together. She can very clearly get her points across and knows exactly when to push and what to say to get the results she’s looking for. It’s also really obvious that she cares a lot about what she does and she really gives it 110% of her effort and attention. I’ve been to a lot of clinics with a lot of people, some of them really big name riders, and none of them were as useful to me as she was. It wasn’t one of those “one size fits all” things where there’s one exercise set up and every horse does the exact same thing throughout the day.  Instead everyone got exactly what they needed, individual attention, and specific exercises to help them with their particular horse. Nothing cookie cutter about it. Those of you in Area 2, I’d definitely look her up and try to ride with her. But if any other folks out there are thinking of bringing someone into your area for a clinic, for sure look at Ashley! 10/10 would recommend.