Handy Hunters

The huntseat world has for some a reputation of  bored push-button horses (’hothouse petunias’ at George Morris calls them) and posed riders perched on top like immobile Barbie dolls.   The U.S. Hunter Jumper Association High Performance Hunter Committee has an answer that hopes to challenge both riders and their sometimes sleepy equitation mounts:  The Hunter Derby Series.

Courses will provide more varied and bending lines as well as  jumps resembling obstacles on a hunt field.  Riders can choose extra or more difficult obstacles for potential higher scores.  The Derbies consist of two courses:  Classic Hunter and Handy Hunter.  Handy Hunter is where it starts to get really interesting.  Some of the options include opening gates while mounted, halting & backing and dismounting and leading over an obstacle.

The prize money is nothing to sneeze at: a minimum of $10,000 prize money must be offered per class.

Details of the Derbies are available at the USHJA site here.  The Hunter Derby was featured in this month’s Practical Horseman magazine.  An overview of the article including videos of some past Derby performances is available here.

Minnesota Hooved Animal Rescue Trainer’s Challenge

Tia is currently available for adoption at the Minnesota Hooved Animal Rescue. “Foaled in 1990, Tia is a beautiful bay, purebred Arabian mare (Bask breeding); 15.1 hands, gentle, friendly and sensible mare. Has had some round pen work and is ready to be started under saddle.”

The Minnesota Hooved Animal Rescue is taking a page from the Mustang Challenge and starting a Trainer’s Challenge for some of their current horses awaiting adoption: The Trainer’s Challenge of the Unwanted Horse. This sounds like a great idea. Foster and train a horse for 100 days. Compete for a $4000.00 first prize. Turn an unwanted, untrained horse into an adoptable horse with skills and savvy. Horses will be evaluated on basic skills such as standing for the farrier, loading & unloading from the trailer as well as basic ring and trail training.

Brilliant. More details are available here.

Straight from the Horse’s Mouth

Goodbye Teddy

I am broken hearted to have read at Fran Jurga’s Hoof Blog here that Theodore O’Connor, the 14.1 eventing pony from the O’Connor stable was euthanized today after an accident at his home barn. I have not seen any additional details of what happened. I have a soft spot in my heart for ponies and this Thoroughbred, Arabian, Shetland (!!) cross had taken the eventing world by storm in the last year. He was short listed for the American Team at the upcoming Hong Kong Olympics.

Teddy was a shining copper penny of pluck and courage. In days of a bigger is better mentality, he proved that heart is what matters most.

Update: thehorse.com has a more detailed article available here regarding the accident.  

Blonde on Board

Mr. Banderas, the 46″ Hackney pony, has what the art world would call  ’unknown provenance’.  He came to me with no papers and just some highlights of his past.  He is as my cousin so aptly described, a Pony School Drop Out.  My trimmer owned him for 3 years, intending him originally to be a project horse for her teenage daughter.  Prior to that he had at some point been a show pony for very young rider.  I’m sure he looked gorgeous.  He however also bucked his little rider off his back; antics which had him headed to the sale ring until my trimmer gave him a new home.   It would not have been a promising outcome for a pony who couldn’t be advertised as child safe, no matter how fancy.

We’ve been working on ground training to give him a job as a cart pony (Banderas Walks the Line), but today I woke up with the thought of trying him in the indoor arena for a bareback ride.  Both my trimmer and her daughter had both ridden him a couple times  so I knew he was at least trained well enough to know whats what.

So, DH and I set out with a mission in mind.  Query:  How Broke is the Pony?  Answer:  Not Broke Enough. In this picture you can see me heading in one direction with the pony body clearly headed in another.  You know the end of the story: dirt.  I have to say, it’s rather fun to have a horse from which a ‘dump’ is nothing more catastrophic than some dirt on my jeans.  Heck, it’s practically fun to bail off from that height.

In the end, after 2 false starts (Remember how slippery little pony backs are without a saddle?), decided it would be in everyone’s best interest to have Banderas haltered and led around the arena by DH while I rode.  (Kudos for pony wrangling to DH).  Yes, ok, I looked like a 3 year old in a lead line class but I wanted to ensure we had a smooth, confidence building trip around the arena and bareback is not how I wanted to ride out any serious bucks.

Next time, I’m bringing the saddle.  He’s going to be a fun little ride.

Enter Drama Queen, Stage Left

The aforementioned Drama Queen at Liberty this winter.

In response to some previous spoiled behavior (J Goes Back to School) J, the Arabian Trakehner horse,  and I have started working through the exercises from Clinton Anderson’s ‘Gaining Respect and Control On the Ground’ DVD series.   I’d worked through some of the exercises over the last couple weeks with my old dressage whip in place of Clinton’s special stick.  J was doing well.  He was respecting boundaries and backing and yielding well.

As it’s actually fairly easy to underestimate the power of and misuse a bendy, thin dressage whip, I thought ordering the special white stick from Clinton’s site would be a good idea before DH entered the mix.  It’s considerably thicker than a normal whip plus a little longer and has the nice removable leather strap on the end.

New white stick in hand, I haltered J, did some backing exercises and was embarking on a “quick” desensitizing  exercise when J fixed that new white stick with a beady, steely glare.

Wait just a gosh darn minute, he seemed to say to himself. She’s trying to pull a fast one on me.  This.  This thing is NEW.

He stuck out his nose to sniff it; shot air through his nose like a dragon (Arabian owners you know this sound) and bolted sideways faster than most horses can move in any direction.

Holy crap, that thing’s made out of dead horse bones isn’t it? His eyes accused me.  That’s why it’s so WHITE.  And SMELLY.  And SCARY.  She’s a witch doctor.  Snort. Snort.  SNORT.

So enters the Drama Queen.  At one point I couldn’t help but laugh when I touched the stick to his front hoof and he shot that foot up in the air so fast you would have sworn I had poked him with a branding iron.  He was reacting as if he could die just from the touch.  Clearly I had added poison to the tip, tricky devil that I am.

After two days of exercises, he’s accepting it better.  This morning he walked over it calmly and relaxed when it touched his back.  His reactions are so much worse on his left side that I’m beginning to wonder if he has some vision loss on that side.  He startles much more easily there and sometimes seems to react to things on the left as if they appear from nowhere.  I need to schedule the vet to come back out in the next week to finish the last round of spring vaccinations; think I better add an eye exam to the list.  In this case, I hope it is just his sometimes high maintenance nature coming out.  Better safe than sorry.

Big Brown, meet the Onion

Image: www.websterps.com

Ok sure, the road to the Triple Crown is one thing but you know your horse has really hit the big time when he is spoofed in the gag based newspaper, the Onion.

“PORTLAND, OR—In a move that added the world’s pre-eminent equine athlete to its stable of endorsers Tuesday, Nike signed Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes winner Big Brown to a seven-year, $80 million endorsement contract that included a $10 million signing bonus as well as the creation of a signature horseshoe, the Air Brown. . . Click here to read the whole article.

While I have some serious concerns about Big Brown passing along a continued history of poor feet to future generations of race horses, this tongue in cheek article made me laugh. And who knows with Nike dabbling in the equestrian world with the Nike Ippeas, maybe it isn’t that far fetched of an idea after all.

Invasion of the Lawn Snatchers

The dandylions are taking over.  They are spreading quicker than you can say ‘kudzu’.  I swear some of them are knee high with flower heads as big as my fist.  They are a pretty yellow blanket where the lawn used to be. 

Unfortunately, they continue to display a complete disregard for boundaries or concepts of sharing.  Perhaps a tethered herd of miniature horses are needed to keep them at bay?

 

Painted Pony in the Fog

www.websterps.com

This photograph taken in 2007, early one morning in North Dakota at my parent’s house.

A man, a plan and a cornerpost

DH was busy last week. He took a week’s vacation and devoted it to Ranchette improvements. My favorite of which is:

New Cornerpost in the big pasture

This replaces the previous icarnation of the “corner post system” which had been rigged up by prior tenants from 3 metal t-posts and a bunch of crazy wire. Big improvement. Way to go DH! We just need to trim the one 4×4 to size and restring the electrical wire to the new corner. If today’s rain and subsequent fear of smote by lightning bolt hadn’t prevented it, I would have pounded in the new ground rods for the solar fence charger. The overgrown trees have been trimmed away from the electric wires (DH’s nice handy work again) so that will be the last step in getting the largest pasture open for business.