I used to pride myself in being a bare bones, most basic, purist when it came to training. I thought that using anything other than a snaffle meant that you hadn't put in enough time training or that there was a hole in your training foundation. I used to think that if you couldn't get it done without any gadgets that you should just keep grinding the gears until you could figure it out. Well, I was wrong. 

The talk that I have with all of my students when they are learning about contact and a horse being "round", or "through", or "on the bit" or whatever you want to call it goes something like this:
Me- "What do we sit on?"
Rider- "Their back"
Me- "Is that a strong place or a weak place on the horse?"
Rider- thinks, looks around at the horse then with some slight sound of dread... "weak"
Me- "yes, we sit on the weakest part of their body. When they don't have a rider on them, they are perfectly safe to move however they want, but when we get on it's our job to get them to use their other muscles and body parts to turn their back into a strong place so that they don't get injured from carrying our weight."

So, if it's our job to keep them sound... because we all know they weren't the ones with the bright idea of putting 150lb on their back... isn't it also our job to fill our tool box full of tools to help them? Isn't it our job to fill our tool box with tools that support our horses while our students learn to do it all on their own? 

Now I'm not talking about cutting corners or forcing false frames, but I am talking about being well educated about equine anatomy, physiology and bio mechanics and using appropriate tools to encourage or support a horse to use their body properly. If we all know that a horse needs steady contact to push their forward energy into, but we have a rider who is still only able to focus on the "forward energy" part why not offer the horse (and rider) a steady contact via neck stretcher? That way, the horse has a contact that won't drop away a million times and the rider can feel what it's like to send the horse toward a steady contact and what happens to their frame and gaits when they have a steady contact on the other end of the forward energy. Wouldn't that help connect the dots for what our riders are looking to feel better than trying to explain it to death? Teaching someone to FEEL something is HARD... why not find ways for them to learn the feel by feeling it? And in the mean time, let's not allow our horses to go around inverted and risk injury. The Spanish Riding School doesn't allow their horses to go around like giraffes while their students spend what I'm sure seems like a century on the line with no reins... so why should we? 

​When I have a rider who is jumping a horse who gets strong to the fences, should I let her flounder in a snaffle... teaching her to start riding backwards toward the jump and increasingly killing the nerves in the horse's mouth, or should I give her some tools to help her ride softly and help her horse learn to follow the leader? The right bit for the job can make a world of difference. Does this mean that we skip the basics and ignore whatever the root of the "strong to fences" issue is? No. But it does mean that I'd rather keep my rider having good habits, a horse who can be ridden softer, and a team that approaches jumps safely. 

​I have seen so many of my riders put on a well adjusted neck stretcher for the first 10 minutes of their ride, get their horses forward and get the feel of the steady connection and then take it off to then be able to seamlessly go replicate the feeling.... that right there is magical. Why would we deny our riders such a wonderful way to discover connection with their horse?

So, this post may not be about my red mare... but if my red mare has taught me one thing it is to work smarter not harder and find the best tools for the job. 

When Belle came off the track, she had been consuming about 18 quarts of grain per day. To put that in perspective a horse's stomach is roughly the size of a foot ball. They can only safely fit about 5 quarts in it at a time. Many boarding barns are only willing to feed up to about 8 quarts per day. Race horses routinely get fed a crap load of grain because they are sprinters and use a lot of energy in a short amount of time and grain has a lot of calories. So transitioning horses from what they are fed on the track to what they will be fed as a "normal" horse can sometimes be tricky since their metabolism is used to processing such high quantities. 

Belle grew like Jack's bean stalk in the first 2 years. It was so hard to keep weight on her that I would loose sleep over it. She was ribby and had long spider legs, and vibrated ALL THE TIME so she was using all of the 10 quarts of grain I was feeding her, plus some. I tried fat supplements, amino acids, extra other protein and many of the latest and greatest grains out there. She was on a calming supplement at all times because without it she couldn't bare to be in her own skin. I was still struggling to figure out why she wasn't getting stronger, and many trainers would tell me "put more weight on her so she has more to turn into muscle"... well, I would if I could. 

​All good horsemen know that the base of a horse's diets should be forage. We do not have access to pasture, so hay it is. Hay is great, if your horse will eat it. The most that I could ever get into Belle was 12 pounds in 24 hours. They say that horses need 15-20% of their weight in forage. So if Belle weighs approximately 1000 pounds, 12 pounds of hay would barely sustain an easy keeper, never mind a hard one. I've tried second cut, I've tried it in a hay bag, I've tried it loose on the ground, it didn't matter. So I resorted to adding hay stretcher, beet pulp, alfalfa cubes, you name it. 

We finally got her to a weight that I was ok with. She was still a hot head, and reactive to way more than I'd like. I kept telling her that if she would stop having dramatic outbursts that he could use that energy for good instead of evil. JUST STAND STILL AND GAIN SOME WEIGHT! But we kept plugging along. 

I am a researcher. If I want to know about something (like how to make my skinny mare fat) I will stay up far after my bed time reading university studies, scrolling though forums, comparing nutrition facts, etc. I had always thought "wouldn't it be nice to have a horse that could be on zero grain" and "concentrated grains can't be the only option" but I had put all of this effort into getting her to an ok weight... taking her off of grain may totally throw a wrench in things. This past August, we decided to try her on an altrenogest hormone therapy. Her heat cycles didn't seem that bad before, but this year her hormones seemed to be taking her on a bit more of a roller coaster ride and it was tough on both of us. For those of you who don't know- altrenogest suppresses estrus in mares, making her hormones get back in their jail cell and behave themselves. It is an oily liquid consistency and highly hazardous to women. So, while this magic juice did help Belle A LOT, it also is pretty toxic to have to handle each day. So I was back on the web to find a better long term solution. 

I found a few mare owners who stated that taking their horse off of all soy made a night and day difference in how reactive they were. I did more research and found that owners with super hot horses had a different, calmer, horse when they took them off of soy and grains. "OK, I've come this far", I said to myself, "might as well dive in"!

​Why no soy? Soy has phytoestrogens called isoflavones. Phytoestrogens are compounds found in plants that are chemically similar to the hormone estrogen. So, when you're trying to control the naughty estrogen already in your mare's body... adding more may tip her over the edge. Just about every grain company out there uses soy as one of the top ingredients. It is a good, cheap source of protein and easy to mix with other ingredients. 

Why no grain? Many of the grains that are fed to horses are high in sugar and non structural carbohydrates (NSC). The type and amount of sugar can create insulin resistance or sugar highs and lows. Horses are created to digest structural carbohydrates, like grass, with their hind gut. When you feed them NSCs, they rely on their foregut to digest it all and if it passes to the hind gut without being completely broken down it can cause all kinds of issues. 

We feed grain to horses who are working in order to support the extra protein, fat, calories and minerals their bodies need. So I needed to find a way to replace the minerals and vitamins, and provide extra calories, fat, and protein. Many grain companies make a ration balancer to help add vitamins and minerals to a diet that doesn't need a lot of grain (ponies!!) BUT most ration balancers have soy as the binding ingredient. So, I did more research and finally found a company that creates a soy free balancer! (I ultimately went with their High Point instead of Fuel) Replacing the calories fed in grain is much easier, I decided to feed a mixture of beet pulp and alfalfa pellets. Replacing the fat is easy too, I decided to use ground flax seed, which also offers a good amount of extra protein and a few other vitamins including extra E. 

​I slowly transitioned Belle to her new diet over the course of 3 weeks. After 2, I already noticed a difference. After completely switching her, I had a new horse. She wasn't vibrating out of her own skin, she wasn't over reacting to sounds or being spooky, she was leading to and from the paddock like a gem and overall she just started to be a peach to be around! Not only was she calm, cool and collected.... she was EATING!!! She couldn't wait for her next meal and was finishing all of her hay. She has kept her weight and I'm hoping to have her gaining more now that she will happily eat whatever is put in front of her. 

I have a pony mare that came here in the Fall. She's a cutie and mostly red ;) but had been out of work for a while and just seemed amped up more than she'd like to be. I had hoped that after she got into the routine that she would settle, but it never really happened. I had tried a full horse size dose of two different calming supplements and they barely made a dent. After two weeks off of grains and soy my kids were asking "what did you do with Maybel?!" She seems to be so much happier in her own skin which makes her much easier to use, and that means I can use her more and she is loving it. 

I have two more mares at the farm that struggle with their heat cycles, a horse who cribs and is chronically ulcery, another horse very prone to ulcers, and one who could use a little less energy to use for evil. So, I'm becoming one of "those" barns that is crunchy like granola and doesn't feed her horses fast food. I'm still in the process of transitioning most of them to their new diet and will be keeping a very close, skeptical, eye on everyone's weight and condition but for now I'm sold. When you have a red mare it pays to go back to the basics of nutrition. 

It may be because it's the middle of winter and everyone is getting stir crazy but I have found myself repeating one version or another of this idea over and over to my students:
​BE PROACTIVE NOT REACTIVE.

Being proactive with a red mare may mean noticing the weather change that will make her back tight, making sure you wont shock her when taking her blanket off, or noticing a potential spooky thing and redirecting her attention before she sees it. Whatever it may be, it will work much better than reacting to her reaction. Belle is the queen of anticipation. She reacts to things that she as come across before, when I didn't notice it was a "thing" then she over reacts next time around. So I have learned to pay attention and know what's coming before it comes. Diffusing the bomb is much easier (and less stressful for her) than cleaning up the mess after the explosion. 

Ever since I was a little girl, I wanted to be The Horse Whisperer. But shouldn't we actually be aspiring to be better horse listeners instead? If we are not interested in listening to what they have to tell us, why should we care whether we whisper or shout? 

Before I had Belle, Spot was my main man. He was incredibly stoic when it came to his feelings. So I learned to pay very close attention to if he was acting even slightly out of the ordinary. If he did ever tell me something was wrong it was usually after it had festered for a while and he ended up telling me in some round about way; typical man. So when I began working with Belle, I was ready to pay attention if she was trying to tell me when something was wrong. Like all smart, strong willed women she was incredibly vocal about her feelings. She was also a spicy baby dragon, so sometimes it took me a little while to understand what she was saying.

When we began working a bit harder than just playing with the very basics under saddle, she started bucking and twisting and leaping though the air like she was the main act in Cirque de Soleil. This usually happened any time we cantered to the right. I tried pushing her forward, stopping her, lunging before riding, chiropractic, xrays, injections, etc. Multiple trainers told me to use draw reins or a running martingale or other methods of making her stay on the ground but I had a feeling that there was a reason. Is she spicy, yes. Is she naughty, no. I refused to think that she deserved to be reprimanded so we just kept on keeping on. Her canter got better, but not believable enough for me. I tried using K Tape, a rope behind her butt when lunging, and researched any other ideas on how to help engage her core more but couldn't quite figure out a way that I was happy with. 

​When I tried starting to jump her, she acted as if I had shot her out of a cannon. She became frazzled and reactive. Many people told me to just keep working on it and she would get used to it. But she really didn't act much different no matter what I did or how long I had worked on it. So I decided to keep working on the dressage, hoping to get her stronger. She was doing very well in competitions and everyone was very complimentary of her, but she wasn't feeling as strong as I thought she should. She was SO athletic, I knew there was more to her. 

I kept consulting with medical professionals and well respected trainers and while I trusted their advice, I trusted Belle more. I finally talked chiropractor and physiologist, Heather Beaudry, to squeeze me into her schedule. A few of my clients were having her work on their horses and from what they had said and what I saw in my client's horses she had a slightly different view than anyone I had previously consulted with. It very much matched mine, actually her perspective was more like the big brother of what I was thinking... you know, the one that the little brother always wanted to be like when they grew up. When she came to look at her, she was the first person to point blank tell me that I was right. She wasn't carrying herself correctly and that if I had jumped her she probably would have gotten severely hurt. ((YES!!!)) She swiftly helped design a plan to turn muscles on that had seemingly not even been firing for quite some time. She showed me how to use therapeutic bands while she worked to engage her core and pelvic floor. It was the biggest relief to have someone tell me that my instincts were right and that my horse WAS telling me something was wrong!

​

Remember: she's a sensitive lady who isn't a fan of being touched and I expected these bands to be deemed unacceptable by her but Belle actually seemed relieved. She stopped being so spooky, she focused on the work more and most definitely got stronger- fast. That right there spoke volumes to me. After almost 5 years of trying to figure out what she was trying to tell me, she stopped telling me something was wrong and started coming to class ready to listen. I was able to take my spurs off, ride with barely any whip and whisper my aids to her. I tried jumping, and once she realized that it didn't hurt or scare her any more, I had a beautiful little jumping bean! 

​Over the last few months our relationship and her confidence have strengthened ten fold. Yes, we may have mixed in a little hormone happy juice along the way, but she seemed so relieved that I finally figured it out. Now that we have solved the questions as to whether Belle was just reactive to be reactive or if there was a true underlying issue (clue: there's always a reason), I'm able to sort out if she is trying to tell me about a problem more quickly now.

During the wicked cold spell that we just had, I tried to be thoughtful and add an extra sheet underneath her blanket. Soon after she became incredibly head shy and wouldn't let us put her halter on. At first I thought it had something to do with the altrenogest (hormones) that she was on but it wasn't. I then talked her into letting me touch her head and poll and her poll was hard as a rock. Once I started rubbing it, she leaned into me for a moment and then turned her nose and seemingly pointed at her back. I didn't quite pick up on it at first, but the next time I rubber her poll, she gave me this look as if to say, "would you PLEASE listen" and turned and pointed her nose as close to her withers as it could get. I couldn't believe it... she was telling me what was wrong! I called Heather Beaudry, who has encouraged me to listen to Belle more than anyone else, and she agreed that her second blanket was probably putting pressure on her withers and then it was making her poll tight. So, I took her sheet off and the very next day she was like a different horse! I'm sure she's happier that I'm learning to figure things out quicker... it's probably like having to be partners with the stumpy kid in the 3 legged race for her but I am learning! 

Lastly, she had been such a peach (after the great blanket fiasco of 2018) that I was pumped to bring her in for the farrier and see what he said about her reactiveness, or lack there of, because... you know, when you are excited about something you then want to show it off! But she was wound tighter than an 8 day clock. She came out of her stall sideways and seemed to hold her breath the entire time. He made a joke that she "probably knows something's coming" and I laughed it off, wondering where the dragon flew off to with my sweet little mare. That night while scrolling through Facebook I came across a meme about it being a full, super blue, blood moon... well jokes on us. She DID know something was coming! It wasn't actually something to truly worry about, but hey... the crazies were definitely out in full force and Belle was ready for 'em! 

So, just like the saying in our house is "Bryan's always right"... When your red mare tells you something.... LISTEN!