What if it isn’t a bad thing?

I have a “big picture” thing I want to say and it’s going to take some explaining. Just food for thought, really, but there’s some defining of terms that has to happen first. Just for the purposes of this article, and with full knowledge that making generalizations is always a bad idea. Here…

She’s Tomboy. I don’t write about her often enough; she’s a little more serious than my corgi men. She’s a Briard, a French herding breed that has a very protective side. Tomboy appointed herself my personal bodyguard when she was a tiny pup and has…

I got badmouthed by a cowboy recently. He dressed the part way too seriously.

It’s okay, in dressage we think of ourselves as eternal students. There isn’t a day that goes by that horses don’t teach me something. I…

We see things differently than horses.  And like usual, I think we should try to be more like them.

To start, one of the easy ways to tell if a mammal is predator or prey is eye position. Predators, like us humans, have our eyes close together, aiding our depth perception and…

My favorite training mentor had a habit that drove me nuts. She would be working with a horse who spooked or flipped his head or had some other issue that made him a disaster and when she climbed on, if you were close, you could hear her say in a low…

Photo by Patrick McMahan

The first time I met him, he was two months old standing in a stall with his mom. He was bright and intuitive, an Andalusian/Appendix…

Walter, Tomboy, & Preacher Man supervising chores.

My friend Sarah says, “All dog stories end the same way.” I know what she means. None of us humans are getting out…

It’s that time again- the sun’s a bit late in the morning. Geese are starting migration and horses are growing hair. School buses are out in full force.

It’s been 40 years since I got summers off to play and ride, and then lost sleep over what to…