relationship building

We teach our dogs to come. Even the little ones will rush towards you with a bit of training. (Scooter has a hard time putting on the brakes. He stopped just behind me.)   Like dogs, horses can be taught to come for treats. However, a horse is a grazer, […]

Come! From Turnout

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It’s still so cold that Tonka is turned out in a sheet or blanket.   But it’s been warming up to above 40° F in the afternoons. That’s a good thing/bad thing. The trails are clear of ice!   But the ticks have woken up. The other day, scratching the […]

Hands On Grooming for Tick Season

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I think that the big picture is cute.   The view from on top gets even cuter. There’s a whorl in that skunk mane. It’s a part of my horse that cannot be tamed!   As a trainer, I’ve learned to break down behavior into the smallest possible components, find […]

Seeing The Details

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It takes just one bad scare to change how your horse behaves from then on – for days, maybe months, maybe years, maybe forever. With observation, management and training, you can alleviate some of your horse’s fear, but you might not be able to “fix” it. I’m in this situation […]

Overcoming a Fearful Incident

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Recap: Tonka has had recurrent sacroiliac joint issues which cause back pain, which I know because he tells me in a myriad of ways. When the SI joint flares up, Tonka moves away from the mounting block. He doesn’t willing do upward transitions. It gets so bad that he refuses […]

Tonka’s Sacroiliac Joint Progress

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For the last few weeks there’s been a lot of activity near the horses’ paddocks. A crew of two men have been putting up a new fence. First there were the piles of posts and rails in places where there had never been posts and rails. Then the guys got […]

Losing Fear By Making Friends

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As promised in my last post, here is a link to a new piece of writing by Karen Pryor. It’s about her time on board a tuna fishing vessel. She was there to study dolphin behavior so that better ways to fish could be implemented so that dolphins wouldn’t end […]

My Takeaways from Karen’s Writing

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Last week, I drove way up the coast of Maine (Maine is a huge state!) to see my friend, Lindsey Lewis. We know each other through our websites, and we’ve met in person at training conferences. She’s been clicker training her horses for years. We talked and talked and talked […]

Horse Hugs

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Tonka and I hadn’t been out on the trails for awhile because we’d been dealing with his SI issues. But, it was time to get him using that rear end and the vet said that easy hills out in the woods would be good for him, so last week, off […]

Crossing a Troll Bridge

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