Help for our equine friends suffering from fly allergies

What would your horse say about you if they could tell me?

Large animal veterinarians are becoming extinct. Even more endangered are equine veterinarians. Why? Being an equine veterinarian is challenging. Horse owners expect their veterinarians to have answers for all ailments.

Many times our horses need the opposite of what our brain and body want to do. A good portion of riding is overcoming what our body wants to do for the betterment of our horse.

I’ve touched on this topic before: the cohesiveness of your professionals. It is essential that the professionals you choose can communicate effectively, can disagree respectfully, are open minded enough to realize that they don’t know everything, and they want to continue learning. If your professionals are easily offended, defensive if another professional disagrees with them, doesn’t continue their education, or can’t respect the experience/education of another profession

There is no guidebook because the answer when finding the right path is, “It depends”.

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Part of enjoying horses means feeling safe while we are on them. Let me just say that riding a 1/2 ton prey animal is never 💯 safe. But there are some ways we get ourselves into trouble.

However, just like that sponge, the horse learns and retains more when the aids are released vs applying more pressure.

How do we refeed a starving horse? Carefully. You can literally kill then with kindness. Google refeeding syndrome. Giving a starving horse too much too fast can cause organ failure. So what did I do?

Life Lessons part 1

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Pain creates panic. Our horses are prey animals. As such they are masters at hiding pain. The weakest horse in the herd gets eaten. By the time your horse is expressing lameness or undesirable behavior due to pain, they have been in pain for a long period of time (unless it is a traumatic injury). If they are exhibiting changes in body use, gait and hoof morphology, the pain has been there and hiding for awhile. Having recently had surgery with uncontrollable pain, I can at

If you and your horse had a wreck, your horse is hurt too. It is easy for us to find our bumps, bruises and sore spots. We treat and baby those aches and pains. How many of us think about those same bumps, bruises, and sore spots in our horses after a wreck? We need to and they need the same attention we give ourselves. Your horse will compensate and hide discomfort because they are a prey animal, it’s what they do. But eventually you will notice they are stiff, unwilling

I absolutely love this posture correction solution. I bought mine a few weeks ago at the podiatry seminar. I use it at my desk every day. It has help with my back pain because it engages your core. The Anywhere Saddle Chair from Wendy Murdoch.

Having horses is expensive. Most of us try to save where we can. Investing in good equipment and proper care is important but expensive. I have a few musts for horses leaving my program. It’s to keep the owner and horse on the best track forward in their relationship. Some owners head the advice. Some don’t. The ones that don’t usually end up with far more problems.

Don’t train weakness. I don’t believe any of us intentionally do this but by not riding with intention we inadvertently do it. So what does unintentionally training weakness look like? Here are some phrases you may find yourself using when you unintentionally train weakness.