Blue Heron Equestrian

03/22/2024

Happy 4th Birthday, Not Just Flashy aka Cory!! Born early Sunday morning March 22, 2020 on the first day of the coronavirus lockdown, this c**t was premature, had the longest, most wobbly legs ever (which meant he couldn't get up on his own) and a full-size horse worth of personality!

After a week of feedings every 2 hours round the clock at the farm, our team (mostly Neil as I couldn't lift 45 kgs of gangly foal onto his long wobbly legs) was exhausted and we decided Cory had to go to OVC to get real, round-the-clock help until he either had to be pts or he could get up on his own. We were on the verge of deciding to euthanize, but at his 7am feed on that second Sunday morning, he went from lying down as if already dead, to bright-eyed and determined to live, drinking a full bottle and getting up (with help) and nursing too. Almost two weeks at the clinic in Guelph, and he was finally strong enough for the journey home. Then the personality kicked in, in full measure! I rode home with him in the trailer to make sure he stayed standing and the little spitfire was tearing around the box stall trying to warn me off with his back side and kicking as high as he could!

Over his first year of life, he ended up having 3 sets of surgery: two pins in his left fetlocks at 3 months old for ALD (Angular Limb Deformity), then check ligament surgery on both fronts as his tendons had started contracting at about 4 months old and then finally a pin in his right hock to correct the ALD there at about 6 months. This kid was a mess! Maybe only a pasture puff after all these problems, and most unlikely to make it to the races, per the vets. But always a spark of mischief and life that made you laugh. And who wouldn't notice all the chrome! Big white blaze and four white socks on a blood bay horse. After all those surgeries, he was allowed out with a herd of horses to play and grow which he definitely did. From a 16hh mare and sire, this boy has grown to a handsome 16.3hh pony!

As a racehorse, he's had a slow start, but now we are here cheering on his 4th birthday and he's out there putting his heart on the track. After a suspensory tear in his 3rd year and taking a good long break for that to heal, he is now beginning to enjoy some success at the track. A 5th, a 4th, two 3rds and a second since February with time off for a few weeks in the middle, we are looking forward to him doing well in the future. Too bad he won't be celebrating his birthday with a race this Sunday (12 entries and only 9 spots available and his name didn't get drawn) but we will be celebrating with him anyway, celebrating his great will to live and to be competitive.

Love you to the moon and back, Cory! Happy Birthday!

12/31/2023

Happy New Year, everyone!

I'd like to set fire to the last few months of 2023 and ring in a new year full of good times and cheer! This was actually a photo of a good time spent with our wonderful group of boarders for whom we are most thankful. Horse barn therapy! It's good for us all.

10/26/2023

Corn harvest is coming any day now! Our first year of putting our hand on the land.

09/12/2023

A place for Monarchs! They are loving the autumn flowers.

07/01/2023

Happy Canada Day!

04/27/2023

Full board spots available in Troy/Rockton. Convenient to Cambridge, Brantford, Ancaster and Waterdown.

Daily herd turnout in grass paddocks.
2 grain feeds/day.
Hay inside and out over winter.
$715/mth

03/02/2023

Not Just Flashy had his debut last week! For a horse that should have been left to the wolves, he's doing pretty well. He stayed flat and beat his previous best time by 2 seconds. On top of which, his big white blaze sure does stand out on the track. You can't miss him! His driver was P. MacKenzie. Next Friday March 3 at Western Fair in Race 6 at 7:45pm EST. Look out!

02/22/2023

Not Just Flashy goes to the races for the first time this Friday at Western Fair Raceway. 3rd race, number 2 position. He'll be learning all about the gate behind a real gate! Let's hope he gets it figured out. GO CORY GO!!

02/18/2023

Exciting day tomorrow! Cory (aka Not Just Flashy) goes to qualify at Flamboro. We shall see how our crooked little man does! Not so little anymore at 16.2hh but we still think of him that way. He's now a big goof, rather than a little goof! Always looking for attention and affection. Maybe he'll realize if he wins he gets lots of extra of both!

01/31/2023

Working on improving conformation using the Balance Through Movement Method. This is our start posture. In 30 days we'll take another look and see if any improvement has shown itself! This mare has poor conformation from the get go so muscle improvement can only get us so far but hopefully far enough for her to move with comfort.

01/11/2023

DIY stalls available for short term or long term rental. If you live in Flamboro or close to it, you can control everything around your horse. Or you can get a helping hand with other DIY-boarders at the barn making more of a co-op. Come use our arena to get ready for show season and stay a few months or come to stay for all the facilities.

12/29/2022

Winter months barn rental available, January to April. Get ready for the show season with access to indoor arena. Rent the whole barn of 7 stalls for $1350/mth or individual stalls for $226/mth. Use of 3 paddocks goes with the barn. Barn is warm and cozy, has hot and cold water, wash stall, feed area, office.

12/15/2022

International Day of the Horse! All types and sizes in my life! Great to get to be part of so many aspects of the Horse World! Harness racing, cutting, hunting, jumping, dressage, trail and ranch riding. All here in one Horse community!

12/10/2022

A handsome young lad getting ready to train. Slow and careful wins the race.

12/10/2022

If this boy actually holds his own in a race, he will be a miracle of veterinary medicine and tender loving care. ❤️ At 2:11 yesterday he's very close to qualifying. We will let everyone know of his first race!

08/18/2022

The horse wins by a ????!!!

07/27/2022

My mare taught me the truth of Ross Jacob's observation!

DON’T MAKE WORK SOMETHING TO DREAD



I have horses because I like them. I ride and teach because I like horses. I trained horses for people for many years because I like horses. I see them either as friends or as friends-to-be that need help.

It’s because I like horses that I care as much about the emotional welfare of my horses as I do about the way they work. I don’t want work to feel like a chore to them. I don’t want my horses to feel work is a grind and something to dread. I spend a lot of time trying to figure out how I can make the challenges of riding and training something that we can willingly do together with a minimum of stress and zero drudgery. To me, that’s as important as any of the cool stuff I might be able to teach them to do.

That is why training that deliberately sets out to make work seem like a burden to a horse, confuses me. I am not kidding. There is a lot of mainstream training that is purposefully designed to make a horse hate work. It is derived from the old adage of “make the right thing easy and the wrong thing difficult.” I first heard this at a Ray Hunt clinic very many years ago, but since then it has been incorporated (I believe in a corrupted form) into the teaching of a lot of trainers – both popular and unknown. I can think of a handful of trainers who largely base their entire approach to horse training and teaching along those lines.

The first time I was aware of this was at a clinic in the 1980s where the trainer was helping an owner load a horse into a trailer. The horse refused to take more than a couple of steps onto the ramp, so the trainer backed the horse out and lunged it in circles at high speed just outside the trailer. The horse whirled around and around for a few minutes and then was invited to load into the trailer again. The horse walked about halfway in and stopped, so the trainer backed it out again and began sending it around like a satellite orbiting at the speed of light. After four tries at loading the horse, it finally stepped all the way into the trailer. Everyone was impressed at the mission accomplished.

In another example about 6 years ago, a visiting clinician was assisting a fellow whose horse had bonded to another horse in the group. In order to help overcome the separation issue this created, the trainer had the rider allow his horse to wander of its own free will towards its buddy. Then on cue from the trainer, the fellow picked up the reins and applied leg to put the horse to work in close proximity to its friend. He worked his horse hard for several minutes until the trainer told him to point his horse to the opposite end of the arena to see if the horse would willingly walk away from the second horse. The horse went a few steps and then drifted back towards its friend. The owner was instructed to make the horse work hard around the other horse once more. After about six or so repetitions of this exercise, the horse would finally walk to the end of the arena without looking back for its friend.

Then, of course, there is the all too common liberty round pen work where a horse that won’t be caught or hooked on to a handler (or join-up) is chased around the yard until it decides being with the person in the middle is less stressful than being run around the perimeter at speed.

There are many more examples I can quote, but they all have one important thing in common. Their effectiveness in changing a behaviour relies on using work as a punishment for the responses we don’t want.

I am not saying that such a strategy is not effective in changing an unwanted to a wanted behaviour. It clearly works when it is done well. However, I believe there is a price to pay when we use work as a punishment.

I never want my horse to hate its job. When we want a horse to see work as something we do together and it feels okay, how can a horse distinguish when it is meant as a punishment and when it is meant to feel like two mates sharing a satisfying experience? How is a horse expected to feel comfortable about being lunged for balance and focus and also feel uncomfortable about being lunged for not loading into a trailer? How is a horse expected to feel okay about being directed around a round yard to build focus and relaxation and then feel bad about it when it doesn’t want to hook on? How is a horse that is looking for safety in another horse expected to feel good about us and work with us when we use work to trouble a horse?

I believe there is a lot of merit in the philosophy of making the right thing easy and the wrong thing difficult. But the concept is applied too often too broadly and without an appreciation of the negative consequences of using work as a discouragement of behaviour. The risk of this approach getting in the way of a good relationship with a horse and a horse’s willingness to work is too high a price for me. There are alternative strategies that can be applied that don’t have the same negative consequences. These can be tried and experimented with if only people would not be so lazy and think a little more about the health of their relationship with their horse and less about creating obedience.

Photo: Trying to make the wrong thing something to dread by making the horse work hard for not going into the trailer.

03/10/2022

11/18/2021

We take our human ability to extrapolate from one set of circumstances to another and assume a horse can too. Not always so!! As with all things horses: it depends!!

Memories are funny things and the way our brain recalls a memory is even funnier.

I have travelled a lot in my life and after one particular trip to Europe, my friend and I were re-telling tales of our trip to some friends. I talked about the streets of Helsinki and the airport chaos in Zurich and the ancient monuments in Rome. Meanwhile, my friend talked about the coffee in Rome, the restaurant we ate in Helsinki, and the cheesecake we had in Zurich airport. We were both there at the same places at the same time, but our memories of our trip were a little different. Our brains processed our memories to highlight the aspects that were most important to each of us.

I have wondered if horses do that too.

I think I am teaching my horses focus, clarity and softness when I enter the paddock or the arena. But since I always wear a Fedora hat, what if I am teaching them focus, clarity, and softness only when somebody with a Fedora hat enters their life? It is an easy experiment to test this theory. However, I can only test these things if I am aware they exist. But what if I don’t know there are differences between what I think I am teaching my horse and what my horse thinks I am teaching it?

I was helping a student with a horse that had a poor response to a rider’s leg. Forwardness seemed a foreign concept to it. Yet, when the rider picked up a riding crop there was an instant change in the forward response to the rider’s leg. The student didn’t even have to apply the crop to their horse, just carry it. In the student’s mind, they had been teaching their horse to think forward when they applied their leg. But in their horse’s mind, it was learning to think forward when the crop was carried. The rider and the horse had very different memories and interpretations of the same lesson. The rider thought it was obvious, but the horse never linked the association of the ‘rider’s leg -> forward’ and was stuck at ‘crop -> forward’.

I might teach my horse to line up to the stump so that I can mount with ease. Pretty soon my horse lines up at the stump when it sees me step on it. What if I am not teaching my horse to line up to a mounting block because in its mind it has learned to only line up to that particular stump or only to any stump but not a fence or step ladder. Horses are visual learners, so familiarity with a stump comes easier than feeling that same level of comfort with all objects I use to mount my horse. They struggle to extrapolate mounting from a stump as being the same as mounting from a fence or a gate or a step ladder or a trailer fender.

Many times at clinics I have come across horses that load into a trailer with very little trouble. The owner thinks they have taught their horse to trailer load. Then one day they buy a new trailer or they try to load with an extra horse or they want to load in a different bay of the trailer. Suddenly their perfect trailer-loading horse is not so perfect. The owner sees loading in a different trailer or in different bays or with a different travelling companion as no different and no more challenging than the trouble-free experience it has always been. But in the horse’s mind, they are being asked to load in a trailer that doesn’t look or smell or feel like it has always been. The owner thinks they trained their horse to trailer load - end of story. But in the horse’s mind, it has been trained to load only in a trailer where everything is perfectly familiar - nothing out of place. It doesn’t have confidence in being asked to trailer load per se. It only has confidence in trailer loading when everything about the trailer is comfortably familiar.

It’s easy to kid ourselves that when we ask a horse a question and we reward for the answer we want, that we are teaching the lesson we want our horse to learn. That’s because we know the end game. We know why we asked the question. Horses don’t have that advantage. They don’t know the ultimate goal. They live in the moment and have to deal with everything that happens in the moment. It’s important we learn to see our training as the horse sees it and realize there is more to Rome than great coffee.

The way to minimise the risk of thinking we are teaching a horse one thing when they are actually learning something else is to not focus on teaching tasks or jobs. Instead teach your horse to focus, connect with you, and follow your feel. If you can do that you avoid the pitfalls of your horse just learning a job. Instead they learn to work with you and trust your ideas with every step. If you only teach a horse to do jobs you are only teaching tricks and they will fail you when the circumstances change.

Photo: Louise and Pom from a clinic last weekend. Pom had trouble lunging while still checking in with Louise, so she walked up to Pom to touch him during the work, which brought his mind back to her.

10/02/2021

A week or so shy of 6 mths old and Annie constantly reminds us of how much of a miniature of her Mom she is.

09/04/2021

Good stuff.

Asking your horse to push his hip over requires him to engage his hind end and core completely. When done correctly, this maneuver can drastically change the way he moves and collects himself.

07/21/2021

Oh how sad but true! Except the last time when I tricked her Into loading by loading her BFF at the same time!!! That was the only time we had zero stress loading!! And 2x on the same day as she had to come back. I've had to leave her overnight at sites because she wouldn't reload.

06/17/2021

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When I first began training horses I was hungry for ways to train more effectively, easily, and safely. Although I'm still on my quest to find better ways of training, there are some things that would have been nice to know when I was a rookie.

I wrote a Letter To My Rookie Self for an educational website called Horse Rookie, where I was to write all the things I wish I had known when I was first beginning my horse training journey. Here's what I wish my rookie self would have known:

1) Everything Your Horse Does Is Communication

Even though you might not realize it, your horse is always giving you information. If you want to be successful you have to be aware of your horse’s mental and physical state at all times, not just when you are training. Most problems that you’ve encountered so far only occur because you’re asking the right question, but at the wrong time. Being able to properly identify what your horse is ready for allows you to ask for things that give you the highest chance of success. If a horse isn’t ready for something, you can fall back on something less challenging that you’re sure they can do. Asking things of your horse at the wrong time erodes your horse’s trust and confidence in you to make educated decisions. The difficult horse’s you’ve trained are only difficult because they’re confused about your ability to read situations.

Also, try to stay away from labelling a horse’s behaviour as being good or bad, but instead think of it as the horse telling you how they feel about what’s going on. Remove the judgement, anger, frustration, disappointment from the situation. It’s okay if your horse isn’t ready for the next thing, you have to be able to meet your horse wherever they are at the time.

2) Learn to Meditate

I know it sounds hokey, but this will be one of the most important things you’ll ever do. Meditation doesn’t always involve sitting cross-legged in a monastery, there are many ways you can practice aligning your mind and body. Small breathing exercises are simple ways you can reduce stress and anxiety.

If we’re not fully present and aware with our equine partners we’re not able to read and respond immediately to their body language, making it difficult to create effective communication.

3) Self Care Is Important

There will be trainers who tell you they work 7 days a week, and they may try to shame you into doing the same. Their constant activity is just a way for them to cover up some trauma that they have endured, and their ‘devotion’ is potentially an unhealthy balance between work and time spent with family and friends.

It’s important to listen to yourself and take the time needed to prevent burn-out and fatigue. Find things that inspire and energize you, and make them a part of your daily routine. In order to show up for our horses, we have to show up for ourselves.

4) Emotions Are Worth Dealing With

You have a tendency to avoid difficult situations. When you’re unable to fully process stress it becomes stored in your body. This happens because often it isn’t socially acceptable/normal to deal with our emotions openly and honestly with ourselves and others.

Do not judge this automatic freeze (shut down) response too harshly, it has been your only option and your best friend when you were unable to use fight or flight. Work on facing your fears. Start small, the smaller the better, and work on this a lot. Start to get comfortable with being uncomfortable, and be courageous with your emotions. Challenge norms you have been surrounded with when it feels right.

5) Winning Stuff Is Really Not that Important

I know you think it is, but for most people it’s about making themselves feel like they are enough. We’ve all seen the movie stars and successful businessmen who are unhappy. Even if you do not ever win anything, you ARE enough. The most important things in life are deep connections with ourselves, our animals, and the people we care about. Celebrate each and every success that brings you closer to where you want to be, but don’t beat yourself up for not being there quite yet.

6) Everyone Is Dealing with Something, So Be Kind

Everyone’s reactions are based on their previous life experiences, and many of them may have some trauma attached to them. Don’t take people's outbursts personally. Empathy spreads like wildfire when given the chance. When someone acts out negatively, see where you can help them. This is another opportunity to be courageous. Even if you’re unable to help, you can always look back on the situation and know that you made an effort. You also never know how impactful your kindness can be until you begin to use it often.

7) Don’t Be Afraid to Ask Questions of "The Big Guys"

I know they intimidate the hell out of you, but they are all very open to helping. Just admit what you don’t know, they will not judge you harshly. The more people you ask, the more coherent and concise of an answer you will be able to form for yourself. Everyone has their own best practices, oftentimes many simple exercises can make more technical movements easy.

8) Own Your Mistakes

This will be part of facing your fears. Be honest about mistakes you have made. People appreciate honesty more than they judge the mistake. Mistakes and missed opportunities are a part of horse training, being able to forgive yourself easily allows for you to focus your efforts on the things that are going right rather than the things that went wrong.



Thanks for sticking through and reading this. I think it's important to reflect on where you are and where you have been. Celebrate your successes and your accomplishments, no matter how small. And always look back on your rookie self with a smile.

Journey On!

Warwick

04/02/2021

So cool.

A herd of elephants marched 12 hours to the house of Lawrence Anthony after he died – the man who saved them. They stayed there silent for two days.

Exactly one year after his death, to the day, the herd marched to his house again. It is something that science cannot explain.