If you are lucky, sitting with a sick horse is something that you will never have to do. Or perhaps you are the type that turns away from sorrow/potential sadness and pays someone else to do this. Or your life just isn’t adaptable because you have to work to keep said horse. But while I truly hope it is something you never have to experience, it is none the less, something I find myself doing on a regular basis here in the equine rescue/sanctuary world. Sometimes when you get to stan...

“I’m scared” I hear these words so often at my barn that I have developed a stable of answers, depending on the situation. But the one I go to the most is : “You can be scared”.   I am usually saying this to someone who is standing on the mounting block about to swing a leg over a horse, often for the first time. We get lots of kids, some with a problem or 2, lots of Girl Scouts, and just generally many beginners, young and old. I can unde...

Back when I was still shoeing horses as my main source of income, I would sometimes be offered, or come across a horse that wasn’t working out for an owner/stable. Before I started my current barn I would either try to place the horse with someone I knew that was looking or train it myself. One of these that I came across I thought I’d ‘flip’. I’d been working with other people’s horses that had issues, riding and training them, but hadn’t yet taken on a...