The Art of Un-Training a Horse
The first video is of a Mustang, proud and breathtakingly beautiful. He's a burnished smoky buckskin, with a...
Wild or Tame: Trust Actions Above Words
This is my neighborhood. That's Pikes Peak peering over the horizon, exactly where it was when I bought the farm....
Deconstructing Horse Aggression
When I got home after school, I walked in the front door, dropped my books, and walked out the back...
Affirmative Anxiety
For as often as we've watched horses run and thought them the most beautiful of all creatures, we should know...
How Long Does It Take To Train a Horse?
I have a herd of relatively normal retired horses. And then this gang of raconteurs, misanthropes, and dangerous characters, referred...
Human Failings, Horses, And Judgment
A four-year-old video surfaced this week and a dressage rider deeply apologized for the overuse of a whip. She will...
Calming Signals: Love vs Understanding
The mare would not pick up the canter. She just wouldn’t. In her defense, the rider was off balance. Every...
Travelblog: Mister Has a Dark Night of the Soul.
Dogs. We rescue them, buy them, inherit them. They are irrepressible puppies, midlife couch-partners or milky-eyed elders with wonky ears....
Calming Signals: Another Word for Dominant
There is a wild stallion on the ridge fighting all comers for his harem of mares. We think aggression and...
Travelblog: Thinking About Aging in Ancient Surroundings
I was in Newcastle Upon Tyne. I had finished ripping around Scotland and arrived at my hotel, where a group...
Stay in Your Own Lane
I don't mind getting stuck in traffic. It practically makes me un-American to say so. I don't love it but...
Nube: Undiagnosable
I hope I'm not going to end up writing some kind of justification for harsh training. Usually, it's easier than...
Allowing Horses the Time to be Curious
I saw a video this week that I can't get out of my head. It lacked the drama of the...
Nube: What If This Isn’t Wrong?
My first ex-husband used to tease me about my frantic love of shortcuts. I was always up early, on the...
The Joy of Imperfection
We are sick to death of the violence against horses. It isn't just the damage caused by rollkur in reining...
Nube’s Ulcers: What We Can’t Control and What We Can.
When Nube (nu-bay) was two and first diagnosed with ulcers, it felt rare, almost exotic. People were just learning about...
Culture Wars in the Barn
There is a recent article in the NYT about the culture wars going on in dog training that's worth reading....
Horse Training Means Affirmative Waiting
Humans, aren't we swell? Compared to horses, we have dim, frail senses, we're seven times slower in our response time,...
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