Relaxed & Forward Blog

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...
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Are We Over-training Our Horses?

My Grandfather Horse was so good with latches he could have broken out of Alcatraz and made it back to...
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Nube. More Dark Clouds and Questions With No Answers

The worst thing about remembering a horse in the past is that maybe there are options now that your horse...
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How To Buy a Horse

He was a bay gelding in his teens when we met. A Quarter Horse with a bit of a downhill...
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Edgar Rice Burro. All He is Saying is Give Peace A Chance.

Yet another horse trainer got tarred and feathered on social media this week. It happens all the time. People jumped...
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What It Means to Love a Horse

I'm talking to a new client who contacted me for help, asking them to tell me about their horse. They...
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Famous Cruelty, Ordinary Cruelty, and an Affirmative Solution

  Another story of cruelty hit the international press last week. Operation X documented horrors happening in a well-known Danish...
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Horses and Chimpanzees, Or Why Horses Aren’t Cuddlers

  When I first moved to my farm, I pretended to be Jane Goodall. My land was a high desert...
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Horses Measuring Intelligence in Humans

It's my fault for asking for blog topics. She writes, "Can you possibly do a blog post on why your...
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The Difference Between Peaceful Persistence and Nagging.

Today, I’d like to use you as a human demo horse. Please, play along with me. Let’s say you come...
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Calming Signals: What If Horses Are Meant to be a Mystery?

I'm not sure when I started sitting on horses, but I hadn't started school. You couldn't really call it riding....
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Nube: Ulcer Nostalgia and What I Didn’t Know

I get nostalgic for the days when I didn't know what I know now. I miss the bittersweet, marginally innocent...
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1,354th Friday Morning and Not Bucked Off

  No, I’m not dreaming of a career as a hand model. My hands have looked like an elderly mechanic’s...
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How to Measure the Heart of a Horse

Have you experienced this? Someone says something that is a throw-away comment, not meant to be anything, they toss it...
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What To Do When You’ve Tried Everything

"I tried everything," my client says. This isn't something that I hear once in a long while. It's a time-honored...
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Cleaning Out the Toolbox

If it weren't for manure frozen into the ice, we'd have no traction at all and it's only the eleventh...
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The Thing About Dimensionally Succinct Horses

I've written "The Thing About" essays on Mares, Geldings, and Donkeys to dispel untrue myths and sing their praises. These...
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Silent Night: The Truest Words Aren’t Words At All.

I was standing outside of a hotel at five in the morning waiting for my limo. Obviously, several things had...
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