The Home Barn and Separation Anxiety
May I brag? I have that strange career where I travel a lot, see beautiful country as a routine part...
Nube: What Retirement Means
And so, Nube [pronounced new-bay] retired in limbo. Undiagnosable. Sometimes, the solution for a long-running struggle is to just stop...
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...
How Affirmative Training Was Born.
I am not a bliss-ninny. Loitering in denial doesn't work for me. I'm a blunt truth-teller who doesn't enjoy being...
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...
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...
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...
Trainer Love: In Memory of Seri
Seri died this week. She was never my horse, but she is part of the trainer I've become. Seri was...
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....
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...
Euthanizing Your Horse: How to Trust Yourself
It's colder now. The leaves are gone. The wind charges at us from the north, and the temperature drops ten...
Book Launch: Say Hello to ‘Undomesticated Women’ by Anna Blake
It's before dawn on a Friday morning and I'm in an RV park in Amarillo, Texas. I've been mud-wrestling...
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...
Nube: How a Horse Taught Me a Canter Cue
The short version is that my horse poked me in my sit bone, which isn’t possible, is it? But let’s...
Balancing Energy with a Horse
Is your horse lazy? Lazy is a name we call horses when we want to denigrate them by comparing them...
The Difference Between Training and Retraining a Horse
Lesson #1. Learning to Lead Horse Training is the process of collecting good experiences. Let it...
Focus is Active Listening. Horses Do It Naturally.
I had a friend who used to write me little vignettes about the antics of her and her horse at...
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