Horse Topics

If horses are kept inside in a barn, they require regular daily exercise for their physical health and mental well-being. Some scholars believe the Spanish Conquistadors brought some vividly-marked horses with them when they first arrived in the early 1500s, others believe that the Russian fur-traders brought them at a later date. The Nez Perce obtained their original horses from the Shoshone people, and from there took advantage of the fact that they lived in notable horse-breeding country, relatively safe from the raids of other tribes, and developed strict breeding selection practices for their horses. The earliest evidence horses with a spotted coat pattern is from the cave paintings dating from the Upper Paleolithic era, circa 18,000 BC found at Lascaux and Peche-Merle in France. The Nez Perce tribe of the American Pacific Northwest developed the breed. The Nez Perce people were a relatively peaceful nation, a high amount of of whom engaged in agriculture as well as horse breeding.

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Choosing the right horse boarding stable will ensure your horse’s health, safety, and happiness. In order to find a stable that meets your horse’s specific needs, it is important to find out exactly what services they offer. Here is a list to help you to choose the right horse boarding stable for your horse.

1. Experience. Experienced owners will recognize a sick or injured horse, know what horses need to stay healthy, and will be able to spot possible dangers for horses and their owners.

2. Clean healthy stalls every day. A good stable with clean stalls daily and provide dust-free animal bedding and clean water.

3. Basic vet care, grooming, and exercise.

4. Pastures for roaming and grazing. Horses have an instinctual need to graze and forage and to help prevent stall-related health conditions.

5. Facilities. In addition to stalls, a good horse stable will have facilities such as horse runs, tack rooms, round pens, and arenas to ensure the best possible care for your horse.

Deer Canyon Stables and Handyman Services located near Austin, Texas, is a family-oriented horse stabling facility with 30 years of knowledge and experience in the field of working with horses. Deer Canyon Stables offers round-the-clock access, peaceful riding trails, and none of the traffic and headaches of boarding in the city. Horses are given the option of turnout to roam on 16 acres of beautiful land or hanging out in tree shaded paddocks. There are also miles of public riding just outside the property, located in the beautiful Hill Country of Central Texas. Services also include quarter horse stud services, trail riding, trainers, and overnight horse boarding.

For more information about horse boarding and horse stabling at Deer Canyon Stables and Handyman Services visit their website at http://www.deercanyonstables.com/ or call 512-636-2592.

Jayne Miller is a freelance writer and editor based in Austin, Texas. She writes for travel and outdoor recreation magazines and is on assignment with Deer Canyon Stables and Handyman Services. Visit their website at http://www.deercanyonstables.com/

If you want to make the most of your horse riding instruction and learn to ride horses really well in the shortest amount of time possible, here are a few secrets just for you:

Multiplying Your Practice Time
Learning to ride horseback, like anything else, is a skill that comes with practice. But horse riding instruction can be expensive and often your riding time is limited to one or twice a week, usually on weekends. So how can you practice enough to get really good when you are limited to an hour or two a week? After all, it is said that to become good at any skill you need to have put in about 500 hours of practice …and about 3000 hours to become a master! Well, by that rule, with a weekly horse riding instruction session of 1 hour, it would take you about 9 and a half years to get good! I don’t know about you but that seems an awfully long time. Fortunately there are some ways you can multiply the effects of your horse riding instruction that won’t cost you a fortune. And you’ll become a better horse rider in the process. …

If you’re like a lot of horse owners perhaps you’ve tried several horseshoers or perhaps there was only one choice in your area and you only use the local farrier. In either case the chances are pretty high the quality of work your farrier is delivering is inferior. The risk to your horse is high. The cost of lameness is also high. Nevertheless you somehow made your choice of Farrier. Hopefully you were lucky – or are you? Sometimes lameness as a result of inferior shoeing takes it’s time before striking.

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As a rather passionate and iconoclastic person, life has not been easy for me. Somehow, while there is an entire world of writers, philosophers, free thinkers, etc., out there, molding and shaking the world, I somehow have managed to travel in circles where people seem to think that discussing their food is genuine and topical conversation. I tried joining Mensa, only to find it filled with wannabees. I tried chat rooms, only to find them replete with lame non-sequiturs. So, most of my friends are writers I’ll never meet, but in whose intellectually inspiring thoughts I have found some solace. Pretty sad stuff, wouldn’t you say? Well, I’d like to think that my life has been given meaning again.

In the summer of 2005, I drove over to the Los Angeles Equestrian Center to inquire about riding lessons. I had ridden off and on as a kid and a teenager, my first riding taking place in 1963 when I was 5 years old. My parents had taken me on a vacation on Long Island, New York, and we rode horses every single day for four days, and, on the fourth day, we rode twice! Clearly I was mesmerized because as soon as I got the chance, I began taking riding lessons when I was 9, just after we had moved to Orange County, California. (It was 1967 and my parents bought a 3 bedroom house with a huge backyard for $25,000! Can you imagine?) Anyway, I started with a 2 week package of lessons and of course, I was bitten by the horsebug again. The stable was a quick bicycle ride from our house, so I just kept riding.

In my teens, I did a lot of jumping and some showing and, while in college, bought a horse who ultimately made the trek to Chicago, Illinois and back with me, as I attempted to settle into a career as an Art Director. By the age of 27, after one more attempt at riding and showing, I gave it up for good as I settled into a life of financial struggle.

Sure, I had some respites from the struggle with generous boyfriends paying the bill, but, the compromise was that we pursued “his” passions. Automotive sports, skiing (Which I loved!) and more automotive sports. Horses became part of my past. Every time I would see Grand Prix Jumping on ESPN, I would watch, swallow hard that something I loved so much was simply out of my grasp and switch channels.

Well, after signing off of boyfriends in my early 40’s and settling into attempting to build a marketing business, things finally turned around financially for me. At the age of 48, I finally found myself with a couple bucks in the bank, a business that was stressful beyond belief and a bout of boredom that I knew I couldn’t endure much longer. Hence, the trek to the Los Angeles Equestrian Center.

I was overwhelmed at the time at how much more expensive things were. Sure, it had been 20 years since I’d ridden, but, $75.00 per lesson! $1,700.00 for a new saddle! And, the kicker was when one of the trainers told me a decent showhorse now cost at least $70,000! No way, I thought. I didn’t scrape together a couple of nickels so I could again become impoverished. So, I went home and continued to be scalded alive by my tempestuous and relentless clients and bored to death by my predictable life.

In January of 2006, I decided that I had to get out of the house, no matter what. I marched back down to the Los Angeles Equestrian Center, left inquiries with every hunter/jumper barn down there. (Barn in this context refers to a trainer and their clients. The Los Angeles Equestrian Center is the home of roughly 10-15 trainers from a variety of disciplines.) About a week later, I got a call from two of the barns and began taking lessons again within the week.

It’s been 18 months since I started riding again, and, while the journey has been somewhat troubled, it has been more than worth it! I finally found a trainer I really like, purchased a fairly good horse at a reasonable price and the barn is 15 minutes from my house when the traffic is light. Bottom line, when I go to the barn, I usually have fairly meaningful conversations! Virtually everyone at this newest barn rides either hunter/jumpers or dressage. Hunters is when you jump over relatively low fences and try to create a pretty picture. Jumpers is when you jump over bigger fences, with jumping clear and fast as the main objective. Dressage involves no jumping but is somewhat like gymnastics or ballet with a horse. All these disciplines require tremendous commitment, courage and consistency to master. (Though true horse people know they can never truly master a discipline. You can only ever get close.)

So, the people who are drawn to riding, tend to be fairly introspective. And, given the cost of the sport, fairly well educated, yet friendly and kind. You can strike up a conversation with virtually any horse person, virtually anywhere and have a meaningful exchange. Also, when you are training with someone, you have, in essence, a working relationship with them. And, that is where I find most of the meaningful contact with others in my life. By working with them. By finding a common goal and focus.

Apparently, my return to riding as an aging baby boomer is not unique. Many girls who gave up riding in their 20’s have come to much the same conclusion that I have. That now that they’ve seen what having a family, a husband, a career really means in terms of personal satisfaction, that horses and the riding life give you something that you will just never find anywhere else. It’s anti-tech, anti-trendy, anti-fad and, with the right trainers, anti-B.S. It’s a life-style where you can again feel that life is full of hope and yet peppered with sufficient challenge to keep you on your toes. Where the rush from riding over a series of jumps, fairly well, is without compare. And, there’s nothing to replace the feeling when your horse sees you coming and starts whinnying and getting all bug eyed. Or, when he gallops across a pasture to get the apples you’ve brought him. That such a large creature can be so trusting and so loving and yet so potentially deadly is somehow more magical than ever, now. And, to be able to genuinely appreciate the gift that is horses and riding, given a lifetime’s experience as reference, makes it all the more precious.

Barbara Israel is a marketing professional who has been designing ads and writing advertising and PR copy for 30 years. She has worked on accounts ranging from Xerox, Church’s Chicken and Brach’s Candy to the Lucky Lady Casinos, JDS Uniphase and Allied Mortgage. She currently owns a marketing company and has just launched an equestrian search engine called http://www.Equilink.com Her horse’s “barn name,” is Cooper and he’s a 15 year old Thoroughbred babysitter who Barbara is relearning how to ride “Hunters,” on.

For centuries, horses have been one of the most popular domesticated animals. While today, people enjoy riding and racing them, in the past they were domesticated because they were the primary mode of transportation for many.

People from almost every corner of the globe have owned horses for one reason or another, and it is for this reason that there are now so many different breeds. However, all horses fall into one of three main categories: pony, light, and heavy classifications. If you are unfamiliar with horse breeds, this is a good starting place.

From this point, some people like to further classify horses into the subcategories such as draft horses, gaited horses, and warmbloods. So these are terms that you might hear when people talk of horse breeds. But for all intents and purposes, we will stick with the three main categories for this article.

Knowing about these different breeds might give you an idea of what kind of horse will be best for your situation – and will let you in on which horses are good for children, which are good for the whole family to ride, which ones are good for racing, and which ones will help out on the ranch.

Pony Breeds

The smallest of the popular pony breeds is the Shetland Pony, and for this reason, it is often the first horse given to children. While the Shetland is usually sweet and relaxed, this breed can, on occasion, get feisty. So no matter what breed of pony, children need to be supervised with horses of any kind.

The Connemara Pony, is larger than the Shetland, and for this reason, often makes a great pony for older children. Another good breed for this young adults and young teens is the Welsh Pony, which is just a little bit larger than the Connemara.

Light Breeds

People often mistake the Miniature Horse for a pony, but it is not classified as one because it does not have the same characteristics as those of the pony breed. This light breed horse is often a companion for children as well as a guide for the disabled.

One of the most loved horse breeds around falls into the category of Light Horses – the Arabian. These horses are not only attractive, but in general, are also known for being sweet, loving, graceful, and speedy. Everything about this horse seems to be perfect – from its kind nature to its speed and endurance while racing.

A descendent of the Arabian, the Thoroughbred, is another popular light breed. This horse is quite fast, so it makes for a great racing horse. Because of this, this breed of horse can be quite expensive. If you are looking for a horse for the family, though, this might not be the best choice since these can be too fast and dangerous for inexperienced riders.

If you are looking for a horse that could help out on a farm or a ranch rounding up cattle, or for a tough horse that can compete in races and competitions, then you may want a Quarter Horse. This is an American horse breed that got its name for being able to race at a good pace for a quarter of a mile. It is a pretty tough breed, but also good for taking on a leisurely ride.

A smaller horse that is also family-friendly as well as hard working is the Morgan Horse. A man named Justin Morgan, who was amazed by the strength and loving nature of his little horse, developed the Morgan breed. This breed has a strong body with a friendly disposition.

Other popular light horse breeds include the Paint, the Standardbred, the Appaloosa, the Saddlebred, the Tennessee Walking Horse, and the Paso Fino.

Heavy Breeds

There are two types of heavy horses: horses that were once used in battle and draft horses. The warhorses went through tough training to ready them for battle, while the draft horses were used to work on farms or to pull carts and wagons.

The Percheron is a smaller heavy horse, but still quite powerful. This horse breed is intelligent and has a friendly nature, so it is easier to train than others, and can be a good animal for the family or the farm. However, if color is important to you, you might note that it only comes in gray or black.

The most famous of the draft horses is probably the Clydesdale. This attractive horse has been bred to do hard work, but it also has a friendly nature, so it makes for a good horse to ride on, too.

Some other popular draft breeds include the Belgian, and then the rarer Shire and Suffolk Punch breeds.

Of the war horse breeds, the Lipizzaner is the probably most famous. This is most likely because these horses often travel around doing performances for Austrian events.

As you can see, there are many breeds to choose from, and hopefully this will give you some idea of what type you are looking for. The best thing to do, however, is to see how different horses interact with you individually when shopping for a horse for you and possibly for your family.

Katya Coen is a regular contributor to All Horses, where you can find a wealth of information on everything pertaining to horses and you can even browse our gallery of horse pictures.