A Little of This, A Little of That...

I have soooo much I want to say and just don’t know how I’m going to fit it all in this post, but I’ll sure give it a try! Okie-dokie, here we go…

First off, I would like to encourage anyone to sign up for Jane Savoie’s emails. She is an Olympic caliber rider (also Pan-American Games and an ‘A’ show judge) and is willing to impart her info to the regular guy like you and me. She has a lot of vids up on youtube where she actually shows you what she’s talking about. Such as a Half-Halt is in her words, a Half-Go, which makes more sense to me! She once sent me an email to check that I was understanding what she was saying! Just a regular girl who is on the top rung of GREAT horsemanship! Also, the picture of her Dressage ride in front of an ancient castle somewhere in Europe (I don’t remember where…*blush*) is just beautiful and lovely. http://www.janesavoie.com/

As for sticking (measuring) a horse. You stick a horse from the flat-footed ground to the top most part of the withers. Try to have a good trim or freshly shod so you’re not adding on extra height. In some cases, you don’t want ANY extra height…such as if you’re measuring for Large Pony classes. A 1/4th of an inch can make the difference between a small horse (not so much $$) or a large pony and we’re talking mega bucks here. A Large Pony that is athletic is in great demand for kids in shows. So, I have seen people almost cripple a small horse trying to get the extra height off, which is sort of sick-minded in my book.

But if you’re only trying to get the general height of any horse, just measure from the withers to the ground. When you say you ‘sticked’ a horse, that means you used the wooden expanding stick that is marked for you. There are numerous tapes out there that can also guestimate the weight on the opposite side. That is plain old measuring and not nearly as accurate but you can get pretty damn close. You can stand on the end with your foot and pull the tape up the side to the withers but I never can get the starting spot near my toe exactly right so I add/subtract half an inch or whatever it is to get the height. Plus I end up kind of bending around the horse’s barrel and that adds a bit of height also so I think the stick is best.

A horse is measured in ‘hands’. A hand is 4 inches. Make your hand flat and measure across from thumb to little finger and you can guestimate the height again. So you have 14h, 14.1, 14.2, 14.3 and then it goes to 15h. There is no such thing as 14.5. I know people say that the .5 means half a hand but how do you measure then the extra inch that should be 14.3?? Can’t do it. When I hear someone say 14.5, I know right off the bat they are either a newbie to horses and/or just haven’t bothered to learn the correct way and then I wonder about what else they have wrong. There is an online horse measurement thingy that you type in the inches you’ve measured, it will tell you in hands how tall your horse is and it doesn’t use the .5 thing either. Please google and learn the right way and don’t perpetuate the wrong info! “Hands” goes clear back over 3,000 years ago to the ancient Egyptians. Isn’t that cool??
http://www.cowboyway.com/HowTo/HorseHeight.htm and http://www.ultimatehorsesite.com/info/horsehandsconverter.html I can't find the converter where you type in the inches and then it tells you but you get the idea. :-)

I was asked about Natural Horsemanship. I don’t have enough time right now to go into it in great detail like I would but I’ll say, that by and large, I’m not a fan. I’ve tried some of the NH stuff going on out there (wanted to test it and maybe learn something new) and didn’t like how my horse turned out so I went back to basics and time-honored and tested training and did much better. If it works for you, then I say go for it and do it the best you can but it’s not for me.

Maybe I should explain what I see as NH and a little of why I’m not impressed. To me, there are no shortcuts to making a horse. There isn’t any reason to spend, what, $300 for some silly bridle that one of the big name NH ‘trainers’ is selling when all you have to do is learn to RIDE (instead of passenger) and use either a bosal, ring snaffle or gentle curb and you’ll be good to go on ANY horse that comes down the pike. My broke horses are such that they ride with whatever my hand falls on when I go into the tack room because I RIDE my horses and don’t expect miracles from a bridle.

I’ve watched/audited some NH clinics and it was a clusterf--- to me. Horses running over the handlers, people with no control while in the saddle and trying to excuse their horses behavior to anyone who would listen that the horse was ‘irritated’ or ‘upset’ or the wind blew out of the west. I know of one case where someone tried to get a horse’s attention and checked the lead and someone else came rushing up and told them that they didn’t need to jerk the horse around. Well, yeah, the horse needed a good sized check and all was well as opposed to running over someone who thought that checking was bad. Just like kids, you have brats and you have kids who mind and pay attention with a little reminder.

I will say that I believe in Logical Consequences Horsemanship. Horse kicks or strikes at me is going to have a real Come-to-Jesus moment and won't EVER want to do that again no matter how great the temptation. But I'll get into that in a later post. Life just keeps intruding, know what I mean??

At any rate, I’ll go into that later because what I’m going to say next is kind of big and pretty funny too.

I spoke with someone today and told them about getting flagged/deleted every time and this person told me that she knew of someone who actually sits in her Barcalounger and does nothing but stares at the computer all day. This person is one of the serial flagger/deleters! This person supposedly has a puppy mill and a sense of lording it over the rest of us so there’s the problem. The person I was talking to said this persons middle name is ‘Evil’. Well, I’d believe it, might be a little strong but still... Can you imagine sitting around all day just watching and monitoring the net to keep people in line?? Doesn’t that remind you of the Hall Monitor from grade school?? So, from now on, like my last post, these are the ‘grow a pair’ people, just so you know from here on in.

Until next time…