Category Archives: Horse life

Fifteen years ago, the American Quarter Horse Association registered the transfer of ownership of one five-year-old chestnut mare, Miss Olena Chic, from Gregg Shrake to me. I was preparing to start my second year of teaching, and my spouse had suggested that maybe it was time for me to become a horse owner again, instead of continuing to be a lesson rider and dealing with the frustrations of juggling special education teaching with the riding lessons that kept me sane. I’d been riding with Gregg for eight years by this point, and had learned just how one goes about finding a good horse that had a decent temperament and wasn’t a dangerous and poorly trained puke–i.e., enlist a trainer you trust. I showed Gregg several local prospects I’d found on Dreamhorse. Gregg waved them away.

“How about Mocha?” he suggested.

I boggled. I’d known Mocha from a baby. In utero, no less. She was the daughter of Gregg’s prized reining mare, Annie (Miss Lorena Wood) and a young stallion, Chocolate Chic Olena, who had been in training with Darren Stancik, a friend of Gregg’s. Mocha was intended to be Gregg’s personal horse, but he’d been having some health issues. I knew she was for sale. I’d handled her, brought her in from turnout, and even said to her at one point once I knew she was for sale about a year earlier, “I wonder whose horse you’re supposed to be?”

“Um, well…how much?” I asked. Honestly, I expected the price tag to be out of my budget.

Gregg named a figure within my budget. “Want to try her tomorrow?”

“Sure.”

That night I hit the internet, pricing out five-year-old daughters of Chocolate Chic Olena. First of all, I found there weren’t many for sale. Second, I saw a lot higher price tags. But they were in Texas, and a couple were in foal. All the same, this was an opportunity for me to buy a nicely bred mare with a decent temperament.

The trial ride the next day confirmed the deal. I knew Mocha’s half-siblings, by Jac Daniels Neat. I’d lusted after Mocha’s older sister, a dun named Miss Neat Amerika (Erika, after a granddaughter). I’d ridden Mocha’s brother, Tyler. He and I didn’t click because he was the sort of gelding who occasionally needed a clue-by-four applied. Pushy and opinionated, and occasionally bucked. After the Sparkle mare of my youth, I didn’t worry about the possibility of being able to sit any buck, and Tyler’s bucking was nothing like Sparkle’s. But. There had been a day when I watched Tyler in turnout. He’d just come back from reining training. On his own, he went out about 30 feet from the barn wall, ran as hard as he could toward it, then stopped hard. Paused, then jogged back to his starting place and did it all over again. I think I watched him do this for about five minutes.

(What Tyler was doing was copying a reining training technique known as “fencing,” where the trainer uses a fence as visual reinforcement of the whoa cue to get a good, hard stop. He clearly enjoyed it. Over the years, I’ve seen Mocha do the same thing, although her preference is to run hard at the fence, stop hard, then roll back over her haunches and gallop off. When she was turned out to run in Gregg’s arena, she’d gallop around to get up a head of steam, then run on the diagonal as hard as she could to a corner, stop at the last minute, then roll back, sending dirt flying. Tyler loved the hard stop. Mocha loves the rollback.)

But when I got up on Mocha, I could tell the difference between her and Tyler. The first time I breathed a soft “whoa” and Mocha stopped, I was sold. I felt the difference between her stop and Tyler’s stop. Not that I had any money to go show a horse like Mocha, but the ability to own and ride a horse like her? It was everything I’d dreamed about in the eight years that I’d been a lesson rider both at Shrake’s and at Lake Oswego Hunt.

And so the saga began. Mocha was opinionated, like her mother and siblings. Training had its interesting moments. Not because she was mean, or a bucker. But Mocha had firm opinions about what patterns should be. She needed schooling under saddle to soften up a rough trot and canter. She needed to learn flying changes. She had the foundation to be a reiner, but needed more training.

Gregg and I spent the next few years putting that foundation on her. I didn’t have the time or money to show, much less travel to where I could find a reining competition in that era. Nonetheless, in lessons I learned how to make a reiner.

Eventually we showed in a few reining classes.

By the time of this picture, I’d learned not to wear my Western hat in reining competition. The first time we took off in a large fast circle, even though the tan felt was jammed down hard on my head, the brim was flapping as Mocha galloped harder than she ever had in her home arena. I flicked it off as we passed the gate, for ease in picking it up later. Gregg told me that when I did that, he knew I was going for it. We didn’t do all that well due to pilot error–I had problems remembering just how many spins we had done. But there was no question in my mind that Mocha liked those reining classes…along with trail classes as well.

We did show in other classes, but I learned quickly that unless it was a trail class, we were unlikely to place high. Oh, it happened, but it was not common. Classes on the rail favor a slower-moving horse. That’s not Mocha. But she enjoyed the puzzles that trail class presented, and her mental discipline meant that she could easily make the quick transitions of gaits that are part of an arena trail class. We got good enough at it that we ended up finishing second to a professional in a complicated timed trail class, and beat pros. All the same, Mocha was a real pleasure to show. At her first show (a huge one at Mt. Hood Equestrian Center), I parked her where she could watch the other horses. She found it interesting. I worked at making shows feel like fun to her, and she took to the show life–not that we did a lot of showing.

But things happen. One cold January day I showed up at the barn after work to find Mocha lame in her left fore and right hind. Gregg had to take her by the tail to help me guide her out of her stall. She was going to turn fourteen in March, and hubby and I were in the process of buying a retirement home in Wallowa County. I planned to take Mocha there. But what I saw that night left me in tears. I’d had her left unshod for four years. When I picked up her left fore, I saw a huge hole between the sole and the hoof wall.

White line disease. Never did figure out what was wrong with that right hind. She’d already been getting hock injections to ease the pain of joint fusion. But that damned white line disease. Kenny, her farrier at the time, was grim.

“This killed her mother,” he said flatly, before resecting her hoof, putting on a bar shoe, and issuing strict instructions to me about her care. Mocha was stallbound. She was not to leave that stall unless she was attached to a human. She could be ridden at a walk, bareback. No saddle. No excess weight.

That regime went on for six months. And after that, it was like playing whack-a-mole with that damned white line disease. I’d think we’d have it beat, then bam! Back it came again.

And then we moved her to Wallowa County and a drastic life change. From life in the barn she’d been in since birth, she went to living outdoors in a pen. Not just around other horses, including a breeding stallion, but PIGS. That first summer was rough and hard. Mocha lost weight to a scary degree. She was clearly in pain of some sort. She colicked. She developed monster abscesses in both forefeet–which led to x-rays, and the discovery that shoeing her according to her exterior angles (which is common) was not correct for her. She’d lost the tip of the coffin bone in both forefeet, and in her current shoeing angles, that tip was pointed straight down at the ground.

Fortunately, we had access to a good corrective farrier. It took a year, but the angle issue got fixed and in the drier climate of Wallowa County, the white line disease went away. All the same, to keep her sound and pain-free, she has to live in front shoes year-round.

But things got better. Mocha learned to be a road horse and a trail horse–both of which she enjoys. As she regained weight, I realized that she had indeed been underweight for some time, most likely due to the pain. She took to the life of a 24/7 pasture horse, objecting to being stalled (one time when the ranch owner called to suggest we stall her because she was slipping and sliding on the ice, she had other ideas. At Gregg’s, she’d stay politely in her stall even with the door open. Not so at the ranch. While hubby got hay, I got her grain. We left the gate unlatched. She pushed it open and was on her way back to the field. Did I say she had opinions? Oh yeah, she has Opinions).

Now she is twenty years old. She’s in good weight. She still has her quirks–one winter she adopted a yearling elk as her baby (when the ranch owner sent me the video, because it happened when we were doing business in Portland, I groaned because I knew it would be a problem. It was). When the cows are in the pasture with the herd, she’s one of the horses who will occasionally round them up (I heard that the first time the cows were in the field, Mocha rounded them up, then took them down the fence in fine reined cowhorse mode). We’ve had fifteen good years together, and I spoil the heck out of her in hopes that we’ll have many more.

Happy fifteenth Gotcha Day, Miss Olena Chic. Best damned horse I’ve ever owned.

(Mocha in one of her occasional hitching rail test moods)

Some mindful Facebook posts this morning about horses, turnout, and training made me think about my horse life and just how I’ve learned and grown as a horsewoman. One thing in common with teaching and horse life is that the learning never stops. Even if you own the same horse over fifteen years (Mocha and I hit our fifteenth year together in August), you still learn more and more about how that horse works and thinks as the years go by. Especially if you do what I did with Mocha, and put the horse through a dramatic change in management in an attempt to break an injury/illness cycle (from 24/7 stall life in a wet climate to 24/7 pasture life in a herd in a dry climate). I went into her current circumstances well aware that it might not work, and if it didn’t…well, I don’t think she would have lasted more than another year or two of life in a stall. But pasture life agrees with her, even though she is horribly needy and forms tight bonds with pasture companions. She will leave her friends easily, but frets if they are taken away from her. She’s healthy and is in good condition, and we could conceivably have another five to eight active years together if managed correctly. The me of fifty-some years ago would be boggled by the thought of what I’m now doing with a 20-year-old mare. And that is a reflection of how things have changed in that period for horse management.

I’ve never particularly thought that doing everything like I did when I was a kid with horses was particularly a good idea. For one thing, horse management these days, even with rough pasture boarding, is entirely different from what I grew up with. Regular dental work, corrective farriery, deworming products, fly management products are very different from what I had access to in the late 60s-early 70s (not so much vaccination protocols. The biggest changes in vax from then have been the addition of rabies and West Nile to the vax regime. I was an early adopter of the Venezuelan Equine Encephalitis vaccine when it first came out, in addition to the Eastern and Western variants as well as tetanus. Can’t remember if rhinovirus was also part of the mix then–but the point is, vax was something we just plain did and isn’t that different from today). The closest I came to corrective farriery was putting front shoes on a foundered horse to support her feet, and noticing that hey–the stumbling horse stopped stumbling (I suspect that she may have foundered after foaling before we bought her, therefore the stumbling. She grass foundered one spring with me years later and needed careful management after that). Dental work wasn’t in the cards, and deworming product (unless the vet came out and tubed the horse) was a powder added to grain that the Sparkle mare would manage to separate out and leave in a nice neat little pile in the middle of her grain box instead of a paste syringe. Horses were also considered old by their mid-teens in those days, especially for a non-showing, backyard owner. Grass founder was poorly understood in my area, and I dealt with it in a pony and a horse.

On the other hand, there were certain tips and tricks I learned then that I still use. Showmanship practice as a means to get the horse’s focus on me (shades of “playing horse show” with the green Shetland yearling under the supervision of my first horse mentor, plus learning that hey. The old Sparkle bitch mare started listening better to me when I practiced Showmanship with her in 4H). Ground driving/long-line work to condition and school without a rider at all three gaits in something other than a lunging circle. The use of the lunge as a schooling technique, not letting the horse careen wildly as a means to blow off energy. A habit of establishing a personal space bubble and enforcing it when working with horses in the stall or the field. How to assess a horse’s reliability to be ridden on a road, and how to safely train a reliable horse to be calm around cars and other vehicles. Asking a horse to respond to lighter and lighter cues while working in serpentines and circles. The well-trained muscle memory of how to stick on a horse blowing up under you, and the confidence to deal with challenging situations including knowing when and how to bail out safely. I’m an old, reasonably bold rider, but I have a lot of kid falls in my history that contributed to knowing my limits…mostly, in my sixties. But as I’ve discovered, I’m bolder than a lot of amateurs my age (well, excepting those who compete in jumping or eventing, but I don’t do those things).

All of these were sharpened by later experience with a well-regarded trainer, but the foundation was laid almost fifty years ago. 18 years with a professional supervising me who would also sit down and talk about training, showing, breeding, and the state of the horse industry put a polish on my understanding of work with horses. Those eighteen years with Gregg Shrake really challenged me, made me think about my process, and built on my early experiences. Before I bought Mocha, I spent a lot of time being one of the ammys who provided a reality check on a training horse’s progress as part of my lessons. I never was the first one up on a greenie, but several times I got in one of said greenie’s first 10 rides. I learned more about the nuances of show horse world, and played with it a little bit. Now I’m at a place where I’m learning about more sophisticated pasture and herd management techniques, as well as rodeo horse training and expectations, and mindful management of a small breeding operation focused on producing good-minded, good-tempered horses.

What I keep on learning with horses is that learning is always happening. And that even old horses and old women can learn how to do new things. My relationship with Mocha is not at all like the one I had with Sparkle–while with both mares we came to a position of mutual trust, Mocha is more standoffish and when we are done with working and attention, she is Done With People, while Sparkle was much more social. I’ve achieved more with Mocha than I ever did or could with Sparkle. Breeding and training counts, and Mocha has both. But both mares have taught me a lot, and the lessons are still coming.

Mocha makes sure of that.

Happy 20th birthday, Miss Olena Chic (Mocha)!

I met Mocha a few days after she was born. At the time I was just a lesson rider at the barn, and cautiously peered into the foaling stall to look at the little chestnut filly who was the much-anticipated result of breeding one of the barn owner’s well-bred mares to an up and coming young stallion, Chocolate Chic Olena. Mocha’s dam Annie had a show record of her own, but more importantly she was an extremely protective mother who would bellow at any horse led by her stall, so I had to limit my look to keep Annie from getting too agitated. I can’t remember if I helped lead Mocha in after Annie after a day’s turnout but I’m sure I did–she would not have been the only young one I did that with at that barn.

Memories of Mocha over the next few years are sketchy. I led her to and from turnout, but for the most part since she was supposed to be the barn owner’s personal horse, I didn’t handle her much. Then things changed slightly when Mocha was four. I realized she was up for sale, but wasn’t in the market. If I had been, I probably would have bought her older half-sister who was for sale at the time, Erika, a lovely dunskin mare who had gone through cutting and reining training down at Oregon State. But I was also just starting a teaching position, and wasn’t in a space where I could buy a horse. I do remember leading her in from turnout one day, and murmuring to her as I pulled off her halter “I wonder who you are for?”

A year later, the answer was ME. Circumstances changed. I went to the barn owner with a price range and told him I was looking to buy and what did he think about these possibilities I’d printed out from Dreamhorse? He offered me Mocha, with a price right smack in the middle of my range.

I’d forgotten she was for sale. So the next barn trip, we did the trial ride. I later found out that I was the first person up on her in ten months, ever since the last rider had dropped a rein and Mocha stepped on it, nearly cutting her tongue off. Nonetheless, she was docile, listened, and I enjoyed the ride. She was five and a half years old. Pretty green, but by this point I had been in lessons for a while and was actually looking forward to being able to leave my own impression on a horse rather than schooling rehabs or tuning up school horses.

It didn’t take long for me to realize that while she had strong opinions, she also enjoyed working under saddle and had a lot of energy. Her canter was erratic and I decided to spend some time working at her in walk and trot to build up her muscles–after all, she was coming off of a ten month layoff while her mouth healed. We started in a regular jointed snaffle, but I soon moved her to a French link and then later to a KK Ultra bridoon for snaffle riding. I bought a cheap Western saddle that fit me, figuring that I could buy a really nice new saddle later, once she’d had enough time under saddle for her back to muscle up. At some point, I bought a nice used Collegiate Senior Eventer saddle and started her going in English tack as well. Six months later, I bought the Crates Reiner I now use for her in Western.

One reason for buying the English saddle was that I decided it would work better for getting her into a better quality canter. We spent that first winter working on building up her hind end, and in the spring I started asking for lope. It got better. At the same time, we were in weekly lessons. Once I bought the reining saddle, we started working on reining work.

A few years later, things were such that I was ready to take her to a schooling show, and an opportunity opened when one of the other boarders wanted to take her horse too. The show was at a facility a few miles away from the barn. When we got there, we unloaded the other horse first. Mocha started trembling with excitement and I remember the other horse owner cautioning her husband to watch out as I turned Mocha and led her out, thinking that she would leap out.

She didn’t.

It was a huge show. We got a stall, and Mocha started calling to other horses and fretting. Eventually she settled, but she was still pretty wound up. I took her into the warmup pen because the show was proceeding pretty slowly. We rode around the pen in the crowd until she settled, and then I parked her on the edge so that she could watch what was going on in the arena. Right away she showed a lot of interest in staring at the other horses. This big show even had a couple of saddle seat classes with some high-stepping Saddlebreds, which made her sharp and alert. But the show drug on forrreeeevvvver, and it was late when we finally got to warm up in the big arena. I can’t remember if we scratched without ever getting into the arena or if we made it into one class, but nonetheless it had been a good experience for a first show.

We went on to do 1-2 shows a year for the next few years. I didn’t have a trailer so going was dependent on what other people were doing. Mocha started needing hock injections at age nine–to be expected with the extreme sickle hocks she has which are great for reining competition, but not so great for potential arthritis. These went on for five years at about nine month intervals. Nonetheless, even with only 1-2 shows a year, by our last big show she had the show ring routine down to the point that we left a three-day show with mostly first and second place ribbons.

Then disaster struck, about the time that hubby and I decided to buy a retirement place in Wallowa County, in Mocha’s fourteenth year. I went to the barn one day to find Mocha barely able to move around her stall. It took me at her head and the barn owner supporting her hindquarters to get her out. Her right hind was sore (we never did figure out why), and there was a HUGE hole in her left front hoof. Not an abscess hole, but in the white line between sole and hoof wall. The farrier was due in a couple of days. When he came, he shook his head.

“White line disease. That’s what killed her mama.”

She ended up going through a hoof resection, and having nearly a third of her hoof wall cut off. Support was provided by an oval-shaped bar shoe. She had to wear a bell boot over that shoe at all times, and for six months she was unable to leave the stall unless she was attached to a person. I could ride her with a bareback pad, but only at a walk. Toward the end of the six months, I ended up riding her in a short shanked curb with double rings that I could rig up as a Pelham, with snaffle and curb reins. Riding her bareback at that point was like riding a coiled spring. When she was finally able to go into turnout, she went crazy that first day, bucking and kicking and running.

I thought it was over. But it wasn’t. For the next year and a half, until we moved her to Wallowa County, I played whack-a-mole with that damned white line disease. It would get better, only to erupt in another hoof. I ended up buying a special soak called White Lightning to fight it and reinforcing gallon freezer bags with duct tape because that was cheaper than buying the specialized bags. Mocha was patient, but it was also obvious that she was tired of all this stuff. At one point, the barn manager pulled me aside to tell me that I needed to know that Mocha was severely depressed when I wasn’t around, that she perked up and would show less pain when I came. I knew that she looked for my arrival. Her stall was right by the barn door and she clearly knew the sound of my car. Many times I would either get a nicker or see her standing in the middle of her stall, ears forward, looking at the door. At this time we stopped the hock injections because the inner joints had fused, and the outer joints were getting too tight to easily inject.

Then we moved her to Wallowa County. For fifteen years, she had lived in a stall with occasional turnout and regular riding. She went from that to living in an outdoor pen 24/7, with broodmares, stallions, foals, and PIGS around her. It initially did not go well. She fretted and fussed, pacing her pen. She didn’t eat well. She was distressed. She lost far too much weight, to the degree that the new barn owner and I feared we might get reported. She colicked once. She had a minor case of laminitis followed by huge abscesses in both front feet. But…the white line was retreating, even though everything else was problematic. And then we x-rayed her feet, to discover that she had old rotation (i.e., not from the laminitis), and that the angle that she had been shod and trimmed at for years was wrong. She’d lost about a quarter inch off the tip of both coffin bones in her forefeet.

Thank God for good farriers, vets, and barn owners. We tried pads on her feet, but she hated them and wouldn’t move. I got frustrated about her not moving in the pen and being sore as a result. Movement, and she was less stiff and sore. I’d get her moving good, then put her back in the pen…to come back to a sore horse. By this time, the hay pasture had a handful of horses as the barn owner was moving the herd back home slowly from the various pastures around the area where they’d been living. I asked the barn owner if she thought throwing Mocha out into the big field would hurt her–after all, she had a lot of experience being the rehabilitator of last resort for injured horses who might get better on pasture. She said “turn her out.”

For three days, at feeding time, Mocha would come to the gate and call for hay. Then something clicked, and she realized that she had food 24/7, and all the grass she could eat.

Things got better from there. We learned that Mocha developed intense attachments in a herd setting. That Mocha grew a very thick and warm coat, so she didn’t need blanketing. That this little stall princess THRIVED in pasture life 24/7. After a year of pasture life, she made it known that she did not, would not, happily stay in a stall any more, thank you very much.

And then she did things like adopting an elk yearling as her baby.

About a year ago I started noticing that the strength she had maintained up until the white line struck had returned. Over the course of the last year she’s gotten stronger and stronger. We’re able to do things we’ve not done for a while. And she came out of this winter fat and sassy–a tribute to the good management she experiences.

On April 30th she’ll have completed her fifth year in Wallowa County, in better shape than she was when she came here. And she made it to 20 years, when five years ago I wasn’t so certain she would last a year.

Happy birthday, Mocha. Here’s to another lovely year ahead.

One of my friends made a comment the other day about English vs Western riding that rocked me back on my haunches, so to speak–an observation that based on her experience, she felt that English riding was gentler on a horse than Western. A few questions, and I realized that this perception was based solely on how horses were guided at the beginner level, especially with the use of words such as yanking and tugging to describe rein effect. Now I know that many of my friends already know this stuff, or they’ve been reading horse information spread throughout the speculative fiction world–but the knowledge isn’t as wide as I thought it is. So I decided that perhaps I’d do a little refresher on reins, tack, guidance, and basics.

The first thing to consider is that while someone who is a beginning horseperson or has no experience at all looks at the reins as acting as a major means of controlling a horse, in reality, reins are merely a steering mechanism–and ideally, more of a backup method than the primary means of controlling a horse. A determined horse can and will run through the severest bit and tightest hold you can have on its mouth, if given sufficient motivation–whether anger, frustration, or fear. One of the goals in creating a fully-trained horse–what we call a “finished” horse–is to end up with a horse that will respond to almost telepathic levels of communication through seat, leg, and then hand. The ideal is that by shifting weight, you can change a horse’s direction, slow the horse, collect the horse into moving in balance, or stop it. Leg cues add more options, such as sharper turns, bends, body angle in relation to direction of movement, or gait changes. Hand cues aid with collection, provide guidance, and maintain a line of communication with a horse.

These goals work no matter what the tack is or isn’t on a horse. English or Western, the mark of a good rider is the degree to which you can’t see the cueing going on. That said, if you are working at speed, or things go weird, the ideal might not happen. But ideally, what you want to be able to do is shift weight, touch leg, squeeze a rein to communicate with a horse underneath you. Or even less. Turning your head can turn the horse, even with dropped reins and no leg or seat cues. It’s a shift of weight, and a sensitive, well-trained horse will respond to it.

The problem comes when dealing with either green (minimal or no training) horses, green riders, or horses who have been desensitized to subtle cues by inexperienced or heavy-handed riders who yank, kick, and tug. Green horses need repeated, gentle, soft communication to teach them appropriate responses to cueing. Green riders need to learn how to stabilize their bodies and control them to provide the more subtle methods of cueing. Desensitized horses need repeated, soft, consistent work to bring them back to lighter response.

Ideally, happy horses and happy riders communicate with minimal force–and that all comes back to communicating in whispers, not shouts. Which means a light touch on the rein, balanced seat, and reading what the horse tells you through hand and seat. Yes, you can feel what the horse is doing through the tack–English or Western.

This isn’t the ideal post for this, but it’s what I’ve got for tonight.