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Wanna know how I got these scars?

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  „You dingus…. Oh crap there’s blood… Oh shit the blood is spraying everywhere,“ I thought as my horse struggled to his feet.   Aston had tripped during training on the longe line, tangled his legs up into themselves, and somersaulted headfirst into the concrete foundation of the arena, kicking down a fence board as he went.   Adrenaline shot through me as I watched him struggle to stand, forcing my voice to a low “whoa, whoa, hush baby, whoa” as bloody clouds appeared in the sand next to his hoofprints with each step.   Tiger claw marks had opened on his lower leg and ankle, blood rushing down his tendons from some slashes and spraying towards me from others. A long scimitar had opened up between his eyes sweeping down his face where the nasal and cheek bones meet.   Somehow I called the vet as we gingerly walked out of the arena. I dropped the lead rope in front of the saddle room and crouched to grip Aston’s bleeding ankle with both my hands. He ...
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How to tell it is time to find a new barn

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 Six years, three stables. Sounds like the start of a bad porno. Or another chapter in my upcoming memoir, "This S*** is Too Stupid to Make Up." Alas, it is simply another way to describe my young horse's life.  The first two stable relationships we had ended in dysfunction and dramatic breakups. In hindsight though, I see a couple of common things that should have been warning signs a lot earlier: 1. You get an unpleasant feeling in the pit of your stomach when you are going to the barn. This may or may not be connected to something specific, in other words, you may think "Oh man, I hope _______ isn't there," or you may simply think "I don't really want to go, and I don't know why." 2. The horses are either listless and depressed, or aggressive and misbehaving. 3. The facilities (fencing, barn, outbuildings, equipment) are in disrepair and no one bothers to fix them. 4. Repairs that are made are done in such a haphazard way as to be danger...
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Perspective

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How to make everyone at the barn love you as much as you love horses

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  Few are the fortunate who have enough time and money to keep their own horses on their own property. Most of us work hard enough to maintain our giant pooping lawnmowers that we don't have time or money for the facilities to keep them ourselves. So we pay others to do it. Yes. We know we are crazy. We are in a program. Most boarding facilities have a string of clients, all different kinds of owners from little pony clubbers to young and single professionals, to soccer moms, to retirees. Bring all those different types of people together, and you are sure to have conflict.                Especially with such an opinionated and stubborn bunch as are horse-crazy females. Most people say they hate barn drama, and try to avoid it at all costs. But I say, get ahead of the shit storm before it shits all over you. Steer into the skid, piss into the wind.  Don't know how to become the most hated, drama-causing boarder? That's why I'm here!...
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Don't look at me with that tone! Or how expectations and presuppositions get in the way of our training

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 Most people who hear me babbling away with Aston ask me if he understands English.  Not surprising. We live in the northwestern Czech Republic and I am pretty much the only American up here that I know. I work in the Czech language, deal with errands in the Czech language, have my friendships in the Czech language, and yes, have even given police reports and testified in court in the Czech language. I am immersed in Czech anywhere between 6-14 hours daily. When I go to the stables, my happy place, to get away from regular life, naturally I speak English. It is my mother tongue, the language in which I first heard "darling," "I love you," "good job," and "no, we don't fart in public."  Aston's voice commands are (mostly) in English, and I chatter with him during our trainings in English. Surely he can tell the difference in the sounds between English and Czech, but whether he "understands" one more than the other is hard to say....
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Everything I know about having a kid, I unlearned when I had a kid

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 T here are book smarts and there are street smarts.  Book smarts can talk circles around street smarts... until the street smarts have had enough, then they fold the book smarts up and put them on the ground.  Such was my experience when Aston Martin was dropped into my lap and suddenly I had to raise him. (!!!)   I had spent my life studying equine behavior, anatomy, physiology, history, training theory, and spending as much time as I could with experts in the field, riding and caring for horses. Surely I was the best qualified to take on raising an orphan. As I knew, horses are designed to live outside in a herd 24/7, have grass or grass hay as the foundation of their diet, and they grow thick winter coats if we humans don't interfere with it by blanketing them. And if they live in a herd, they will get enough exercise on their own and don't need humans to interfere with them for exercise.  (As an aside, for a healthy adult horse, *most* of the time this is t...
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Welcome and Vítejte

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                                                                                               Photo: Jana Bačíková Coming from a non-horsey family, I was richer than the poorest and poorer than the richest in the horse world. I worked hard and was grateful for everything I got, especially to my supportive parents, but  I went off to college without a horse of my own. After completing my studies and moving to Europe, I found the horse of my dreams. I budgeted and saved, planning to buy her after her last foal was born.  She died in labor of a uterine rupture, leaving a colt who could have been her clone. I took him on as my own, naming him Audeamus (Let Us Dare in Latin). From that point on, I beg...
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