Last weekend I had a tremendous ride around the cross-country and steeplechase courses at the Galway Downs International Three-Day Event, where I was competing my mare Alba (show name Firebolt) in the classic-format CCI1*. You can see video footage of us on steeplechase and on cross-country by going to the Galway Downs website www.galwaydowns.com) and going to the Saturday video coverage. (Click on the “Event Video Coverage” tab on the right side of the home page.)

You’ll see us about halfway through the extremely professional Saturday coverage by Josh Walker of the U.S. Eventing Association. Host Frankie Therriot interviews me and my son Wesley (who doesn’t say much), and you’ll see part of the steeplechase phase from my perspective (because I wore Josh’s helmet camera) and see a few minutes of us going cross-country too.

You can also see two fantastic photos of Alba and me by going to the Galway Downs photo album of photographer Julia Reynolds’ Facebook page. Julia took the two photos of us at the fourth-last jump, a skinny wedge-shaped brush that was six strides on a left turn from a maximum-sized table. At this point, my 15.1-had appendix Quarter Horse mare had gone 13,000 meters (about 8 miles) and jumped 33 jumps, and you’ll see from the photo how full of run she still was. She was absolutely still looking for more jumps to attack, on her way to finishing in third place.

Riding Alba in this classic-format three-day event was meaningful to me in a number of ways. Readers of this space (and of many other things I’ve written) know of my belief in the classic format as a training tool for horse and rider, because it requires us to know our horses physically and mentally and to thoroughly prepare them for what I consider the ultimate test of horse training.

With Alba I truly experienced what that the classic speed-and-endurance day teaches an event horse. As we trotted through phase A, the first roads and tracks phase, Alba was a bit worried and confused. She was fitter than she’s ever been in her life, and she’s now done enough events that she could tell by the electricity in the air (and the nip in the air, since it was only about 45 degrees!) that today was a big day. She’s a smart girl, and I suspect she expected that it was cross-country day, and she couldn’t understand why we seemed to be wasting our time going on a hack. This made no sense to my little workaholic, because she knew she was ready to run.

She’d settled down a bit by the time we returned to the steeplechase course (phase B), but I think she was still a bit confused, because, yes, there was a start box, but it didn’t look like the cross-country courses she was used to. But then I sent her off at a gallop, with a tiny nagging worry about how well she’d handle this phase for the first time. But 10 or so strides from the first steeplechase fence, my worry evaporated as I could feel her lock on and then fly over it, and then we hit warp 10 as she said, “Yee ha! This is great fun!” We were almost 15 seconds fast to the first marker, and when I got her to slow down after the third fence, I sort of fell asleep enjoying her lovely gallop, until I realized we were slow about 400 meters from the finish. So we disappointingly ended up 10 seconds slow.

But she went out on phase C in a much more relaxed state, now beginning to understand, in her workaholic mind, the point to the exercise. We had a lovely ride around the grounds on phase C and finished almost 4 minutes early, giving us some extra time in the vet box.

I’d anticipated (hoped, really) that phases A, B and C would get Alba to the start of cross-country in a much more relaxed state than she’s ever been for the start of cross-country, and that’s exactly what happened. In fact, the only somewhat uncertain fence we jumped was fence 1, because for the first time ever she didn’t come out of the start box like she’d been shot out of a cannon and her tail was on fire, her head in my face as I tried to restrain her. She actually galloped to the first fence like a normal horse, and neither of us were 100-percent sure what to do. We hopped over it a bit awkwardly, and on the 150-meter gallop to fence 2 we chatted a bit before jumping fences 2 and 3 perfectly on our way to fence 4AB, the first combination.

Throughout the course, Alba was the perfect combination of bold but rideable, the way she’s always been from about a third of the way through the course. But this time she was that way from the start. She just flew into both water jumps, and she jumped the coffin combination and the down-bank combination well. And she was perfect on The Moat, the combination right before this photo and an effort you can see in the video. The Moat was two maximum-sized trakehners (logs over water-filled ditches) set on a very forward five-stride line that you had to find between a giant pampas grass bush on the left side of the first trakehner and a giant chess piece set on your right, about halfway between the two jumps. This jump was a test of courage (of horse and rider), of fitness (since it was fence 17), and of rideability, and when I walked the course I’d thought, “This is where I’m going to find out if my little girl really is a three-day horse.”

As you’ll see in the video, she flew through it like it was just a gymnastic exercise. And, 30 seconds later, she perfectly handled the combination that’s pictured and then galloped up a little berm to fly over a very narrow brush-filled corner, which she locked on to as we made the right turn to it. The seven-minute alarm sounded on my watch as we approached the next fence, the second-last, and we cantered in 20 seconds fast.

My Quarter Horse mare, who came into our lives three years ago when her former owner paid her first month’s training board and then vanished, had proven that she is really a three-day horse. I was doubly proud of her because I taught her to jump and I’ve taught her how to play a game she wasn’t bred to do. And she went out there on Saturday and ran around like a superstar.

My only real regret of the weekend was that, after leading Alba and me into the cross-country start box, my wonderful wife, Heather, was too nervous to watch us gallop around the course. Some very nice friends held her hand as she listened to announcer Michael Tucker’s commentary, and she’s seen part’s of Alba’s effort on Josh’s video and some photos. I’ve ordered the full video from the videographers, Ride On Video, and I can’t wait for it to arrive so she can see the whole thing, and then we can both appreciate the heart that Alba has.

I like to think of writing the articles I do for the Horse Journal, and these blogs, as my chance to share my experiences with horses. And right now is a chance to get the Horse Journal at a terrific deal.

That’s because we’re offering a special holiday subscription deal: You can get two subscriptions for the cost of one. That means you and a family member or your friend at the barn, or maybe an internet friend who lives across the country, can both enjoy and benefit from a subscription to the Horse Journal, for a total of $36, or just $18 per person.

There is one trick, though—you can’t take advantage of this offer on our website. You have to call 800-829-9145 and mention code 71X2F1. Don’t ask me why you have to do it this way. I guess the marketing people haven’t figured out how to track this from our website. But don’t let that stop you from taking advantage of this great deal!

If you need some ammo to convince your friend to go in on this deal with you, let’s talk about some articles I’ve written lately and I’m going to be writing soon. They’re the kind of information you can find nowhere but in the Horse Journal.

Let’s see, in August, I wrote “Tendon Boots: One Type Doesn’t Tit All.” For that article I tested a dozen different types of tendon boots, from top-quality cross-country boots to inexpensive general-purpose boots, and discussed their pros and cons. I also advised you to be careful about overusing tendon boots, in the misguided name of protection.

For the October issue, I wrote the lead article, which we called “Do You Plan To Breed Your Mare?’ I consider this a very important topic, because all too often people think, “Well, my mare is lame, I guess I’ll breed her.” Why? So you can have another lame horse? And that’s just the beginning. So I described in detail all the things that can go wrong when you try to breed your own horse, based on our experiences.

Yes, it often does turn out well, as you blog readers know from my recent posts about our homebred filly, Phoenix Amani. But your mare better be worth breeding.

I also write half a dozen or so commentaries a year—a chance to express my opinion on a variety of subjects in a place besides this blog. In February I criticized what I call the “golf-club mentality” that’s becoming all too prevalent in equestrian competition, a mentality in which horses are treated as golf clubs that eat. In May I warned about the often unseen cost of suburban development to the horse world—the loss of land on which hay and other grains can grow. That’s a huge reason to support your local land trust and, especially, the Equine Land Conservation Resource. And in August I discussed my plan for attacking the problem of unwanted horses.

What’s coming up? Well, in the December issue, I offer you seven tips for evaluating horses for sale, most of which involve your attitude and preparation for the task. In January I’ll write about developing fitness in your horse, and in the future I’m going to be testing air vests.

Aren’t these articles worth a subscription at this fantastic price? I certainly think so. Pick up your phone—operators are standing by!

I’m going to share with you today a letter from one equine group to another that shows how complex the interwoven subjects of horse breeding, equine slaughter and unwanted horses are. This letter further demonstrates the diverse and deep feelings people have about equine slaughter, a topic I’ve discussed several times in the last year here.

The letter, dated Oct. 10, is from the Arabian Professional and Amateur Horsemen’s Association, addressed to the Arabian Horse Association’s Board of Directors. In it, the APAHA thanks the AHA for “your support for the re-opening of the equine terminal marketplace” (equine slaughtering plants) and promises “to join with the AHA in support of the reinstatement of equine processing in the United States.”

The letter continues, “While we appreciate that this subject can be a sensitive one to those who are not intimately involved in the horse industry, there is no question that it is an integral component for the continuation of the horse’s survival into the 21st century, as well as to any and all breed associations.

“The simple fact is that for the horse to continue to survive and contribute to mankind, as it has done for the last 5,000 years, the equine terminal marketplace must be re-established in the United States. Equine slaughter for rendering and consumption is a necessity in the equine livestock industry, in order to allow horses at the bottom of the pyramid a humane, dignified, and contributing end. The bold words are the important points of this referendum, not the emotionally exploited ones of slaughter, rendering, or human consumption. Without a terminal marketplace, horses today are left trying to survive, for the first time ever, after their usefulness as a work-mate to man has passed. Regardless of whether you like the idea of equine slaughter, the vast, documented increase in equine suffering throughout the U.S. since the close of the slaughter houses should be enough for all people who truly care about horses to demand that those of us who have invested our lives in horses be the ones responsible for making the decisions about the marketplace that surrounds them.”

Obviously, their viewpoint is very much that of people for whom horses are a profession and a business, not a hobby or a pet. I’m not at all suggesting that there is anything wrong with that—I run a horse business too. But one of the underlying challenges to this issue (and to many others in the horse world) is the broad spectrum of ways people who own and ride horses view their relationship with the animals. For some they’re a commodity or an investment; for some they’re a career, a way of making a living; to some, training them is a life’s work; for some they’re the means to an athletic goal; to some they’re a partner in a sport; and to some they’re a pet, a giant-sized dog.

How we view our relationship with horses largely determines our view on equine slaughter and unwanted horses. To the pragmatic leaders of the APAHA, slaughter is a necessary evil. They write:

“Some people were affronted when the AHA stepped up last year to support the re-opening of the equine processing plants. We contend that as breeders and current caretakers of the world’s oldest breed of horse, we have an obligation to support the re-opening as well. It affects breeders and the breed in a singularly unassailable way; simply, that the free and low-price market for the ‘pet-quality’ horses is simply no longer available. The bottom tier of every breed and breeder’s marketplace, that for family riding horses, has been eaten up by the ‘re-homing’ of over 300,000 horses since 2007, many of whom have huge medical issues, training issues, psychological issues, and on and on.

“Often, the people who take on these horses are novice horse lovers whose heartstrings have been played by emotional, fact-less advertising paid for by lobbying groups that never invest in shelters and re-homing at all. Once saddled with an adopted horse that by contract cannot be sold or bred, these horse lovers find the difficulty of dealing with the myriad of issues draining financially and mentally. These experiences are not good at building repeat, long-term business for the horse industry.”

The letter continues with an interesting observation. They note that, since 2006, the registration numbers of four equine associations have dropped quite sharply. The American Quarter Horse Association dropped from 150,000 foal registrations in 2006 to less than 90,000 last year. Paints fell from 39,357 in 2006 to 17,835 in 2010. The Morgan Horse Association registered 3,461 horses in 2006, but only 1,835 in 2010. And the AHA declined from 10,311 in 2006 to 6,660 in 2010.

The key question is, is this decline good or bad? Depends on your perspective. From an association’s income perspective, it’s potentially catastrophic. Take the AQHA—as I’ve previously noted, they charge a ridiculously low $25 to register a foal, but 60,000 fewer registrations means $1.5 million less a year in income. But if you’re someone who believes that the real problem is that we breed too many horses, a decrease of 84,000 horses from just these four breeds is really good news.

If you’re from a breed association, you see the loss of equine slaughter in the United States as a reason why you can’t sell your “pet-quality” horses—because the people who buy them have extremely limited options to dispose of them when they become old, sick, unaffordable or simply don’t want them any longer. To others, though, these numbers indicate a good result mandated by a simple law of economics—the demand has dropped (due to the economic decline we’ve suffered for the last three years), so the supply must drop too. And to others fewer horses being produced means—thank goodness—fewer horses will suffer.

The APAHA observes that these four breeds (and Thoroughbreds too) “weathered a similar economic downturn in the ‘80′s without this kind of drop in registrations, and rebounded accordingly, the difference being that when economically strapped owners could no longer afford feed for their horses, they had a way to reduce numbers until the economy changed, after which their breeding business could rebound.”

Therefore, the APAHA argues, “By reopening the equine processing plants, we are simply restoring to horse owners and breeders the option that all other livestock breeders and owners have, and that horse owners and breeders had until the last four years. We will still retain the option to care for our horses after their usefulness is done, and we will still retain the option to rescue horses from the terminal marketplace. And people will still have the option to make horsemeat available to some of the 25,000 people on earth per day who are dying of starvation, allowing horses a chance to give back and be useful to humans, as they have done for centuries, even after they have passed.”

That’s an assertion that we could debate into the next century, and your position will depend on your belief in the horse’s “usefulness” and his place in our lives and society—whether he’s a pet or livestock. The APAHA is, clearly, a very pragmatic, business-oriented group, but their point of view isn’t shared by the vast majority of American horse owners.

But, I really think the APAHA makes a very cogent observation in this letter’s conclusion: “There are issues to address, certainly, and many different options available to improve the terminal marketplace, among them mobile slaughter units and live web monitoring of plants. As horsemen, breeders, and horse lovers, we are the ones responsible for dealing with these issues, making sure that the terminal marketplace becomes ever more humane, with a quick and dignified passing, without undue stress, and where the horse can go on to be useful to man after his demise, just as he has been for the last 5,000 years.

“This is not a job for politicians, lobbyists and animal-rights people to define; it’s a job for us, so that the horse that has brought so much to our lives will survive and evolve to bring much needed help to the people coming after us.”

Yes, indeed.

Since I’m a member of the Board of Directors of the Equine Land Conservation Resource, the other day I received an email from our CEO, Deb Balliet. She was in New England to present our lifetime achievement award, the Anson W. Taylor Award, posthumously to Marge Kittredge, a grand lady who did so many wonderful things, and she was touring around equestrian sites in Massachusetts, visiting with other people who are deeply involved in equine land preservation.

Before I continue, I have to offer thanks to people like Marge Kittredge, Natasha Grigg and Susanna Colleredo-Mansfield, and many, many others, for their efforts in trying to preserve a part of the country that was once at the heart of American horse country, in the English disciplines. (Deb visited the latter two women on her trip.) They’ve been up against it, living in an area squished between New York City and Boston and blessed (and cursed) by a surplus of transportation, on the highway, on trains and in the air. The mushrooming population and commerce of the last half-century has simply overwhelmed most of what once were green fields and lovely forests, many of which people on horseback enjoyed.

Last night, I was on a conference call with the two other people on the committee selected to choose future Anson Taylor Award winners. Nancy Winter and Georgiana McCabe are each former ELCR presidents, and, like me, their primary equestrian interests have been eventing and foxhunting, the primary equestrian interests of Anson Taylor, one of the founders of the ELCR in 1997. Georgiana, Nancy and I are on this committee because we’re the only board members who knew Anson well, and so our mission is to choose recipients who have his vision and his ability to accomplish the mission of land preservation to which he devoted himself.

That morning, I’d been thinking about how the geographical center of English horse sports has moved south and west in the 30 years since I’ve been writing about them. In the first 10 or so years of my working for The Chronicle of the Horse, I went to Massachusetts (or Connecticut or upstate New York) several times a year to cover major competitions, but the last time I can recall going to Massachusetts to cover a horse trial was in 1990, when Ledyard Farm, in South Hamilton, hosted the biggest USEA Adult Team Championships ever held.

When I mentioned that memory to Georgiana and Nancy, we became quite nostalgic what it used to be like around South Hamilton, Mass. In the ‘70s and early ‘80s, Ledyard Farm, owned by Neil Ayer, the USEA’s president for more than a decade and the man who designed the cross-country course for the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, was to eventing what Rolex Kentucky is now. Ledyard, in South Hamilton, was the biggest, best event, the only event that drew foreign competitors. But now, if you said “Ledyard” to current eventers, I’ll bet 90 percent would look at you blankly. Even my wife, Heather, who grew up eventing in California in the late ’80 and early ‘90s, said she would have known about Ledyard if not for me.

Neal’s vision was to create a great event, one that would sell the then little known sport of eventing, and that’s exactly what he did. One of my most cherished photos (I’m looking at it right now, perched on my bookshelf) is of Neil driving me around Ledyard in a golf cart at those Adult Team Championships, even though he was gaunt with cancer. He was so proud to see lower-level riders competing at his farm, as proud as he had been to see World Champions and Olympic gold medalists competing there. He would leave us just a few months later.

That may be just as well, because Neil was also an ardent foxhunter. And I suspect that, despite the passionate work of people like the ones I named above to preserve farms and trails, Neil would have been dismayed by the loss of so much of his dear countryside. He would have been horrified to discover that, aboard his hunter, he couldn’t follow hounds wherever they went or to discover that eventers in the South Hamilton area were hard-pressed to find places to gallop their horses today.

Anson Taylor, who left us in early 2006, was a similar man of vision and action. Each could see things the rest of us couldn’t, and then they’d create structures (of various kinds, from organizations to buildings) to make them happen. Preserving open space to keep, ride and compete horses was among their life’s priorities, and their determination should be an inspiration to all of us who ride horses.

Nancy, Georgiana and I look forward to honoring others who have that passion with the ELCR’s award. Do you know anyone to nominate? Go to our website, ELCR.org, to download a nomination form.

The lead article for the October issue of the Horse Journal is one I wrote, called “Do You Plan To Breed Your Mare?” In that article, and in my blog of Sept. 27, I strongly advised that you think two or three times before breeding your mare, before trying to produce a foal of your own, for a variety of economic, philosophic and emotional reasons.

Well, last weekend—actually for the last couple of months—I’ve also been reminded of a very strong argument for breeding your own horses. That’s because our 4-year-old homebred filly, Amani, has been growing up into the kind of horse I dreamed she would be, ever since I saw her very white nose insistently push its way out of her dam.

Please, allow me to tell you a bit about Amani, whose name is the Swahili word for “peace.”

Amani was an orphan foal, because her dam, Gussie, was the first of the two broodmares we lost. She died less than 12 hours after foaling Amani, because of severe colic, caused, we think, by Amani nicking a blood vessel around her intestine during delivery. We spent countless hours bottle-feeding Amani, and I remember dreaming during some of those hours about riding her (usually late at night or early in the morning), especially over cross-country courses. We bred her to be an event horse, having chosen Formula One to be her sire, and during those hours of holding bottle after bottle for her, I decided we weren’t going to sell her, that she was going to be my event horse.

As a 2- and 3-year-old, Amani proved to be a quick study, but also rather opinionated. Basically, she didn’t mind being ridden, but it took several months to convince her to use her butt and her back to go forward into a round frame. That seemed like an awful lot of work, and she wasn’t easily convinced that there was a point to it.

When I started to jump her last December, though, she started to see a point to the exercise. And when I started taking her across the countryside, at about the same time, she climbed aboard the exercise train.

I took her to her first schooling event last January, and she was better behaved and performed better than I could have dared hoped. Five weeks later, we took her to her first USEA-recognized event—we hadn’t planned to take her there, but Heather’s horse developed and abscess and we didn’t want to just forfeit the entry fee. I thought she might be ready, but she wasn’t. We didn’t get over the first fence in show jumping, because she was completely distracted by everything going on around her, including horses going cross-country. So we backtracked and took her to several smaller schooling shows and took her on two trips for cross-country schooling, with the goal of taking her to her next USEA-recognized event in August.

That event, Shepherd Ranch in Solvang, Calif., is a smallish and low-key affair, with beginner novice and novice courses that are very encouraging for young horses. Amani went greenly but willingly there, and she would have won if we hadn’t had a drive-by at fence 4 on cross-country. But it was an absolute baby moment—a dark green coop in the deep shade of a giant oak tree that she couldn’t figure out at first and just ran past. I reprimanded her and kept her galloping through a big circle, and she came back and jumped it as if it were four feet tall with trolls below it. But I was happy that she accepted my correction and then went where I told her to, despite her uncertainty. She was fabulous on the rest of the course, going right into both water jumps, over the ditch and up a bank.

Last weekend’s Event At Woodside, in Woodside, Calif., had more than twice as many horses and three times the commotion, and on Thursday Amani’s eyes were bugging out of her head. But she went where I told her to go and schooled decently. That was all she needed, because she was absolutely professional throughout the competition.

She couldn’t have gone better in the dressage ring, after surviving the crowded and confusing warm-up ring, and placed eighth of 20 with a good score. She then galloped beautifully around the cross-country course on Saturday to move up to fourth.

The best part of cross-country was that, after the fourth or fifth fence, I could feel her have what I call the “ah-hah moment,” where the horse grasps that cross-country is a course, a series of exercises they’re to do (and that they know how to do), not just a bunch of scary things set in their path. That’s the point where they begin to look for the next fence, to say, “Give me more of this!” Well, I could feel her do that, feel her begin to take me to the next fence, and it was an even more fulfilling sensation on Amani than it normally is with other horses.

In show jumping we just ticked one rail, for 4 faults, and still moved up to third place. Even though it was just beginner novice, just her low-level introduction to the sport, I felt tremendous satisfaction receiving that yellow ribbon on my “princess.”

Riding and competing Amani brings a different sort of pressure to me. Throughout my adult life, I’ve largely ridden horses with baggage, temperament problems or issues caused by poor training or disturbing experiences they’d had with someone else. So, in many cases, anything I do with them is an improvement, and I could always, if necessary, blame their shortcomings on the baggage they carried with them.

Well, I can’t do that with Amani. A friend of ours was actually the first person to ride her for the first three months, because I was hurt at the time. But no one else has sat on her in a year, and I’m the one who taught her to jump and to go across the countryside. So I have no one else to “blame” for any shortcomings she may have. I’ve put almost all the buttons on her, and if they don’t work, it’s my fault.

I’m thrilled with how well she’s begun to compete, but what makes me even happier is how much I enjoy riding her and how much I believe in her under saddle. She’s a joy to ride because she’s teachable. I can feel her work to, physically and mentally, learn new skills, and I can feel her think, “OK, this is part of my job. I’ve got it.”

Last Thursday at Woodside I experienced the practical application of that understanding and of her confidence in me and my aids. We’d been there just a couple of hours, and the atmosphere was hectic as competitors and vendors unloaded and set up and the show staff buzzed around in tractors and trucks. I’d just gotten on Amani and was walking her toward the rings to work her, when she got frightened by a big white tent and a tractor moving garbage cans alongside it. She anxiously half-reared and spun away two or three times before I got her straightened out and convinced her to walk stiffly past the cause of her worry.

What I really appreciated was how that moment showed our mutual confidence in each other. She was telling me she was worried, but I felt as if I knew what she was going to do. It was a measured reaction that was in keeping with her personality, and then her response to my aids was, “If you say it’s OK, then I’ll go.” That little moment was indicative of our growing confidence in each other over fences, and I’d like to think that’s a confidence I’ve inspired in her through training.

I’d like to think that Amani, so far, is an example of how horses should respond to thorough and progressive training. She has light years left to travel in that training, but her positive and willing response to the first two years of it is what I’d hoped would happen back when I was holding bottles in her hungry mouth.

In four weeks, I plan to be riding in a competition I’ve been aiming my wonderful mare Alba toward for nearly two years—the classic-format CCI1* at the Galway Downs International Three-Day Event (www.galwaydowns.com) in Temecula, Calif. And I’m going to tell you about that preparation this week as a follow-up to last week’s blog on “How To Save The Preliminary Three-Day Event.”

Last week, Sherry Hevner-Rygh, of the Long Format Club, told me that it “seems to be someone looking for a challenge or for a tradition” who’s riding in preliminary classic-format events. Well, I’m proud to say that I’m both of those. I believe in the classic three-day event format as the historic basis of my sport, and I like the challenge of preparing my horse and myself for it.

Alba, who’s now 9, has been an atypical horse to train, in that she hasn’t developed competitively in the usual style. In February 2009 (three months after she’d started jumping), I ran in her one beginner novice event, and she zoomed around both cross-country and show jumping. Six weeks later, I ran her at novice, and she basically ran away with me in both jumping phases. So I moved her up to training level at her next event, hoping the larger fences would slow her down. They did, for four events.

I decided then that I didn’t want to run her in a training level three-day event because I didn’t think she was mentally ready to run the short steeplechase phase and then do cross-country. Since barrel racing was all she’d done before she entered my life, and she has an over-achieving but hard-headed personality, I didn’t think she could handle galloping even faster to three jumps before going cross-country. So I decided to move up her up to preliminary, the next level, figuring then that it would be her “training” level, the level at which she’d really learn her job, having had an introduction zooming through first three levels from February through August.

Preliminary certainly has been her “training” level, as you’ll know if you’ve been read the several blogs I’ve written about Alba in the last 20 months. How has Alba (whose show name is Firebolt, as in Harry Potter’s broomstick), and the two of us, evolved in that time? Well, let me think…

Her ring anxiety has certainly decreased markedly. Alba used to get so tense and stiff in her back and neck, whenever she entered a dressage or jumping ring, that it was like riding a board. Now I can feel her hold her breath as we go around the outside of the dressage ring and then let it out and loosen up. Before show jumping and cross-country she usually does a half-rear and spin before she takes that breath, but at her last event, 10 days ago, she didn’t run away with me to the first fence, for the first time since her first event. That was a great accomplishment! I think this improvement is the result of mileage and confidence in herself, the result (and purpose) of training.

Similarly, her understanding of and obedience to my aids has improved tremendously, probably 20-fold. I don’t think she’d previously had anything more than rudimentary training (she could walk, trot and canter—that was it), so she hadn’t really been taught to accept the aids, and as a red-headed mare, she’s naturally inclined to do things her way.

Now she knows shoulder-in, haunches-in, leg yield at trot and canter, counter-canter and more. What I’ve lately been working on is a back-to-the-basics program, because I had to teach her these exercises to be able to work on our communication. I couldn’t just trot or canter a circle and convince her to be round and relaxed and obedient. I had to “do something” with her. So, now that she’s confident in my aids and accepts them, we’ve taken a step back to work on the quality of the gaits and of the transitions and figures, trying to do them really well, instead of just doing “tricks.”

I’ve gone back to the basics in jumping too. She understood and took to jumping about as quickly and easily as any horse I’ve ever ridden, and then, in concert with the need to move her up, I had to make the fences bigger and the jumping exercises harder to get her attention and to be sure she could answer the questions at the next level. So she knows how to answer al the tough questions, but jumping a fence or two quietly and steadily remains an elusive ability. So we’ve been doing a lot of more basic exercises and concentrating on our communication going toward and leaving the fences. We’ve still got a lot to improve, but in that last event I was ecstatic with the way she went cross-country and largely pleased with our show jumping.

I think, though, that what’s really helped the most is the fitness and strength she’s developed over the last three years, especially in the last three months, as I’ve prepared her for Galway Downs.

The primary difference between a standard horse trial and a classic-format three-day event is the second day. Instead of having just a cross-country course (which for preliminary is about 1.75 miles), we have to do four phases—phase A is roads and tracks (trotting a marked path around or through fields or along dirt roads); phase B is he steeplechase (a fast gallop over five to seven brush fences); and phase C is the second, slightly longer roads and tracks.

You do those three phases without stopping, although you plan your timing to arrive at the start of B one to two minutes before your start time, and you plan to walk for three to six minutes at the start of C to let your horse recover from the gallop. At the end of phase C, you have a 10-minute break in the vet box, where veterinarians examine your horse’s soundness and recovery, to be sure he’s fit to go on to phase D, the cross-country course.

At Galway Downs, the total distance covered on the second day of the classic-format CCI1* is 9.2 miles, with the cross-country course being about 2.4 miles of that. Galway Downs also has a training three-day with a total distance is 6.1 miles, the cross-country course being about 1.6 miles. The preliminary steeplechase speed is 640 meters per minute, with cross-country at 520 mpm. The training steeplechase speed is 520 mpm, with the cross-country speed at 470 mpm.

Yes, the preliminary is markedly longer and faster than training level. So, as I’ve done the fitness work (along with the more demanding dressage work), it’s been fascinating to see Alba’s body develop. Her neck, shoulders, back and hindquarters now ripple with muscles, and she moves with bigger, looser steps. I’d say she walks with a swagger now, as if she’s saying, “Look at me!” I now think that Alba is mentally ready to do cross-country after steeplechase—I’m confident that 6.5 miles of work before she starts on course will get her there in an eager but relaxed attitude.

Last Saturday I took her to the beach at Bodega Bay, about 40 miles north of the Golden Gate Bridge, as the seagull flies, to continue her conditioning program. We trotted for 20 minutes, then galloped at about 500 mpm for six minutes, walked for three minutes, trotted for 10 minutes, galloped for three minutes at about 450 mpm, and trotted for five more minutes. Her breathing could hardly have blown out a candle as we walked back to the trailer.

But what was really neat was what a joy she was to ride, how self-assured she was. She hardly paid attention to the people walking or jogging, to the dogs running in and out of the surf (and some barking at her), or to the crashing waves and the surf flowing back and forth as we trotted and galloped through it. She was there to do the job she knew how to do, with me, and I just had to think, “trot,” “gallop” or “walk” for her to do it.

No mater how we finish at Galway Downs, and at future events, I’ll treasure that day as evidence of the communication and bond that Alba and I have developed along our journey.

When I rode in the Morven Park Three-Day Event (Va.) in 2004, there were 60 or 70 horses competing at the preliminary level, a typical number for that event and for other preliminary three-day events then. But at that time three-day events were undergoing a profound format shift, caused by a group of influential people at the Federation Equestre International. They wanted to cut out the first three phases of the second day, leaving only the cross-country phase, and the 2004 Athens Olympics were the first international championship to run in what came to be called the short format.

Within two years, all FEI-sanctioned three-day events, at all four levels, were mandated to be in the short format. But a handful of U.S. organizers held on, grimly vowing to continue to hold preliminary three-day events and supported by a cadre of riders and trainers and leaders of the sport. But now there are only four of them left (and Morven Park isn’t one of them), it’s news if 10 horses start in any of them, and many of us are scratching our heads trying to figure out what we can do to keep the flame of the classic format burning.

In 2009 the leaders of the U.S. Eventing Association combined the preliminary three-day events and the new but more numerous and well-supported training three-day events into the SmartPak Equine USEA Classic Series (http://www.useventing.com/competitions.php?section=classic). They hoped this would promote the classic format, and they’ve put together some really nice prices as an added incentive. The winners of each event receive a SmartPak Wellfleet leather halter and engraved lead shank, a Five Star Tack bridle, a pair of FITS Breeches, an entry into the year-end drawing to win a year’s supply of SmartPaks, and an entry into the USEA’s year-end drawing to win a Stackhouse saddle.

Also in 2009, a small group of true believers got together to form the Long Format Club, whose mission is to support the USEA Classic Series and individual organizers, primarily by raising money to help with the organizers’ additional expenses in running a three-day event.

The leaders of both the USEA and the LFC hoped that pairing up the T3DE and the P3DE would encourage riders to “graduate” from the training level to the preliminary level, but, so far, that hasn’t really happened. Basically, today there are—with a few exceptions—two groups of people riding in these competitions: professional riders, for whom the T3DE can often serve a purpose but for whom the P3DE no longer seems to serve a purpose, and adult amateurs, for whom the T3DE is a comfortable level but the P3DE seems a bridge too far. The largely missing group is teenagers or young riders—for the majority of them either the T3DE is beyond their commitment or the P3DE isn’t part of their higher plan.

So last week I talked to Sherry Hevner-Rygh, a director and one of the founders of the Long Format Club, about the situation. “I can’t get a feel for who the average person entering a P3DE is. It’s not all professionals, and it’s not all adult amateurs. I can’t really get a handle on it because the numbers are so small, but it seems to be someone looking for a challenge or for a tradition,” Sherry told me.

I asked Sherry if she knew where all the teenagers and young 20-year-olds had gone. She suggested they’d gone the same place as so many of the amateur riders, and that place surprised me a bit.

She noted that the USEA’s leaders, in the last decade, had made a goal of making eventing more popular and more accessible, and she suggested that we’re seeing an unintended side effect.

“We wanted to make it ‘easier’ to do the sport, and we did. But this is the downside—you can now do the lower levels without so much effort,” Sherry said. “To some degree, we may be the victims of our own success. People today want something easy and fun, and the vast majority have no aspirations to ride higher than novice.”

So we have teenagers for whom eventing (and riding at all) is just another “activity,” wedged between soccer, basketball, student government and friends. It’s not a passion, a sport they do instead of the others. Or, if they are that committed, the P3DE doesn’t fit in for reasons I’m getting to.

Still, for some members (probably somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 of the USEA’s 12,000 members) competing at training level is doable, for them and their horses. The fences aren’t too big (3’3”), the speed isn’t too fast (400 to 450 meters per minute in horse trials, 450 to 470 mpm in T3DEs), and the amount of training and physical conditioning required for horse and rider is moderate.

But most of this group views moving up to the preliminary level to be a giant step, a much higher mountain. I’ve always considered the jump between training level and preliminary as the biggest in eventing. It’s certainly where the rubber starts hitting the road, where you separate the wheat from the chaff. Most well-trained and prepared horses and riders can jump around training level, but preliminary requires true scope and speed from the horse, bravery from both, and a considerably higher level of conditioning for both. You have to be serious and committed to ride at preliminary level. You can’t sit on your horse for half an hour three days a week and be ready.

Sherry did have some suggestions she thought could encourage people to enter their P3DEs. She suggested that they follow the lead of Robert Kellerhouse, organizer of the Galway Downs International Three-Day Event. Robert is a stalwart supporter of the classic format, and he’s done two things to encourage people to enter his P3DE in November.

The first is that, since 2008, he’s also offered at T3DE. That does two things: Since he gets 40 to 45 starters in the T3DE, it makes it worthwhile to him to set up the steeplechase and roads and tracks—and get the volunteers to man those phases—even if he gets only half a dozen entries in the P3DE. And it gives the T3DE riders a chance to see they can do the same thing they’re enjoying at a higher level, hopefully giving them encouragement to move up.

The second thing is that the Galway Downs P3DE is the only one of the nation’s four that is FEI recognized. It’s technically a CCI1* with steeplechase, and that means that riders perform the FEI’s CCI1* dressage test (instead of the USEF’s P3DE test) and that the FEI only counts faults on phase D (ignoring phases A, B and C) and show jumping. The reason for FEI recognition is so that horses that compete in the Galway Downs CCI1* with steeplechase can earn a qualifying score to move up to the two-star level.

Kellerhouse believes strongly that not being able to earn an FEI qualifying score at the other three preliminary three-day events negatively affects their entries. Why? Because riders whose goal is to move their horses up the levels will almost always choose the short-format CCI1* over it, because the short-format CCI1* is a qualifying event at all the events where they’re run.

“I don’t see the support for the P3DE building like we thought it would as a result of the T3DE,” said Sherry. “I’m just kind of perplexed about what to do, other than putting the two levels together at more events and making the P3DE an FEI event.”

For the last year and a half, my goal with my wonderful mare Alba has been to run her in the Galway Downs classic-format CCI1*, and next week I’ll talk about that journey and how my commitment to the classic format has influenced my work with her.

When you read the lead article in the Horse Journal’s October issue, which I wrote, you’ll see that I’ve basically tried to talk you out of breeding the mare that you love.  I’ve given you lots of things to think about, and I’ve also note that each year our country adds about 170,000 new unwanted horses, so unless you have a really good reason to add another horse to America’s population of 9.5 million, you should buy a horse instead of breeding one.

I received an email following one of my recent series of blogs about these unwanted horses from a woman who believes very strongly that we U.S. horse owners should establish a moratorium on breeding until that problem gets solved.

Her suggestion is a bit extreme for me, but I do think that our breed organizations—especially the American Quarter Horse Association, which registers 150,000 horses every year—should alter their course. Instead of encouraging people to breed lots of horses (the AQHA, for instance, charges are ridiculously low fee of $25 to register a foal), they should be educating their members about how to assess their mares (and stallions) so they can breed fewer, better horses.

In the month or so since I wrote that article, though, I’ve been contemplating the reason people do want to breed their own horses, mostly as I’ve been training and competing our 4-year-old homebred Amani. She’s one of nine horses we’ve bred over the last 13 years, and, in not a single case, has the foal’s birth or his or her development gone like we planned or hoped.

Our first foal was Shawn, who’s now 13. He’s out of a wonderful Thoroughbred mare, named Ariel, whom I raced over hurdles and over timber, foxhunted extensively and competed in eventing through the training level. She was getting ready to move up to preliminary when she suffered a horrible injury while cross-country schooling. So we decided to breed her to the Thoroughbred stallion Class Secret, a son of the legendary Secretariat. I knew Secret and knew he had a fabulous temperament to complement his outstanding conformation.

The gestation went without incident, but Shawn was born with a kidney infection that required him, and Ariel, to spend the first five days of his life in the neo-natal intensive-care unit of the Morven Park Equine Clinic in Leesburg, Va. That cost us $4,000,  so he was immediately worth his weight in gold.

Shawn turned out to be an excellent event horse (as we’d hoped), placing in a classic-format preliminary three-day event and at intermediate level. But he’s always had a terrific buck too, and he threw me about a dozen times when he was young. So I’ve never competed him—trainer friends of ours have done that. And now that he’s mature, he doesn’t buck (much) and a teenage girl is leasing him. Ariel lost three foals after Shawn, because, vets finally determined, whatever caused Shawn’s kidney infection continued to live in her uterus. But they couldn’t identify it, much less eliminate it.

It would be eight years before we’d breed another horse. By then we’d moved to California and started our training farm and what we thought would be a breeding program. We’d bought two broodmares, both Thoroughbreds. One, Lizzie, was only 5 and hadn’t had a foal, but her dam had had 16 foals and her two older sisters had had multiple foals, so we were confident of her family’s reproductive ability. The second mare, Gussie, had proven her reproductive ability by having two foals already.  Lizzie was in foal to the Irish stallion Clover Hill when we bought her; we chose the Irish-bred stallion Formula One for Gussie.

Lizzie delivered her colt on a cold night in mid-March 2007. She was fine, but the colt, whom we called Bongo, couldn’t stand, and it was only partly because he was lax in all four legs. We had to help him up and down to nurse and to sleep for more than a week, and his laxness and weakness did improve. But getting him up and down had caused the inevitable umbilical hernia, and at five months he had to have surgery for that (and was gelded at the same time).

Bongo never really recovered from that surgery. He could never move right (he had a pacing walk and could barely canter), and as a late yearling an equine therapist took her to her farm, sort of as an experiment, to see if she could help him. About four months later she called one morning to say Bongo couldn’t stand—it turned out he was neurological (as we’d long feared) and we euthanized him that day.

Two months after Lizzie gave birth to Bongo, Gussie produced a beautiful bay filly, with three socks and a big blaze and a devilish expression. The filly looked great right away, but Gussie was clearly exhausted. We cared for her and went to bed about midnight. When I opened the barn doors at 6:00 a.m., I could hear her groaning at the far end. She was colicking, badly. I started walking her as Heather called the vet, but he got stuck in morning traffic and didn’t arrive until almost two hours later. Gussie was in her death throes as the vet reached the gate, and all he could do was pump the euthanasia fluid into her to make sure her misery was over.

Amani had apparently nicked a blood vessel during the delivery, but that didn’t matter then. We just had to keep this fabulous filly alive. I don’t even want to think about the hours we spent bottle-feeding her or the money we spent on milk replacer or the drugs to induce the nurse mare we got to begin lactation. I never added it up, but it was thousands of dollars. And now we’d lost half of our broodmare band.

Lizzie didn’t conceive that summer, so we had no foals in 2008. But in 2008 she did conceive a foal by the Dutch Warmblood pinto stallion Palladio, and that winter we also had two mares in foal to warmblood stallions, and their foals were to be our payment for training the two stallions.

Lizzie gave birth in late March to a pinto filly, whom we named Bella. But two weeks later she got “broodmare colic,” and a rushed trip to the clinic for surgery couldn’t save her. Now we had another orphan foal. This time we were lucky enough to find a mare who had a foal that desperately needed to be weaned, so we didn’t have the expense of milk replacer and drugs. We just had to wake up every two hours to put Bella in with the mare, because it was the better part of three months before the mare accepted her.

Two weeks after Bella was born, one of the other mares, Phaedra, went into labor. She was a maiden and was clearly confused, and to make it worse the foal was slightly malpresented. Heather, who as three months pregnant at the time, reached inside of Phaedra, while a friend held the phone so the vet could talk her through straightening out the leg that was preventing his exit.

Then, with Phaedra still standing, things happened really fast. I pushed Heather out of the way and literally caught the oversized colt in my arms. We weren’t sure he’d still be alive, but I’ll never forget my excitement when I felt him take his first breaths and his heart pound away. We named the handsome chestnut colt Piper.

The other mare, Sweetie, went into premature labor about two weeks later and delivered a sickly foal who died within a few hours.

So the score for that breeding season was two healthy foals, one dead mare and one dead foal. Our breeding program was finished.

That probably sounds as if I’m still trying to talk you out of breeding, doesn’t it? Well, I hope you take it as a lesson.

But riding Amani does remind me why breeding a horse can seem so appealing. She’s beautiful and a fabulous athlete, I love riding her, and she seems as if she’s going to be the event horse I’d hoped. She just completed her first horse trial last month, and except for one truly baby moment on cross-country, she couldn’t have possibly gone better. If not for that one run-out, at a tree-shaded fence she simply didn’t understand at first, she would have won.

We’ve had Bella and Piper in our pre-school program this summer, a regimen of longeing and ponying, and they’ve both been great. In about a week, pre-school will end and they’ll get the winter to grow. I can’t wait to ride them next year.

One more thing—we bred Amani, Bella and Piper to sell. Remember, this was supposed to be a breeding business? Well, after spending all that time nursing Amani and Bella, there was no way I was going to sell these lovely fillies. And Piper, well, he looks like he’s going to be the perfect horse for Heather—and I’ll never forget the feeling of him coming to life in my arms. It was a feeling second only to seeing my son being born and feeling him grasp my index finger when he was only a few minutes old.

So, what’s the final score for the Phoenix Farm breeding program? Two dead mares, two dead foals, one foal we gave away, one foal who’s for sale now, and four foals we aren’t going to sell. Man, that was a profitable venture.

You could hardly have been alive in America last weekend and not noticed that Sunday was the 10^th anniversary of the horrible Sept. 11 attacks, and the remembrances caused me to ponder the effect that day had on us in the horse world. What have we had to sacrifice? How have our lives and the sports we pursue changed as a result of the attack that, 10 years ago, I called our generations’ Pearl Harbor?

Time magazine chose a refreshing point of view for their special commemorative issue, which they call “Beyond 9/11.” Instead of an extensive photographic and written review of the day’s attacks, they focused on the impact on survivors of the attacks, on government leaders, on soldiers who’d fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, ad on citizens of those two countries.

The final page contains a thought-provoking essay by novelist and playwright Kurt Andersen. His conclusion is that the impact on our lives has been “not so much. It was a jolt that altered the course of American history spectacularly, but it has not, for better and worse, transformed the American people. Terror, we discovered, has a half-life.”

Sure, getting on airplanes and entering many buildings has become time-consuming and often highly annoying, and for the first five or six years most of us were looking over our shoulders, at least part of the time. Otherwise, unless we’re related to or close to a victim or survivor of the attacks, or to a soldier who’s fought since then, the attack’s effects have been tangibly minor. Andersen argues persuasively that the real effect has been in the opportunity that we missed as a nation.

Andersen writes: “There was one large way in which America and Americans should’ve and could’ve changed but did not. That would have required President Bush to announce an urgent national project for the post-9/11 age: Because our dependence on oil is ultimately what sustains the jihadist pathology, he could have said, we must start reducing that dependence as quickly as possible. In the emergency can-do window of 2001 and 2002, he could have rallied Congress and the public to support a serious, sensible, radical new energy policy, including significant new taxes on petroleum.”

But, unfortunately, that’s not at all what happened. I remember a comedian joking then that Bush’s energy policy read like the Exxon or Chevron annual report. Consequently, the price of gas and diesel has climbed from $1.50 per gallon in 2001 to more than $4.00 a gallon—so there’s one way Sept. 11 has affected us horse people.

Time’s issue also contains an interview with Valerie Plame Wilson, whose cover as a CIA covert operations officer was exposed by a syndicated conservative columnist in late 2003, after her husband wrote an article showing that Iraq didn’t have any weapons of mass destruction, the justification Bush had used for invading the country in March 2003.

Says Wilson: “The intelligence was manipulated, and the American people were sold a war that maybe wasn’t in our best interest. I don’t think history will judge those decisions well, because we’re almost eight, nine years into two wars, and the amount of blood and treasure that has been spent by this country—not to mention the civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan—is incomparable. I’m afraid it is a legacy that will endure for generations.”

The extension of what Andersen and Wilson are saying is that the economic decline we’ve suffered for the last three years is, largely, a result of the Bush Administration’s misdirected response to Al-Qaeda’s attacks on us. What if instead of invading Iraq—a country that time has shown had almost nothing to do with the attacks—and Afghanistan—the country that harbored Osama bin Laden and will forever by mired in the dark ages—President Bush had led us down a path toward fixing the problem instead of just seeking revenge? Would we have experienced the unsustainable real estate boom that went so tragically bust? That boom was initially caused by big investors searching for something real to put their money in (because they were anxious about he war’s effects on the stock market) and then was twisted about by creative swindlers. If not for the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions, would those investors, instead, have invested in renewable energy technologies, creating a new energy infrastructure that would now be driving a truly green economy? And think of what we could have used the trillions of dollars (and lives) we’ve spent on those wars to do!

Sept. 11, 2001, was a moment that could have given us the impetus to make pivotal, long-lasting changes for the better, changes for all of us. Instead, we’ve had a decade of anxiety, annoyance and very real pain—pain that clearly isn’t likely to ease any time soon.

Had those human and financial resources not been at war, would we be now cruising along on an economy that, while it may no have risen as high as it did in 2005, didn’t crash so precipitously in 2008? That’s probably the way that Sept. 11 has affected us in the horse world, just as it has everyone else.

This has been a busy summer here at Phoenix Farm. Half a dozen competitions (and almost 3,000 miles on the truck and trailer), horses coming in for training, a bunch of new lessons, a horse sold, a baby donkey born, and 10 Nigerian dwarf goats born. But things started to settle down a bit as the calendar approached Labor Day, and last Friday I had a thoroughly enjoyable few minutes with my not-quite 2-year-old son, Wesley.

We’ve set up a small pen for the goat does and their kids on the grass in front of the barn, under the shade of a sprawling valley oak tree that I’m told is well more than a century old. Wesley loves the goats (he probably thinks of them as “my goats”), and lately we’ve been just putting him in the pen with the does and kids while we work the horses or teach. He plays with the kids and strokes the does, and now that he’s walking so steadily, he runs back and forth with the kids, usually laughing. Or he endlessly busies himself “fluffing” their hay—picking it up and letting it fall to either the ground or to the back or head of a goat.

Wesley considers “hay fluffing” to be very important work, and he’ll also do it for my wonderful mare Alba and for our miniature Sicilian donkey jenny and foal, Sage and Stevie Nicks. Wesley and Stevie will also romp around the donkey paddock together, just like Wesley does with the other children at his pre-school. But Stevie is big enough that we don’t just leave him in there with her, like we do with the goats. (In case you’re wondering how big Nigerian dwarf goats are, they’re about the size of a small Labrador retriever—roughly 45 to 50 pounds.)

Late last Friday morning, I’d finished working the horses I had scheduled for the day, Heather was still riding, and our working student was getting set to ride her horse for a lesson with Heather. Wesley had been in the goat pen for more than an hour, so I decided to go in to join him. As I sat down in the cool shade of that wonderful oak tree, with a nice breeze blowing, two of the three kids in the pen came over to get attention, as Wesley continued fluffing hay.

I had one of the kids in my lap, and Wesley came over to snuggle with the goat, resting his cheek on the little doe’s neck. After a bit, the doe decided she’d had enough and moved away. So Wesley settled in and decided I needed to have hay fluffed on my legs and hands. (Good thing I’m not allergic to hay or goat poop!) We sat there for about 45 minutes—Wesley piling hay on me, wiping it off, and piling it back on—as Heather finished working the horse she was on and began to teach.

For a moment, I felt a bit guilty that I wasn’t doing anything, easily thinking of four or five things that I could be accomplishing at that moment. And then I thought, “You know, he’s not going to be like this for very long. Soon he’ll just be running around constantly, and then, when he gets older, well, who knows? So I should enjoy this lovely moment right now.” I should probably explain how hard that is for me—I’m really terrible at enjoying moments, at relishing little successes, because there must be something I could do to do them better.

And then I began to think—and to be thankful for—how fortunate my son is to live on this farm, in this beautiful valley and with all these animals. He’s surrounded by dogs, cats, rabbits, goats, donkeys and, of course, the horses. Plus, as he grows older he’ll become aware of the deer, the coyotes, the bobcats and the wretched feral pigs that live in this area. He already follows the birds, from the swooping vultures and hawks to the tiny, beautiful finches. Every day he runs to see his bunnies, his head spins around if he’s here at the house and he hears the goats bleating, and a couple of weeks ago he got out of his “corral” next to the goat pen and ran straight to the donkey pen, shaking the gate furiously to induce one of us to hop off a horse and let him in.

I can’t predict if Wesley will want to ride horses as he grows up, although I certainly hope he will. But I’m taking the fact that last Friday he took off his sandals and walked around the goat pen barefoot as a strong indication that, even if he doesn’t ride, he’ll grow up enjoying and caring for animals and the outdoors. And I’ll be very happy for that.

Last weekend was a big step for me and my 4-year-old homebred filly, Amani. We took her to what I like to think of as her first USEA-recognized horse trial, at Shepherd Ranch in Solvang, Calif., and she was a really good girl. I’m very proud of my “princess.”

Amani is the first horse from our now-defunct breeding program to reach the competition ring, and she’s special to me for that and for other reasons. Her dam, Gussie Up, was one of the two mares we purchased in the spring of 2006 to be our broodmares, but she died because of colic less than 12 hours after giving birth to Amani, in May 2007. A friend found us a nurse mare, but she was barren and not lactating, so while we put her through a chemical regimen to induce lactation, we had to bottle-feed Amani 10 to 12 times a day for two months.

When the grind of filling and cleaning bottles isn’t wearing you down, you can become very attached to a foal when you spend hours a day holding a bottle for her. And you can become even more attached when you see her gallop around the pasture like the athlete you were hoping for. I’ve looked forward to riding ever since those first exhausting days and nights.

(In case you’re wondering, Gussie was a Thoroughbred mare, descended from Northern Dancer and other great jumping and staying sires, and Amani’s sire is Formula One, the Irish-bred owned by Denny Emerson.)

Watching Amani grow up has been a fascinating experience, especially since she’s not matured into the temperament I thought she was going to have. I’m glad to say she’s matured into a more tractable and thoughtful disposition than I expected when she was very young.

From the time we weaned her, Amani was the boss of the field. She told everybody where to go, sometimes with the assistance of her hind feet. (I call her “the fastest gun in the West.”) And almost any time we introduced her to something new, her response was “No! I am a princess!”

I will always remember when, in December of her first year, we brought her and our other two weanlings into the barn and thought we’d hose the mud off their legs. The girl who worked for us then, Amani, and I all ended up on the floor, up against the wall of the stall opposite the wash rack she leaped out of, pulling us with her. It would take us a good six months before she’d accept having her legs hosed.

Still, she was easy to teach to longe and pony, and she offered no major resistances to having a rider on her back. It did take a few months of riding before she decided she really wanted to take instruction, but since then she’s been quite willing. And she could always jump.

But that leads me to why I said that I like to consider this event her first recognized start. In January we took Amani to her first schooling competition, a combined test (dressage and show jumping) with cross-country schooling the day before. She behaved well in her first trip away from home, and went very willingly, so when, a month later, Heather’s horse developed an abscess two days before we were to leave for a recognized event at the same venue, I thought we could take Amani in his place. I thought she was ready.

Well, she wasn’t. The location was Twin Rivers, in central California, and there had been about 70 horses at the combined test but 300-plus at the horse trials. The commotion was simply too distracting to her, and she wouldn’t jump the first show jumping fence—because she never saw it. She was looking everywhere but at the jump, and it surprised her when she did finally noticed it two strides away.

Horribly disappointed at Amani’s elimination, we went back to the drawing board and decided we needed to emphasize training exercises that would demand her attention and that I’d take her to as many schooling competitions as possible before trying again. We also decided then to aim her for Shepherd Ranch, because it’s a smaller and quieter event.

I’ve seen her mature physically and felt her steadily mature mentally since then, as I’ve taken her to three schooling competitions and done two more cross-country schools with her, and I’m happy to say that our plan worked. She behaved absolutely perfectly throughout the four days, and she performed as well as she could. She was relaxed and willing in dressage, placing third with 31.4 penalties (equivalent to 68.6% in pure dressage). She was fabulous on cross-country, except for one baby error. Fence 4 was a green coop in the deep shade of a huge oak tree, and she dragged me right past it the first time because she simply couldn’t understand the question. But she went willingly, if cautiously, to it when I circled her around it and tried again. Then she galloped right through both water jumps, leaped confidently over the ditch, and hopped right up the bank. She finished by show jumping faultlessly to finish sixth and get a green ribbon.

She was so tired after show jumping, though. It was a hot, sunny weekend (about 90 degrees), but she was more mentally tired than physically tired. We could just see her saying, “Oh, so much to think about and do for a baby horse. My brain really hurts!”

I drove home Sunday night feeling very proud of my little girl and the work we’ve done to get her to this point, remembering that horrible morning when her mother died and those months of bottle-feeding her. Last weekend was a milestone, the first of many I hope to experience with her.

I’ve been meaning to write about why I’m a big fan of chiropractic treatment for horses and for humans for awhile, and last week gave me a good excuse. That’s because I was very much overdue to see my human chiropractor before I went last Monday, and then the next day the equine chiropractor visited Phoenix Farm to work on five horses.

Ideally, I like to see my own chiropractor every four to eight weeks, but we make appointments to have our equine chiropractor visit us every four to six weeks, as we currently have 10 horses who are in the care of Suzanne Guyton. Our horses have been her patients for about three years.

Yes, I know that many medical people are skeptical of, and even opposed to, chiropractic care. My father was an orthopedic surgeon, and every time I go to the chiropractor I imagine him rolling over in his grave. But chiropractic medicine has come a long way since my father panned it more than 30 years ago.

I truly believe, based on my observations of my own body and those of well more than a dozen horses, that using chiropractic treatment is an example of how traditional and non-traditional medicine (including chiropractic) should be complementary. Every horse Suzanne has worked on has felt better and, thus, performed better, and I can think of four horses with whom it’s caused tremendous improvement.

Here are two examples from my own body: The reason that Heather convinced me to go to a chiropractor, almost nine years ago, was my neck. I’ve fallen off dozens and dozens of times over the last 45 years, and many of those falls (and hundreds of other rides too!) have wrenched my neck. The only thing Western medicine has to offer is a wide range of inflammation-reducing and pain-relieving drugs. Again, from experience, I know that those drugs certainly do have their uses, but I don’t really care to live on them. But a visit to my chiropractor never fails to relieve the pain in my neck—and it’s my neck that’s the reason why I’m going again this afternoon.

Similarly, last year, when I broke four ribs and my occipital bone when I got flung in May, no chiropractor could possibly have helped me initially. I was life-flighted straight to intensive care, where I stayed for 48 hours. But after about two weeks, when the pain in my ribs was beginning to subside, I began to realize how badly my right shoulder was hurt. I could even see in the mirror that it was noticeably lower than my left shoulder, the one I’d separated eight months earlier. Back I went for more X-rays, which showed no facture, but the treatment was basically more pain pills and rest. The doctor suggested physical therapy, but wanted me to wait 30 days before making an appointment. When I did call, the first available appointment was almost 60 days away!

So, about five weeks after my crash, I went to my chiropractor, who carefully began to manipulate my lowered and stretched-out shoulder back into place, along with my wrenched back and neck. I never went to physical therapy, because between my chiropractor’s work and my own yoga therapy, there was no need. Now the only reason I even remember that shoulder injury is that one of the broken ribs was the first one on the right side, and it didn’t heal in perfect alignment with my clavicle.

Enough about me. What about the horses? Well, I’ll give you two examples. The first is a Quarter Horse mare named Matilda. Heather and I found her in a field in Central California in March 2008, and we had to bring her home. When I started to ride her, she was clearly uncomfortable and angry, and we suspected there was something wrong with her back. Suzanne quickly determined that sometime in her life she’d broken her withers and that, either then or at another time, her right hip was rotated and sunken and her ribs moved horribly out of line.

We must have had Suzanne work on her half a dozen times then, with remarkable and noticeable improvement each time, before we sold Matilda in December to a then 11-year-old girl. The girl and Matilda came back to us, just a year ago this week, in part because Matilda was going unhappily again and no one seemed able to help. I could tell Matilda felt like she had when we found her, and Suzanne confirmed that her sacrum and ribs were once again out of alignment. Another two or three sessions had Matilda going like herself again, and now she gets a check-up on every other visit.

My second example is the horse who caused me to write this. His name is Bill, and he’s a 2-year-old warmblood gelding. He arrived here last fall, as a nearly feral yearling, to grow up in our big field with our other young geldings. Bill started in our three-month pre-school program in June, and when I curried the right side of his neck the first time, he flew backwards and broke out of the crossties. I thought that suggested pain in his neck, which wasn’t a surprise since he always flew back like that whenever something surprised him. (Who knows if he reared backwards because his neck hurt or if rearing backwards had caused the neck pain—the chicken or the egg?) After this scene had been repeated several times, and I’d observed that he moved stiffly and tentatively on the longe line, we easily convinced his owner to let us have Suzanne look at him.

Suzanne immediately diagnosed severe trauma in his first two cervical vertebrae—she said he probably felt like he had a migraine every day—and went to work. Bill’s initial reaction was certainly guarded, but everything she did clearly made him more comfortable, and he became visibly more relaxed as she worked. When I worked him on the longe line a couple of days later, for the first time he was moving his head up and down at the walk and wasn’t desperately afraid of the whip. And we’ve been able to see the muscles in his previously pencil-thin neck grow now that the pain has subsided.

Bill’s now had two treatments, and—I swear—he’s almost like a different horse. He’s far more relaxed and confident (he hasn’t reared back on the crossties since his first treatment) and he’s now longeing, in tack, at all three gaits.

There’s no way to know how Matilda and Bill initially injured themselves, but they’re certainly more comfortable now. Unquestionably, chiropractic treatment has brought long-lasting relief that, as was the case with my injuries, traditional veterinary medicine could not, at least not without a long list of potential drug side effects.

My intention here is not at all to dismiss veterinary medicine. Suzanne, like any other honest equine chiropractor, will readily admit that she can do nothing for injuries like bowed tendons or strained suspensory ligaments, for trauma like colic or gaping wounds, or for infections or diseases. Only a veterinarian’s arsenal of treatments can deal with those problems.

That’s why I believe that chiropractic care (or other body work) and traditional veterinary medicine should each be a part of our horses’ care.

My friend Jimmy Wofford often describes horses as “a work in progress,” especially a horse with a lot of ability but a temperamental foible or two that is preventing the horse from being consistently competitive. When Jimmy describes a horse as a “work in progress,” he’s comparing him or her to a work of art, to something that right now might look like just some random splashes of color but that will, someday, tell a story in a beautiful way.

Really, every horse is a work in progress. It’s just that most of them either never get finished—for a list of reasons that could fill up this page—and many more are finished poorly and become the equine equivalent of graffiti. The “works” that do reach their consummation can range in quality from an eighth-grade art project (perhaps a perfect trail horse or a therapeutic-riding horse) to a Picasso or a Rembrandt (an Olympic or World Champion).

I have a horse named Alba who is very much a work in progress (and whom I’ve written about previously), and at a competition last weekend we made some definite progress toward arranging the colors and the light into a beautiful painting.

Alba is a 15.1-hand, Appendix Quarter Horse mare who was left with us three years a ago this month, by an owner who described her as “crazy” and then paid her first month’s board and disappeared. We initially thought she could make a nice lower-level mount for a teenager or smaller amateur woman, and we tried to sell her as that for two years. Meanwhile she progressed along the levels of eventing with me, always attacking the jumps rather too aggressively to suit that demographic.

But I loved riding her and loved having her around, and she’s so sweet and gentle that our 22-month-old son, Wesley, can feed her hay by hand, standing at the door of her stall. So, finally last winter I asked Heather, “Why are we trying to sell her?” She admitted she didn’t know, and now Alba will be with us for the rest of her life.

Why is she a work in progress? Because she’s pretty tricky to ride. She’s almost too willing, too eager about anything when you’re on her back (especially jumping), but she can be rather opinionated, and she has some foibles that my riding style isn’t completely suited for. But we’re both working on that.

Alba is very sensitive and very quick of mind and of body, so she reacts to every single movement of my own body, whether it’s intentional or unintentional. She’s always trying to anticipate what we’re doing next and how she wants to do it, and her relatively small size and quickness can knock me slightly off balance, causing me to shift my weight or a leg, or move a hand, in a direction I didn’t mean. She then tries to figure out what I was trying to say, instead of just, as many horses do, ignoring my unintended aid. And sometimes she can get pretty angry if my aids don’t make sense to her or correspond to what she thinks she should be doing, especially when we’re jumping.

In 2009 Alba zoomed through the three lowest levels of eventing in just six events, her only cross-country faults coming when I cleverly steered her to the wrong fence on cross-country in her first training-level start and we were eliminated. I started her at preliminary (the fourth level of eventing) in February 2010, figuring it would be a big jump up but knowing that the training-level jumps were no longer impressing her.

Last weekend’s Event at Woodside (in Woodside, Calif.) was her 10^th preliminary start, and it was her most consistent overall performance. While her dressage test wasn’t as relaxed and obedient as her previous start (in May, also at Woodside), it had no major mistakes and earned a reasonably competitive score. On cross-country she confidently jumped the ditch that surprised her in May as she cruised beautifully around the course to finish just 5 seconds slow (because I took the long option at the combination with the ditch). And we finished with the best show jumping round we’ve ever had at preliminary level.

After we’d finished, I felt as if my little Quarter Horse, who’s stayed in my life because of an unpaid board bill, had proven she’s belongs in the same division as the more elite and expensive horses she’s up against. Much more importantly, I felt as if Alba and I had reached a new level of communication and trust in each other. As an example, both water jumps had 90-degree turns in them, and she just turned where I looked, sited in on the next jump, and went to it.

My goal for Alba this fall is the classic-format preliminary three-day event at Galway Downs, in Temecula, Calif., on the first weekend in November. I believe that the classic format is the next step in her education, because the two phases of roads and tracks and the steeplechase phase that precede the cross-country phase will deliver her to the cross-country course in a more settled state than she’s ever started out on course before. Our only problems on course have come at early combinations, when she’s still over-eager and doesn’t like to listen to my attempts to slow her down. She then gets surprised by a bank or a ditch when she jumps in, which is what happened at Woodside in May. I hope the classic format will show her she can be both eager and responsive early in the course, just as she is once we get six or seven fences into the course.

I also plan to make the classic-format preliminary three-day events at Galway Downs and Rebecca Farm (Mont.) her goal for the next several years, sort of her “career.” Why do that instead of moving her up to intermediate? Two reasons:

First, although she’s certainly got excellent scope over fences and a bigger horse’s stride, she is still small, and I’m just not certain that the bigger and wider jumps and the faster speed isn’t going to be at the top of what she can do. Alba gives me everything thing she has, all the time, and I absolutely don’t want to discourage or, especially, scare her.

So, the second reason is that I really want to support these few surviving classic-format events, and I think she’s the perfect horse to do it with. I think that both Alba and I will really enjoy eventing the way it’s meant to be.

I’m eagerly anticipating feeling how our communication will grow as we ride through the classic format at Galway Downs, and I hope that, on Saturday night, after a clear cross-country round, I’ll look at her with even more adulation and appreciation than ever before, just as I have with the three horses I’ve already ridden in three-day events. Don’t worry—I’ll let you know how it goes.

One day last week, my wife, Heather, had a phone conversation with a friend of ours who felt insulted and angry because a prospective horse buyer had offered her half of her horse’s advertised price. That price was one-third less than the price she’d previously offered (because she really wants to cut her costs by selling this horse), and the woman also wanted to, after trying the horse twice, take him on trial for a month.

Basically, the buyer was a tremendous pain in the butt, and she even she told our friend that this is a buyers’ market, insinuating that our friend should be happy to accept her oh-so-generous offer. Our friend took the low-ball offer as an insult to the horse and as a slight to her as a professional horseman.

The situation prompted Heather and I to ponder the horse market, which probably isn’t a whole easier than trying to predict the leaping and—now— plunging of the stock market. The horse market is a pertinent topic to us, since we do sell horses, although not nearly as many as we did before the economy crashed three years ago.

Two of the horses we have for sale now are youngsters, a 3-year-old Thoroughbred-cross gelding and a 2-year-old warmblood filly, and I think they represent opposing arguments of how strongly this is, or is not, a buyers’ market.

On the one hand, it would certainly seem to be a buyers’ market since a lot of people have been trying to lighten their horse load, trying to reduce feed, veterinary, farrier and other costs by having fewer horses in their care. That’s caused a glut of horses on the market, across the discipline spectrum, and the economic law of supply and demand says that as the supply of a good rises and the demand decreases, the price has to fall.

We’re in the reduce-the-herd boat with the 2-year-old filly. We were given her as payment for training her sire, and we would like to sell this lovely filly, now. Since she was a late foal (born in mid-August 2009), we’ve only had her in our care for about 18 months. We’ve put almost no training time into her (other than teaching her to lead and stand for vet/farrier care), so we don’t have much invested in her yet. So we’re willing to offer her for any reasonable offer. (No, $500 is not a reasonable offer.)

On the other hand, people who have good horses that they want to sell are not willing to fire sale them, unless they’re absolutely financially or otherwise desperate. That’s the case with our friend’s horse and with our 3-year-old gelding. Her horse is a good mover and is beautifully schooled on the flat, and she’s put three years of time and money into him, so $5,000 doesn’t begin to recoup that investment.

We bred our 3-year-old, and just in stud fee, feed, vaccinations (the only vet care he’s had) and hoof trimming, and feeding him for three years, we’ve invested between $8,000 and $9,000 in him. And he’s been in work since February, so there’s six months of our time, which we would have charged $4,200 for. Plus, he’s the fourth foal we’ve trained out of his dam, so we know the strengths of his siblings and know he’s the most athletically gifted of the four. So, with $12,000-plus invested in him and knowing his quality, we’re not going to take low-ball offers.

But we also know that riders are always reluctant to buy young horses and that they don’t accept what it’s cost us, as the breeders and trainers, to get them going under saddle. So they won’t usually pay what young horses are worth. That’s why he’s listed at for $8,500, a price that’s only two-thirds of what we’ve put into him. We sold his two older brothers for more than twice that as 4-year-olds, and so we’re willing to wait, if we have to, and sell him for more after he’s proven himself in competition next spring.

So, is it a buyers’ market? Yes, largely it is, because there are certainly more goods available (horses) than there are buyers looking to buy them. But good horses, like luxury cars (Rolls-Royce at the extreme, but also Mercedes, BMW, Cadillac), are going to remain expensive because of their relative scarcity.

And even if it is largely a buyers’ market, that doesn’t give buyers the right to be inconsiderate or rude to the people selling the horses. Would you walk into an auto dealer’s showroom and tell him, “I know you’re desperate to sell cars, so you’ll take my offer of $1,000 for that car, or I’m out of here”?

Of course, it all comes down to the age-old maxim: What’s horse worth? What somebody will pay for him.

Just the other day, I heard that the federal government, specifically officials at the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, are proposing that all farmers and horsemen must have a commercial driver’s license (CDL) to drive a vehicle pulling a trailer. It’s a ludicrous idea.

FMCSA officials originally scheduled a public comment period for May, but senators from more than a dozen states got that extended through Aug. 1. Unfortunately, that means it’s too late to “officially” comment, but I’m going to comment here anyway and hope that it will motivate a few of you to contact your legislators.

The proposal appears to be primarily aimed at farmers, mostly Midwestern farmers, who use various sizes of trailers to haul various grains to their nearest grain elevator or to haul farming equipment to another field. Federal officials apparently believe that farmers lumbering along with these loads need to be subject to the same regulations as the long-haul commercial truckers zooming down the interstate.

The regulations have apparently been written to include people hauling livestock (including horses) in trailers more than 16 feet long. The proposal revolves around classifying grain and livestock as interstate commerce, which is the reason the federal government can regulate truck drivers, since driver’s licenses are actually the states’ responsibility.

There are several problems with this proposal, which I’m sure some bean counter thinks is a brilliant new governmental revenue source.

One is that the next semi-logical regulation step would be to require anyone pulling any kind of a trailer (a smaller horse trailer, a boat trailer, a utility trailer or an RV) to have a CDL. Such a requirement would directly affect me and thousands of other horse people. I have a four-horse trailer with full living quarters, making it an RV, so I don’t need a CDL. I have doubts that I could get a CDL, so how would I haul our horses to events 250 and 500 miles away? I couldn’t possibly pay someone with a CDL to do it. So what would I do? Try to sell that trailer and get a smaller one? I also have a two-horse trailer with a dressing room, and I’ll bet it’s just over 16 feet long. So would I have to close the business? It seems counter-productive to close businesses in our economic situation.

If tens of thousands of other horse people and RV drivers stopped driving our big trailers, the result is a serious economic impact. It would mean we’d spend far less in various over-the road costs, the most obvious being gas or fuel and other supplies at hundreds of travel plazas across the country. There would also be lower toll revenues on bridges and tollways, decreased RV and truck sales and decreased insurance premiums, and the list goes on. The German miser in me thinks, “Wow, what a great way to cut my expenses,” but it’s not at all that simple.

Part of the reasoning for this misguided proposal is supposedly safety concerns—thinking that requiring the same license as interstate truckers would make the roads safer. Horse hockey. I watch the San Francisco Bay Area weather and traffic each morning, and they regularly report on tractor-trailer and bus accidents that clog up the roads. But I don’t recall the last RV crash that spilled diesel or some other toxic chemical, and I can guarantee you that almost anyone driving horses is a hell of a lot more careful than your average big-rig driver.

Finally, consider the logistics of all of us being required to take the tests for a CDL. The states couldn’t possibly do it—unless the FMCSA is going to pay for people to conduct the testing in the 50 states. Considering the aggravating debate on the debt ceiling that’s mercifully just come to an end, I’m sure that’s not going to be in the federal budget.

Here in California, it takes weeks or even months to get an appointment at the DMV for a standard license test. Why? Because the state’s budget cuts have closed DMV offices one to two days a week. It would probably take years to get an appointment to take the CDL tests! And then the police would be largely unable to enforce it, except randomly, because of traffic violations or accidents, once again because of budget cut. I had a fender-bender accident a bit over a year ago, and it turned out it was the end of the shift for the county officer who stopped because he’d been just a few hundred yards behind. But he couldn’t stay to take our statements because it was the end of his shift and he couldn’t work on overtime. So the other driver and I had to wait until an officer on the next shift could respond.

Unnecessary. Logistically impossible. Largely unenforceable. Three reasons this proposal is a disaster looking for a place to happen.

With apologies once again to Garrison Keillor, I have to say this was a quiet month at Phoenix Farm.

I’ll start off on the horse side of farm life. We decided to build a jumping chute because we needed to prepare a 3-year-old Oldenburg colt we’re training for his stallion inspection next month, and the biggest part of that test is showing their scope and skill in a jumping chute. Since we had to go to the trouble of building it, using almost all our jump standards and rails to form a 40-meter lane against the ring rail, with three jumps, we decided we’d send our 3-year-old gelding and our three 2-year-olds down it too. It was a fascinating two days of baby jumping, an exercise to remind us that no two horses are exactly alike.

Boogie, the 3-year-old cot, started off great over the crossrail and the vertical, causing Heather and I and his owner to smile, but then he became confused when we added the oxer two strides away. He was jumping so big over the first two fences that he ate up the distance to the third and couldn’t figure out how to deal with it. So we took things down to give him a chance to use his brain, and then he went through with the fences set low. Two days later, we made the distances between the jumps 3 feet longer and the jumps 6 to 9 inches bigger, and he looked as if he were leaping houses. He looked like the jumper we hoped he would be—big smiles for all of us and big pats for Boogie.

Ionto is also a 3-year-old, a Thoroughbred/draft-cross we bred and the fourth of four siblings we’ve had. He’s the most athletic of the four and a very laid-back guy. (You’ve seen him on the cover of the May issue of the Horse Journal, demonstrating side reins and chambons.) Ionto hopped down the chute without fuss, just like we expected.

We have three 2-year-olds in what we call pre-school right now. Two of them are babies we bred, but the third is Bob, who’s been bred for and is destined to be a show hunter. He’s a sensitive and spooky guy, and he’s not so good at dealing with new things in his life. But once you teach him something—he’s got it and will do it again and again. He’s just starting to canter on longe line, and we introduced him to the chute very slowly and quietly, walking him through it a couple of times with no poles, then with poles on the ground, and then sending him through it alone a couple of times with just the poles.

Then we built the crossrail and then the vertical, and he just hopped on through—as if he were born to do it. And he was, being by the champion regular working hunter Popeye K and out of a grand prix jumping mare line. If he couldn’t jump, I said to Heather, then we should all give up this breeding thing.

Piper is a warmblood gelding we bred, and his temperament is rather like a giant Labrador retriever. But he’s going through a horrible 2-year-old growth stage (today the right front leg grows, tomorrow the neck gets longer and thinner), and so he can barely put one foot in front of the other. But Piper just said, “OK, I’ll give it a try” and forged on through and hopped over the crossrail and vertical with power, showing us that he can certainly leave the ground.

Bella, our 2-year-old homebred filly, acted completely different than the boys. They all stopped at the end of the ring nearest the end of the chute and waited for someone to catch them. (Well, Boogie would admire himself in the mirror, as stallions like to do). But Bella would gallop back to the gate, and the other end, and she became very excited by the whole exercise. Still, she never hesitated at the new challenge and jumped beautifully very time. Once again, we’d have been very surprised (and disappointed) if she couldn’t and didn’t want to jump. She’s by another champion regular working hunter, the pinto Palladio, and she’s out of a mare with all the great Thoroughbred jumping and endurance blood you could want (Nearco/Nasrullah on both the top and bottom of her pedigree, along with Mahmoud, Turn-To, Ribot and Princequillo).

On the 4^th of July we welcomed the first of this year’s crop of Nigerian dwarf goats into the world. Except it wasn’t in the usual easy goat way. Norma Jean was the first of our five pregnant does to be ready to kid, and we’d spent the previous 24 hours waiting for the big moment, as she was obviously ready and trying. But nothing was happening, so about mid-afternoon Heather called the vet, and about an hour later we decided to take her to the goat vet clinic, about 30 minutes away. A quick examination, which Norma Jean found rather uncomfortable, showed that one large kid was malpresented and blocking the others. A holiday C-section would be necessary. Fabulous.

Fortunately, the surgery was a big success (except for the cost, which was, thankfully, thousands less than any surgery on a horse!) and yielded two bucks. In honor of the holiday, we named one Sparkler, and in honor of their sire, Mr. Lincoln, we named the other one (the one who’d caused the problem) Abe.

Since then, Amakua and Goey have both kidded easily and normally, yielding two does (both out of Goey) and three bucks. We named Amakua’s two bucks Rory and Mickey (characters on Heather’s favorite TV show, Torchwood), and we gave Goey’s kids space-related names in honor of the final space shuttle mission—Carl (as in Sagan, the scientist and author who insisted there is life elsewhere in the universe), Nova and Luna. We’re now enjoying the antics of the seven pronging baby goats, most of whom we’ve already sold. The fifth goat, Imp, is due next week, and I’m sure she has twins, if not triplets.

While baby goats always bring a smile to your face, July has been a month of heartbreak here at Phoenix Farm. My dog Jackson, a Beagle-cross we adopted from a local animal shelter in June 2010, had been sickly for two weeks, a condition three trips to the vet had been unable to diagnose. He had no temperature, his blood work was normal, and his bodily functions were normal, except that he was being unusually picky about eating and drinking and, thus, was losing weight and becoming periodically dehydrated. The day after we’d spent a weekend at a schooling event 250 miles away, he was even more listless, and so late in the afternoon Heather, Wesley and I took him again to the veterinarian’s clinic.

The vet was most concerned and flummoxed by Jackson’s extremely poor condition. After examining Jackson yet again, he looked at Jackson’s records and said, “You know, you haven’t had him vaccinated here.” We said true, but he’d been fully vaccinated (and just neutered) when we adopted him, so, yes, it was time. The vet thought a moment and said, “I’ll bet this is distemper. I haven’t seen it in years.” And then we wondered if he’d been vaccinated as a puppy, and we suspected that he had a weak immune system, which would explain the mange we’d treated four months earlier.

With distemper, the only treatment is supportive, and that has a very poor success rate, even if you catch it early. Jackson was far, far beyond that, and the painful decision was clear.

It was time for Jackson to go. I stayed for a long time in the examining room after he’d closed his eyes, saying goodbye to the little tricolored dog who was my constant companion for far too short a time. He would help me wake Wesley up in the morning (bringing a smile to Wesley’s face) and help me put Wesley to bed at night, lying by our side as I rocked Wesley to sleep. He would sit or lie facing the ring, watching me ride every horse, and trot up and down the hill from the barn to the house after me on every horse. He was ready to go on every trip, and every night he lay on the floor beside my bed. Normally right now, as I sit at my computer typing this blog, he should be waiting patiently on the rug behind my chair, ready to move as soon as I got up.

But he’s not there anymore. And I’m having a hard time getting used to not seeing those eyes looking up at me, asking, “Where are we going now, Dad?” All I see is his shadow. I’ll bury his ashes and plant a tree over them on the hill above our house, with the other three dogs who’ve gone on before him, when the rains return this fall.

Heather and I finished the month by having a night out to celebrate our 13^th wedding anniversary, with Wesley’s grandparents happily taking care of him for the night. The occasion was a reminder of how lucky I am to have such a wonderful wife and adorable son in my life.

And that’s the news from Phoenix Farm, where all the Nigerian dwarf goats are fat (and one is still pregnant), all the horses are good-looking, and all the dogs and cats are well above average.

Last week I had a discussion with one of our students about how we use our aids to communicate with our horses while we’re on their backs. It seemed to be a rather poignant moment in this teenager’s education, so I thought I’d share it with a larger audience.

We have five basic aids to communicate with our horses while riding—voice, hands (reins), legs, seat and weight. And we have to teach them the commands and directions that each of those aids give, commands to do a diverse variety of things and for which the intensity can range from extremely subtle to extremely strong. I told her to think of the range as being from me whispering to her to me shouting at her.

But our challenge is that the horse doesn’t automatically understand the directions or concepts we’re trying to express to him. I told her it’s as if I spoke Greek and she spoke English. I told her that, since we’re both talking about horses and riding, she’d probably eventually understand some of what I said, probably largely through gestures and imitation. And then I remembered what legendary horseman Bertalan de Nemethy wrote about aids and their application in his 1988 book The de Nemethy Method:

“When I think of the rider’s aids, I am reminded of an anecdote that is told about one of the world’s great pianists, who was asked how difficult it was to learn to play the piano as he did. ‘It is really not difficult at all,’ he replied. ‘You only have to figure out which fingers go on what keys, and for how long. Then you practice for the rest of your life so that you can do it up to tempo.’

“Communicating with the horse is about the same. It is not really all that difficult to execute the correct instrumental acts once or twice, but it is a lifetime’s work to master them. Any horse will be confused by a rider’s clumsy attempts to communicate through an imperfect vocabulary, and this confusion is often mistaken for stupidity or resistance. Luckily, the horse’s memory is excellent, and this provides an excellent basis on which to build our communication.

“Of course, the rider’s physical communication and contact with the horse are still paramount. He gives the orders, and the horse must learn to understand the equestrian language that he employs. This language is often referred to as ‘aids,’ though perhaps ‘signals’ would be a more appropriate term for the actions we want to describe.”

As the coach of the U.S. show jumping team during its greatest era, from 1952 through 1980, Bert revolutionized the training of horses and riding over fences in this country. He then became a tremendously influential course designer, with his signature creation being the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. Those courses were renowned because, for the first time in the Olympics, they weren’t simply a test of scope; they were a test of training and of communication between horses and riders.

I consider it a blessing of my life that I knew Bert, who died in early 2002. I’ll always remember the day he devoted to describing and explaining his three Olympic courses to me for an article I wrote about them. He told me on that day in August 1984, “The animal has to be trained to follow certain signals, and there is only one classical way—there are no shortcuts. The horse should jump the fences clean, but not because of fear. He has to be relaxed and able to use his good jumping ability without being disturbed.”

Bert was the consummate horseman, and so I keep the passage from his book that I’ve repeated above on the wall of our tack room. I think his words perfectly describe our challenge as horsemen and riders, and I concluded my conversation with our student about aids by reading them aloud to her. I hope she remembers them.

In mid-May I wrote a blog called “I’ll Propose a Plan for Unwanted Horses,” in which I outlined my idea for a coalition of horse groups to deal with the problem by sponsoring a low-cost euthanasia program. I expected—and hoped—to get a lot of comments and objections. But, instead, I’ve gotten no comments at all.

I’m suspecting one or two reasons for that. It could be because you folks read my proposal and thought, “That’s a good idea” and wrote nothing. Or it could be a technical problem—the techies at AIM have been moving these blogs around, and I’m not convinced the comments always show up where I look for them.

So this week I’m going to advance my thoughts a little further.

To refresh your memory, I proposed that equine welfare groups and veterinary schools and clinics form a coalition to create a nationwide humane-euthanasia program that would provide the service at a very low cost ($100 or less).

The Unwanted Horse Coalition, which is part of the American Horse Council, has been at the forefront of this problem for the better part of this decade, and their 2009 study shows that the high cost of euthanasia and carcass removal is one of the top five reasons horses get neglected or abandoned. So I would think the two most obvious groups to band together to get this started are the Unwanted Horse Coalition and the American Association of Equine Practitioners, of which every veterinary school and clinic is a member.

I’m suggesting that folks from the UHC and the AAEP put their heads together and figure out how to humanely reduce the number of these horses through euthanasia. We can all agree that too many people who shouldn’t own horses do own them and that education about the realities of horse ownership is critical for the future. But the UHC figured in their 2009 study that about 170,000 unwanted horses crop up each year, and that’s a number that’s a problem right now, a number for which prevention is too late.

It’s also a number that adoption centers and other well-meaning but small horse-welfare groups absolutely can’t handle. And it’s a number that even horse-slaughter facilities couldn’t completely handle—if we still had them. And I’m afraid that we’re going to have to accept that political reality has ensured that they’re not coming back.

There are two major requirements for getting a national low-cost euthanasia program started and working. The first is a change of attitude—on the part of horse owners and on the part of the leaders of breed associations.

I’m talking primarily about the attitude of responsible horse owners, who often reflexively recoil at any mention of euthanasia. All horse owners need to understand the financial and other resource challenges of keeping horses in any adoption facility and accept that large numbers of horses simply can’t live in them. They have to accept the basic humanity of ending an injured or old horse’s life.

And breed associations have to spin their view or goal 180 degrees. Instead of being focused on producing ever more horses, they should be focusing on how to promote the quality of their horses and the quality of those horses’ lives, in a wide range of ways.

And that leads us to the very tangible requirement of funding this program:  I believe that every single breed organization, from the giant American Quarter Horse Association to the smallest breed group must help underwrite this. The AQHA needs to at least double its laughably low registration fee of $25 per horse, and it (and every other breed group) should charge an annual “end-of-life” fee per horse registered with them. I’m suggesting a fee of $5 per horse—a fee that’s not going to change our lives but could change the comfort of many horses.

I think sports organizations like the U.S. Equestrian Federation should collect a similar annual fee from every member, and I strongly believe that race tracks (Thoroughbred, Quarter Horse, Arabian and Standardbred) should all be contributing to the future of the horses they depend upon. They could charge a small fee for every horse stabled at a track (or every time a horse races), and they should transfer a small amount of their daily betting handle to this program. These contributions would add up to millions of dollars a year.

Perhaps you’re wondering what the funding is needed for? This program would need money because we can’t ask our veterinarians to euthanize unwanted horses for free and someone needs to be paid to remove the carcass and take it to a rendering plant.

Would this quickly eliminate the problem of unwanted horses? Admittedly, no. But it would address a number of issues, and I think that in a few years it would help the number of unwanted horses shrink.

Your thoughts?

At a horse trial last weekend, I said jokingly to a friend that I was going to go change my clothes and “turn into a show jumping rider.”

She responded, “Is there an app for that? Or maybe you could watch some videos on YouTube and learn how to do it!”

I thought that was quite a clever commentary on our modern world, one in which we’re always trying to figure out how do things more easily and more quickly, one in which the amazing technology of tiny computer chips and the internet are eliminating records, CDs, phone books, maps and even books. Could these inexorable forces of our culture eliminate the need to actually learn how to ride? My mind began to ponder how apps could help me around the farm.

Well, let’s start with riding. Eventing is what I do, and the hardest part of the sport is that you have to be three kinds of riders—a dressage rider, a cross-country rider and a show jumping rider. It is enticing to think of being able to touch the screen when I want to be a dressage rider and—presto!—I could ride with the feel of Steffen Peters. Then, I could go to the screen again, hit the “XC Rider” app, and I could ride with the balance and confidence of Phillip Dutton. Finally, when it was time for show jumping, I could press the “SJ Rider” app and be able to balance my horse for the perfect distance at every fence, just like Rich Fellers.

God, that would be great! And, if for some reason I wanted to become an even better rider, I could just pick up my phone again, go to YouTube, and tell it to show me videos of riding lessons. I’m sure that would be so much more helpful (and enjoyable) than actually paying someone to work with me in a sun-drenched, dusty ring (or on a cold, windy day) for an hour.

Let me think of other things I could use an app for around the farm. A “Feed the Horses” app would be a big help, but feeding isn’t that hard. (Of course, that app better order the grain and hay, dump it into the right containers, and pay for it too.) Even better would be a “Turn Out/ Bring In” app, along with a “Muck the Stalls” app. Mornings and afternoons would be a breeze!

You know what I’d really love? A “Spread the Manure” app. That would save me so much time and money if I didn’t have to rent a second tractor to fill the manure spreader and didn’t have to spend two days filling and spreading, filling and spreading, filling and spreading. And I wouldn’t get covered with dust.

A “Clean the Tack” app would be great too. With more than a dozen horses in work, those cleaning hooks fill up with dirty bridles every single day. That app better do saddles too (including polishing the stirrups).

A “Bush-Hog and Weed-eat” app would be fabulous. But I better not have to thread new line into the weed-eater or get the blades sharpened on the bush-hog. I mean, if I had to do something, what would be the point?

Having just driven 1,200 miles to last weekend’s competition in Oregon, I’d just about kill for a “Drive the Trailer” app right now. If I could just magically show up, ready to ride like Steffen, Phillip and Rich, that would be the best.

Of course, if we had all those rider apps and the great YouTube videos, I guess Heater wouldn’t have to teach lessons, because she wouldn’t have any students.  I’m not sure if she’d like that or not.

You know, now that I think of it, there’s only one problem with this vision: I don’t have an iPhone or a Droid. I don’t even text. (I have taken a few photos with my phone—I’m great at that.) So I’d have to purchase a new phone and get Heather to teach me how to use it.

But I’ll bet there’s an app for that too!

The dual issues of whether and how to hold national championships in almost any discipline and how to foster the development and sales of young horses have plagued us for years, without resolution. They’re issues I’ve followed as a journalist and been affected by as a horseman for nearly 30 years.

In a recent issue of The Chronicle of the Horse, my friend Bill Moroney, the president of the U.S. Hunter Jumper Association, suggests putting these two issues together. Bill has suggested holding a young horse national championship at the Kentucky Horse Park. But he suggests that it should be much more than just a competition in the three Olympic disciplines and others. He suggests that it should be a major event, a sort of festival of young horses, with an auction of young horses and special presentations and attractions to lure people.

Certainly if there is any place in this country to have an event like this, it is the Kentucky Horse Park. Bill correctly notes that there is no other location so perfectly suited to such an affair—as last year’s Alltech FEI World Equestrian Games showed—but I’m going to argue that our weakness when it comes to producing and selling young horses is not going to be fully addressed by such an extravaganza.

Why do I say that? I’ll give you three reasons: 1) The sheer size of this country, 2) the cost of gasoline and fuel, 3) the malaise of our economy and the dim prospect that it will markedly improve in the near future.

The history of national championships in this country is dismal because of those reasons. They’re why it’s just not worth it—and often not possible—for the vast majority of American horse owners to ship their horses across the country to win a title. Americans only bring their horses to these if it’s a reasonably convenient trip, if it’s necessary for their own riding career, or if they have the money to burn.

I’m very interested in anything we can do to promote the development and sales of young horses in this country, because that’s what we do, or at least try to do. But it’s very hard to do, because all to few American riders understand or appreciate that the well-trained and experienced horses they like to ride have to be made that way and that doing that costs someone money and time that they need to be compensated for. You can’t make a profit on selling a 3- or 4-year-old you’ve bred for less than $10,000, but rarely will people pay that price for a horse that age.

What I’d like to see, more than a big, shiny new competition is a more comprehensive program. We need to do something that educates American riders about the thousands of lovely young horses we breed and produce in this country, so they don’t think that Europe is the only place to find a horse. A series of regional competitions and auctions would be more helpful than a national championship, although I’m not convinced that a competition/auction would be all that popular with potential buyers. I fear most wouldn’t see the reason to go.

Could we take advantage of the user-friendliness of social media to educate and market? Could the USEF, or another organization, put together a sort of clearing house of young horses?

I’d also suggest that the leaders of our national organizations should shift their horizon about the kinds of young horses they promote. For instance, the U.S. Eventing Association’s Young Event Horse Series is a very good idea, but the judging standard is written to evaluate horses as candidates to be four-star horses, the highest level of competition. That’s a level achieved by the tiniest percent of horses who event, and you’ll starve to death as a breeder if that’s the focus of your breeding program, because the odds are so long and because so few people will buy that horse. Your market has to be the 90-plus percent of the membership competing at beginner novice, novice and training level. But if that’s the kind of horse you’re producing, your horses will never get noticed in the USEA’s program.

I’ll admit that, rather like the Republican presidential candidates, who do nothing but bash President Obama’s various efforts, I don’t have any kind of detailed alternative to offer to Bill Moroney’s proposal. I just think that we need more than just a flashy event that we’ll hardly notice out here on the West Coast.

Last weekend, just before the Belmont Stakes culminated this year’s Triple Crown, I read a brief and dispassionate analysis of why the finishing times posted by Thoroughbred racehorses have only rarely improved over the last 30 years or so. The piece was in an online publication called The Post Game (http://www.thepostgame.com/features/201106/humans-keep-getting-faster-why-not-horses).

Being a racing fan, I’ve long known that Secretariat’s 1973 Kentucky Derby time (1:59 2/5) still stands as the stakes and track record and that his Belmont time (an astounding 2:24 for the 1 1/2 miles) has never been approached on any track since then. This year’s Belmont time was a bit slower than 2:30, and even when Affirmed and Alydar locked horns for almost the entirety of the 1978 Belmont, Afirmed’s final time was only 2:26 4/5. That means that Affirmed, the last horse to win the Triple Crown, would have lost to Secretariat by 14 lengths.

As I started writing this, I looked up the Thoroughbred American record times, and what I noticed right away was that that records for the 22 distances listed (from 2 furlongs to 2 miles) have been set only six times in this century. And five of those were for sprint races (at 2 furlongs, 3 furlongs, 3 ½ furlongs, 4 furlongs and 6 ½ furlongs). The sixth record, set by Najran at Belmont Park in 2005, only equaled Dr. Fager’s mile record of 1:32 1/5, set in 1968.

Racing folk like to say, “Time doesn’t matter unless you’re doing it,” and that’s often true, as the time depends a lot on the track condition, the weather, and how the race unfolds. But time is really the only indicator we have of how fast Thoroughbreds are running, and the author of this article cites four reasons why equine speed records haven’t fallen with the regularity of human speed records: the shoes, the track, human vs. equine ego and equine structure.

All are likely reasons. Horse shoes, especially the ones racehorses wear, have changed little in decades, while human running shoes are a bout half as heavy and yet many times more supportive. Horses are still racing over much the same surfaces they did decades ago (the synthetic surfaces, which were supposed to cause fewer injuries but haven’t, aren’t faster than dirt), while human tracks now provide a firm base that feels as soft as if you’re running on a Tempur-Pedic bed.

Those are the human-engineered factors. I think the other two are even more important. Horses don’t have egos like we do. Yes, they can certainly be proud and combative, unwilling to lose. But we can’t motivate a horse by telling him, “If you run your heart out and set the record in this race, you’ll be remembered as the greatest of all time.” Good racehorses only want to beat the other horses, in that race. They can’t read the teletimer on the tote board.

And then there’s structure or anatomy. A Thoroughbred weighs four to 10 times as much as a human runner, and on every stride that weight, at a speed more than twice as fast as ours, is being supported by a single leg that’s nowhere near that much bigger than ours. It would appear to be a simple matter of physics, that an unbelievably faster horse simply could not stay sound. Thus, he (or she) won’t win races and would not likely reproduce.

So the horses racing today at tracks across the country look basically the same as the Thoroughbreds racing 25 or 50 years ago, and they’re doing almost exactly the same thing—galloping around left-handed ovals over distances from 2 furlongs to 2 miles. We could certainly argue whether today’s Thoroughbreds are as sturdy as their distant relatives, but that might be for another time.

Now, let’s compare those horses and their sport to the three Olympic horse sports. The horses (and riders too) competing in these look and perform almost nothing like their pre-World War II predecessors. The jumps are far more diverse and creative and better built; the courses that include those jumps are far, far more demanding physically and mentally and communication-wise; and the footing those courses are built on is, generally, more weather-resistant and often shock-absorbing.

Today’s sport horses are generally bigger and more muscular, because they’re more highly trained than their predecessors. In all but a precious few cases, the horses who competed in the 1932 Olympics wouldn’t be at all competitive today. I’m afraid that almost all would be literally laughed out next year in London, if they could even qualify to get there.

There’s even a noticeable difference in technical difficulty and, thus, the level of training from the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics to today. Would 1984 gold medalists Ahlerich and Charisma and Touch of Class still be competitive today? I would argue that they were such extraordinary athletes, with three of the greatest riders and trainers of all time (Reiner Klimke, Mark Todd and Joe Fargis), that, yes, they could be trained to win in 2012. But I don’t think the same would be true of the majority of their competitors.

No sane person could argue that the technical proficiency and standard of competition has not increased dramatically at the international level (and national level too) in the last several decades. Dressage horses now perform to music, doing double canter pirouettes and passage half-passes, and performing a piaffe barely dreamed of earlier. Event horses gallop through precise gymnastic combinations (often involving jumps with faces only 4 feet wide) in the middle of ponds; jumpers make demanding changes of stride length and balance in three or four strides to leap over jumps a family of hobbits could live in.

If today’s sporthorses are doing so much more than today’s racehorses, does it mean that sporthorse training has dramatically improved, while racehorse training has not? You could certainly make that argument. Or has breeding made a difference too? We’ve now been purposefully breeding sporthorses for some 40 years, selected largely on their trainability and their ability over fences or in the dressage ring, so we should have more suitable horses. Perhaps too sporthorses are benefiting from a hybrid vigor that Thoroughbreds cannot because of their closed studbook?

And, yet, like racing, horses aren’t jumping bigger—in fact, Olympic and other international show jumping courses usually aren’t as big as 30 or 40 years ago, and the maximum height of cross-country fences hasn’t changed in 80 years. In fact, three-day event courses are shorter than they used to be. Dressage tests are harder, but while riders have developed variations on movements for their freestyles (the piaffe pirouette, the passage half-pass), no one has created a new movement or even suggested adding the airs above the ground to the Grand Prix.

It makes me wonder if we reached the limit of equine ability decades ago. Maybe all we can do is fine-tune things from here

I often get annoyed when someone insists that a horse will always have a certain characteristic or problem. They’ll say things like, “He’s just crazy” or “He’s a stopper” or “He can’t do dressage.”

While it certainly can be true that a horse isn’t cut out to be a jumper or a dressage horse, and it’s certainly very true that some horses are more sensitive or excitable than others, I don’t believe that most horses just “are”—meaning they’re unchangeable. They are living, thinking animals, and just like us, they can—and do—change and evolve, depending upon their training and their environment (and sometimes their health too).

I believe that, almost all of the time, if you and your horse are having a problem in training or competition, you can fix it with thought, effort and time. Sure, you may very well have a weakness in a specific area, something you have to make allowances for whenever you compete, but most things can be overcome, if you take the time and make the effort.

My appendix Quarter Horse mare Alba is a case in point. I’ve been competing Alba, who’s now 9, in eventing for three years now, and this is her second season at preliminary, the fourth of the sport’s six levels. Her previous owner brought her to us to sell (helpfully proclaiming she was “a crazy mare”) and then never paid us a dime after that first month. We became her owner 90 days later by court decree.

I never thought she was crazy, although we’ve decided he thought she was because she’s desperately afraid of cows, despite her Quarter Horse heritage. They’d been barrel racing her, and what do they usually have at shows with barrel racing? Cows. She wouldn’t have liked that at all.

Alba is also an over-achiever. She desperately wants to do things right, so she’s always anticipating what she’s going to do next, guessing what my next aids will be. And she gets rather frantic (and angry too) if she guesses wrong or doesn’t understand.

Alba looks more like a small Thoroughbred (she stands 15.2 hands) than a Quarter Horse, and she’s blessed with considerably scopier movement and jump than stock-bred or cow-bred Quarter Horses. (Please don’t take offense, Quarter Horse people; those horses aren’t bred or built for dressage or jumping. They’re bred for a specific job they do fantastically.) And she’s as physically quick as she is mentally quick.

At her first event, at beginner novice level, Alba was extremely bold and strong on the cross-county course, and at her next event, at novice level, she ran away with me on cross-country and in show jumping. So I moved her up unusually quickly to training level, hoping the 3’3” jumps would make her slow down and look. They did—for four events. So considerably quicker than I usually do, I moved her up to preliminary, where the jumps are 3’7”, figuring this would be her “training” level. And it has been.

Dressage and show jumping have continued to be her most difficult phases, because she gets so ring-anxious. Well, on Memorial Day weekend, at The Event At Woodside (Calif.), we sort of experienced all the ups and downs in her education and evolution. I experienced the parts of her progress that are going well and the parts that still need a lot more work.

We got to Woodside early enough on Thursday that I was able to school her in the dressage ring where we’d be competing. Working in the actual competition ring was an opportunity to help her feel more comfortable in it, and I rode her through the dressage test, repeating several movements we didn’t do well. My goal was to show her that she could relax and listen as well in the competition ring as she does at home and, now, in the warm-up.

It worked. We placed fourth in dressage with a very good score or 32.7, equivalent to 67.3 percent in straight dressage. It was by far our best test ever, and I was tremendously proud of her.

In our previous event, in April, she’d been blessedly calm and rideable on the cross-country course, right from the beginning. But this time she pulled hard to the first two fences, and then I could feel her “take a breath” on the gallop to fence 3. Heather had reminded me to ride her hard to fence 6, a rail-to-ditch-to-rail combination, because she’d been surprised by a similar combination (at fence 3) at Galway Downs in late March. Well, I didn’t ride her well enough, and she stopped in half a stride when she suddenly saw the ditch. That was disappointing, but she jumped fabulously the rest of the way, especially at the two quite difficult water complexes.

The second water complex (three fences from the finish) had a lot of experienced riders worried, because it was four demanding efforts in a sort of serpentine shape. The complex began with large spread fence (probably 3’6” high by 3’6” wide), then an almost 90-dgree left turn of eight to 10 strides to a log drop into the water, then a right bend of another eight to 10 strides to a wooden canoe-shaped jump in the water, and then a left bend of five or six strides to a big corner jump just out of the water. Alba picked up on each of the jumps and just sailed through.

What our early refusal showed is that the phase she’s in now is that she’s actually looking at where her feet are going, no longer just leaping kamikaze-like. That’s good news and bad news—it’s a problem early in the course, when she’s still over-eager and strong, and she suddenly notices a bank drop or a ditch. Keeping her calm and attentive while galloping is our next big challenge, and I suspect the classic-format preliminary three-day event at Galway Downs in November will be the next big climb on her learning curve.

In the three-day event, we’ll have done two phases of roads and tracks (trotting for about 40 minutes) and a three-minute steeplechase phase before we reach the cross-country course. I expect the first three phases will deliver Alba to the start of cross-country in a relaxed attitude, ready to gallop and to listen. I’m really looking forward to the three-day event and to that ride around the cross-country course.

Guest Blog by Heather Bailey

Like most of the eventing world, we woke up this morning to the kind of news that makes your heart thump and your blood run cold. A barn fire had raced through the famous True Prospect Farm (home to Phillip Dutton and Boyd Martin, among others), claimed the lives of six horses, and left two in intensive-care unit at the New Bolton Center and two more in the regular hospital there. Three of the riders training there—Ryan Woods, Caitlin Silliman and Lillian Heard—were treated and released for injuries they suffered running in to the barn to try and get the horses out.

As horse owners, and barn owners, nothing is more terrifying to contemplate than a barn fire. You can’t help thinking of your own animals and building, and if you can’t turn your brain off, you eventually can all but feel the heat, smell the smoke, and hear the screams.

A tragedy of this magnitude is extremely difficult to get your head around, and for the average horse owner seems as though it would be the end of you. For some of those affected by this terrible turn of events, it may be.

But one thing I’ve learned over the years of being a farm owner is that you rarely have the luxury of simply curling up and crying. As much as you may want to, it just isn’t a possibility—because you have other animals, other horses, and other creatures who are relying on you not to fall apart. They still need care, and their bellies won’t understand that you’re grieving.

While I’m blessed to never have experienced something so awful as this, I have seen and experienced some fairly horrific things—gory, life-ending injuries, horrible colic, trailer accidents. What has always struck me as a bit odd is, that if you ask, most people who’ve been involved with horses over the long haul have seen such horrifying things too. But we don’t talk about it, really.

I’ve found often it is a very surreal experience to have something horrid happen, then have to go out and do something mundane but necessary, such as get groceries. Inevitably, the clerk will ask the standard, “How are you today?” and I’m sometimes tempted to answer truthfully, “Well, terrible, I had a broodmare drop a horribly premature foal this morning, and it had no hair and couldn’t breathe on its own and its bones were soft, and . . .”

But I refrain, smile and say, “Fine, thanks.” And then I think about emergency room doctors, who surely must see horrifying things day in and day out, and have families, and go shopping, get gas, etc. I wonder how often they’re tempted to answer the clerks with something other than, “Fine, thanks.”

In 2009 when I was pregnant, I had gotten extensive prenatal testing due to my “advanced maternal age” (they say that right to your face!). It just so happened that when the doctor called back to discuss the results with me, as I was watching my beloved broodmare Lizzie being sliced open for emergency colic surgery. We’d left her three-week-old filly sedated in the barn. Although the news on my baby was good, the news on Lizzie was bad. (She ultimately wouldn’t make it, and we’d raise her daughter as an orphan on a nurse mare.) The doctor was growing increasingly agitated at my lack of joy over the news that everything looked great and we were having a boy. So I had to explain just where I was.

My exhaustion and illness and worry probably made me explain a bit too much detail, because eventually the doctor was completely silent and then said, “Make sure you tell the vets you are pregnant, and call me next week if you have any other questions,” before she hung up.

She later told me that she had been torn while talking to me, because pregnant ladies are supposed to avoid “shock” and “stress.” But she could also tell by the detail and fairly dispassionate explanation that I was familiar with such terrible occurrences. So she let it lie.

In this modern age of suburban living and ubiquitous hand sanitizers, most people are incredibly removed from the true face of life and death. There are a few professions that keep you up close and personal with it, and sadly, anything to do with animals is one of those. We accept that price, because the good, usually, does outweigh the bad. The bad is the price we have to pay for our relationship with horses or almost any animal.

Still, I keep thinking of one of those folks from True Prospect, picking up coffee for their shattered crew, answering the guy behind the counter, “Fine, thanks.”

The prayers and best wishes of everyone at Phoenix Farm, and everyone at the Horse Journal, go out to all the people and horses of True Prospect Farm affected by this terrible tragedy.

With deserved deference to the great essayist and broadcaster Garrison Keeler, I’m going to start this week’s blog by observing, “It was a quiet week at Phoenix Farm.” And now I’m going to tell you just a few of the things that happened.

Well, there was, shall we say, some rather significant concern this week around the horse world about the EHV-1 virus that a some cutting horses have carried around to the western states from a show in Ogden, Utah, at the beginning of May. If you’re reading this, chances are good you’ve been following as the anxiety and misinformation billows in internet land. But the near-hysteria has gone beyond the inter-world—I saw a brief, and reasonably calm, piece about it Sunday morning on “Good Morning, America,” filmed at the L.A. Equestrian Center and featuring my old friend Marnye Langer in a speaking role.

EHV-1 was actually a bit personal here at Phoenix Farm, because Heather and I are the press officers for The Event At Woodside this weekend, a horse trials about 30 minutes south of San Francisco to which we’re also planning to take six horses. I’ve spent many hours this week discussing the situation with organizer Robert Kellerhouse and writing press releases, and Heather and I have spent countless hours following the latest reports and discussing our participation in the event. She’s also spent lots of time discussing the virus and our plans with our clients.

Robert and the management of the Horse Park at Woodside, which hosts the event, have developed a safety protocol to protect the more than 400 horses who were entered and the hundred-plus horses boarded there, and as of Tuesday morning, the event is still on and we’re planning on competing.

The deciding factor in favor of holding the event and our participation is that the virus has not spread outside of horses who were at the Ogden show—at least, not yet. Our horses had all their vaccinations updated last Friday, an action our veterinarian recommended, and we believe they’re at no more risk than they are at any other event we attend. If, by the time we leave on Thursday morning, the virus has spread beyond that specific population, our plans could change.

In the midst of the EHV-1 “Sturm und Drang,” we did have a big and wonderful surprise here at Phoenix Farm on Thursday. For the last five years we’ve had a small herd of miniature Sicilian donkeys, led by our jack, Mr. Steve, who was just a wee weanling when we bought him in October 2006. We lost the jenny who came with him, named Miss Vicki, to a prolapsed uterus the following spring, and just this February we lost another jenny, Trinket, to colic. That left only the kindly Sage, now 19, who’d never shown any obvious signs of pregnancy. In fact, Mr. Steve had always appeared rather inept at the necessary act, and we’d basically given up hope that we’d ever see any offspring.

I finished riding about 1 o’clock and came up to the house for lunch and to watch Wesley, who’s now 19 months old, so that Heather could teach her school-age students. She was in the middle of a lesson when she noticed Zeus, our 150-pound livestock-guarding dog, carrying something large in his mouth from one end of the donkey and goat paddock to the other. At first she thought he had one of our Nigerian dwarf goats, but a quick head count revealed all six does present and accounted for. So she looked again, and saw that whatever Zeus was carrying had very long ears. Then she realized that Zeus had picked up a foal to carry it to safety while Sage tussled with Mr. Steve, who’d moved in in that very bossy donkey way to see what was going on.

Heather screamed to our farm manager Kate for assistance and told her student, Victoria, to summon me on her always handy cell phone. Imagine my confusion when Victoria told me that Heather wanted me at the barn right away because “Sage had a baby.” I had to get her to repeat it three times! And then I was out the door, glad Wesley was still soundly napping.

When I reached the barn moments later, Heather and Kate had moved Sage and the foal, a jenny, to a small pen under the giant oak tree in front of the barn. I just stood there with my mouth open for a minute or two, and when I went in to dry her off, I realized she wasn’t slimy like a newborn foal should be. That’s when we looked at Zeus’ bloody legs and chest and realized that he’d licked her clean for Sage. The foal stood unsteadily a few minutes later and made her way to the udder with our help, and all was well.

Now, what should we name her? We don’t want to use the obvious “Surprise,” especially because we know an unexpected mule with that name. We thought of Stevie Wonder, using her sire’s name and connoting a sense of surprise, but Heather pointed out that the gender was wrong. Then she remembered that the great songstress Stevie Nicks once recorded an album called “Sagebrush”—and that was perfect.

Saturday morning was a lazy day. The previous afternoon, all of our horses (and donkeys) had been vaccinated, so I was only going to give three horses some light work. Heather gave a student a lesson at 9:00 on our schoolmaster Schultz, and then Heather and I, the student and our friend Lee sat for a while under the oak tree and watched Wesley romp in the pen with Stevie, as Sage looked sagely on. We laughed as Wesley, who’s been going through serious teething pains this week, and Stevie uncertainly attempted cross-species communication. She would follow a few feet behind as he trotted about, but when he turned to look at her, she’d pivot and scamper off, with a few bucks and kicks. Then Wesley would turn around, distracted by something new, and Stevie would follow behind him once again.

Wesley actually seemed more captivated by the docile Sage, patting her and leaning against her. Then, when she laid down to rest, Wesley engaged in one of his favorite activities, tearing off hunks from a hay flake and sprinkling the flakes on top of her. (He also likes to do that to his bunnies, Hip and Hop, and they seem to enjoy the chance to eat what they’re wearing.)

It was a lovely couple of quiet hours, on an absolutely perfect spring day—about 70 degrees, clear blue sky and a light breeze. And that afternoon, with the help of our friend Amber Levine, we introduced two 3-year-olds (one of them our homebred Ianto) to having a rider on their backs, always a fulfilling experience when it goes right, like it did on this day.

And that’s the news from Phoenix Farm, where all the Nigerian dwarf goats are fat (and pregnant), all the horses are good-looking, and all the dogs and cats are well above average

For the last couple of months, we’ve been discussing in this space the problem of unwanted horses and whether the elimination of U.S. equine slaughter almost a decade ago has contributed to the rise in the number of unwanted horses. I’ve long been a pragmatic advocate for equine slaughter, but my feelings on it are beginning to bend.

Why? Because some of you readers have brought up figures and observations that suggest there may not be a strong relationship between the availability of slaughter and the number of unwanted and neglected horses in this country. That is, it’s not entirely clear that the availability of slaughter decreases the number of horses that people neglect or abandon.

You know, Thoroughbred breeders often get hammered for the unwanted horse problem, and certainly the Thoroughbred racing world has its share of blame to shoulder. As you’ll recall, I launched into this topic in February because of the catastrophic problems of the Thoroughbred Retirement Fund, the largest and most well-funded U.S. horse rescue. My premise was, basically, that if a group like the TRF can’t succeed, how could any horse rescue succeed?

But quite a few readers have pointed fingers at the American Quarter Horse Association and the breeding incentives it offers to its 330,000 members. So I looked up the annual registration numbers for both The Jockey Club and the AQHA. The Jockey Club registers about 35,000 Thoroughbreds annually, but the AQHA registers roughly four times that each year (135,000 to 150,000 a year during the last decade). That means that each year, almost half of the AQHA’s members are registering a foal they’ve bred. Holy cow! I can’t give a contrasting number for The Jockey Club, the Thoroughbred registry, because it’s not an individual membership organization.

Several readers have pointed their fingers at “irresponsible breeders” (especially of Quarter Horses) for the unwanted-horse problem, an accusation I’ve long dismissed because I know how difficult and expensive horse breeding is. How could anyone afford to breed horses like dogs or rabbits, I wondered?

But I’ve been told that, especially in Texas and Oklahoma, there are numerous Quarter Horse breeders who produce hundreds of foals a year, figuring that the numbers will yield a handful of good horses.  And, I’m told most of the rest get disposed of through cheap sales or sent, now, to Mexico or Canada for slaughter. I’m simply amazed that such a practice is economically viable, but I’m told they really do make it work, mostly because it’s simply a numbers game. (Here’s one financial incentive for Quarter Horse breeders: The AQHA charges only $25 to register a foal, while The Jockey Club charges $200.)

I’m really not looking to turn this blog into a diatribe against the AQHA. But any breed group that’s adding 150,000 horses to the U.S. herd every year is clearly part of the problem and, thus, needs to be a much stronger part of the solution. (Interestingly, I discovered that the American Paint Horse Association registers about 35,000 horses a year, about the same as The Jockey Club.)

I said at the start of this blog that my support of equine slaughter as a method of dealing with the unwanted horse problem is weakening, but that also means that my support for humane euthanasia of unwanted horses is growing stronger. Why? Because the reality is that horse owners (whether responsible or irresponsible) simply must have an option to humanely divest themselves of horses that they cannot keep, especially if the cause is the horse’s health or their own health or financial situation.

Yes, all too often, people purchase a horse, or a number of horses, when they shouldn’t. Those horses become unwanted (and, thus, neglected or even abused) because they aren’t capable of caring for them. Veterinarians and rescue workers around the country will tell you that they regularly find horses abandoned on roadsides or in someone else’s field or shed. And then these horses—who are almost always very old or sick or unsuitable for anything—fill up the rescue stables.

And, as we saw with the TRF, keeping large numbers of horses is simply too expensive, for any organization. They require far more resources than keeping dogs and cats at a “no-kill” shelter.

Unwanted horses often become that way because owners can’t afford to pay an equine veterinarian to euthanize the horse and then pay to have the body hauled away. (And in some places, you can’t even find a service to haul the body away.)

So I’m going to make a suggestion that some horse owners may not like, but, please, hear me out.

The simple truth is that every horse (like every one of us) must die someday. Another truth is that equine euthanasia, done correctly by a veterinarian, is a painless process for the horse—they just go to sleep. The hardest part is controlling the horse’s collapse to the ground. (I know, because I’ve seen it done more times than I wish.)

A third truth is that equine euthanasia is expensive. Most veterinarians charge $300 to $500, and the livestock renderer charges somewhere between $100 and $400.

A fourth truth is that it would be nearly politically impossible for slaughter plants to return to the United States, especially a network of them that would eliminate the horrible transportation problem. Nor would they have a more certain, and cost-effective, way to end the horses’ lives.

But, as I said earlier, a fifth truth is that American horse owners need to also have a cost-effective way to divest themselves of horses they cannot take care of, a way other than dumping them somewhere or letting them slowly starve. And, as we’ve seen with the TRF, horse-rescue organizations aren’t the complete solution.

So, why can’t a coalition of horse-welfare groups establish a nationwide humane-euthanasia program to provide the service at a very low cost (say, around $100)? The most obvious partners would be veterinary schools and clinics with equine-welfare groups, including horse rescues. These groups are already doing low-cost castration clinics in parts of the country.

Breed organizations and racing organizations should also be partners, primarily on the funding end, but also on the education end. Breed organizations could charge an “end-of-life fee” with each foal registration, which the organization would transfer to a foundation established to underwrite the cost of the euthanasia service. Racetracks (for all breeds) could charge a small fee for each horse stabled there (I’m talking $3 or $5 per horse per month) and allot a small percentage of each day’s betting handle to the cause, funds that again would be transferred to a funding foundation.

Discipline organizations like the U.S. Equestrian Federation or the AQHA could also charge members a small annual fee for the humane-euthanasia fund. At $5 a member, those two organizations alone would yield $2 million a year.  And if the AQHA charged a $25 end-of-life fee for every foal registered, that would yield another $3.75 million per year. Of course, if they’d educate their members about the consequences of over-breeding and decrease or eliminate the incentives they have for breeding horses, both numbers would decrease.

To make this work at the grass-roots level, veterinarians can’t be expected to practically donate their services to everyone who has a horse they don’t want. There would need to be a way to establish the owner’s level of need or inability to pay, plus there would have to be standards for the horse’s health and age.

Obviously, this is just the start of an idea to help solve our problem of too many unwanted horses. What do you think?