R.I.P. Chief of the Promise

Sunday was a good day...or so I thought. I got to sleep in, had lunch with my friends, and watched a movie. That all sounds great, right? Well it was until I got a call from one of my best friends back home. Sarah and I met through horses and have been friends for about 10 years. When I get a message from her asking me to call as soon as I get a chance, I know it can't be good.

So, I call Sarah back and she informs me that one of our good friends is having to put her horse down on Tuesday. This news is unfortunately not really surprising to me. This horse is not only very close to the owner but also very close to Sarah. When Sarah was looking for her first horse, she was only interested in borrowing a horse not owning a horse, so through pony club she found Chief.

Chief is a very special horse who has been around for 27 years. If you are familiar with the Indiana horse community, you have most likely heard about or seen Chief around at some show or other outing. He is a tall appaloosa who has the heart of a teddy bear. In his prime, he was shown at preliminary level which is a higher level in eventing consisting of roughly 4 foot jumps. As he aged, he helped beginners learn the ropes and would perform any task he was called to do.

Instructors felt comfortable putting a five year old on him because of his willingness to please. Anyone who entered the barn was automatically drawn to Chief due to his puppy dog eyes and quiet expression. He served two generations in the owner's family and touched the heart of so many others.

Chief will be greatly missed. Anyone who laid eyes on this horse knew he was something special. My thoughts and prayers go out to the Mundt family and Sarah. Thanks for sharing this great horse with us.

Spring Break

Most people who have horses in their backyard would be happy to go home for Spring Break and ride everyday. However, this was not the case for me. As I have mentioned before, I have one horse stabled with my trainer and 2 horses at my house right now. I was excited to get some free time away from school to be able to ride, but I was dreading it at the same time because I knew my horses would be hyper since they hadn't been ridden.

I don't know how aware of this you are, but when you leave a horse for a long period of time and don't ride them they get hyper. Especially if you continue to feed them the same amount of food. So, I knew when I got on I should be expecting a rodeo.

I have been having a particularly hard time with my pony lately because he is enjoying his life in early retirement and he never wants to have to work again. I am slowly trying to convince him that he will work and he WILL be happy about it.

I decided to start my break off by riding my horse who is at my trainer's barn because I figured he had been ridden more recently and it would be good for me to exercise him while I was at home. I was excited to ride until I brought him into the arena and watched every other horse rider combination quickly evacuate. That should have been my sign. I got on and before I could even think about it he was rearing. Now, in all fairness I don't mean like vertical in the air rearing, I just mean his front feet were no longer on the ground.

He does this quite frequently, so I decided to kick him to ask him to walk forward instead of jumping up and be done with that nonsense. We were done with the nonsense until I asked for a nice slow trot and he pulled that same stunt again. By this time, I decided to give up and go into where my trainer was teaching so she could help me through this. Once I did that, he was much better and I had survived my first ride of Spring break.

That all happened on Wednesday and I was in know way rushing the ride on my pony because I knew that would be even worse. Saturday came and there were a lot of younger riders coming over to our barn for lessons that day. I decided it would be a good idea to hop on my pony while they were riding because if he saw other horses working maybe he would think that he needed to work too. He didn't understand that and it only made things worse.

I got on with the older group of riders and was ready for everything to go wrong. I knew that I could expect a buck when I asked for canter, but all I was doing was trotting in a circle. I have had this pony for almost 11 years now so I know him pretty well and I could feel the energy about to explode. He was like riding a pony on energy drinks. I was just trying to work out the energy and not do anything special.

We were trotting the same circle we had been trotting for the past 5 minutes when he decided to make things interesting. Completely out of nowhere, he decides to buck. You must understand when this pony bucks (as seen below) you better give up on trying to stay on him. Some people say it is like he is doing a handstand on his front feet. So of course, I go flying through the air without the greatest of ease. I land on our lime arena floor thinking to myself, "Did that really just happen?" I am sitting there, look up at my pony and he looks like he is asking himself, "Mom, what are you doing down there?"

Let's just say, we excused ourselves from that lesson and I went and worked him even harder. I was looking forward to break being a relaxing time to ride both of my horses and enjoy some quality time at the barn. I never expected to come back to school with my back all scraped up and carrying around a bottle of Tylenol everywhere I went.

Background

Junk Mail?

This entry is very random compared to the others that I have been doing recently, but it is on my mind right now and has been since I got home. Ever since I walked in the door, I have been going through my mail that has been sent since last time I was home last week and there is a lot of junk mail.

Now, you are probably thinking that people always get junk mail and this is nothing special. Unfortunately, all this junk mail is ads or letters wanting me to subscribe to this horse magazine or buy this horse product. I have never seen so many advertisements trying to accomplish the same result with so many different products.

Honestly, I am a college student so not only do I not have the money to be spending on these types of things, but I don't have the time to sit down and flip through countless magazines all talking about horses. Don't get me wrong, my mom andI subscribe to three magazines every year. These are monthly magazines and I do look forward to receiving them every month and seeing what topics are in them this month.

There is nothing wrong with magazines or advertisements for that matter. The problem comes when your mailbox gets deluged with never ending advertisements. You start to not even care what they say or what they are offering, because you just want to get rid of all of them.

When you see that you have a stack of mail after you have been gone for a little while, it makes you feel important. However when you go through and realize that you have to throw away everything but one letter, it makes you feel like you are no longer important to anyone except the Alumni association from your high school.

Do these companies that send these out seriously not have anything better to do with their time? Has it come down to simply sending out postcards saying "Subscribe to the Perfect Horse and your horse will never be happier"? Have they never heard of this new thing that everyone is using called the internet? If they would simply catch up with the 21st century, they could advertise on the internet and people could search for them instead of them searching for every equestrian on the planet.

You know that this is annoying and it would be so much better if they would use the internet, save some trees, and stop bothering people every day with their advertisements. If they are doing that bad in sales, maybe they should considering something else besides just marketing more. With economy the way it is right now, I feel like the last thing most people are thinking about spending money on is a magazine subscription.

Work...or Play?

My most recent equine adventure actually involves a study that is currently being run at Purdue's vet school. I was contacted in November about the possibility of me helping with this study because my name was given to them as someone who likes horses. Of course, I immediately jumped on the possibility to do what I love while making a little money on the side. I was interested and excited to learn more about this study and just exactly what I would be doing.

The study is testing a treatment for heaves which is a common problem in horses. It involves airway obstruction due to mucus build up in the esophagus. This problem is triggered by dusty environments with poor air circulation. We are testing one specific treatment for this to see if it is effective or not.

I was ready to get started even though I was not sure exactly what they needed me for. I attended the initial meeting and figured out they needed students to be in charge of feeding the horses, handling them for some of the testings, and shaking moldy hay to trigger the heaves to start. You are probably thinking that this sounds cruel because honestly, I thought that when I first heard about it. However, these horses are monitored so closely that if anything is not looking right, they are immediately pulled from the study.

Unfortunately, schedules did not work out for me to help in the first part of the study, so I had to wait until the horses were brought back for the second round of studies. This means that I only started helping this week. I was pretty excited that on my first day, I had already been shown how to pull blood. I think I failed to mention that I get very light headed at the sight of blood or needles. Somehow though, I managed to watch her show me how to do it and watch other people pull blood on six horses all together. By the end of this I was ready to sit down.

Thursday night was the first night that I was actually scheduled to go to the barn and feed and shake hay for the horses. Unfortunately, two of the six horses had already triggered after three days. This is a process that is supposed to take 2 weeks. So, they did not get any moldy hay, but the other four did.

I enjoyed seeing the horses, since I only get to see mine when I go home. Thursday night, I felt like I was back where I belonged, in a barn around horses. All of the horses in the study are very cute and I love being able to not only see them, but also groom them, pet them, and just be around them. I am definitely very happy that I was contacted about this study and I am hoping I learn something from being in this and helping out wherever I can.

The Infamous Quiz

Every year, the Heartland Region of the United States Pony Club has their annual Quiz Rally. This is an unmounted competition where members go and showcase their knowledge of horses by answering questions and performing various tasks. This competition is an ideal competition for members who might not have their own horse because you don't need your own horse for this competition. It is a very popular rally for younger members because after you go for a few years it gets old because it feels like you are sitting in school for a day.

This rally is one where although it gets many young members competing, it is the least anticipated rally of the year. This is because no actual horses are involved, it is held in a school, and it is all knowledge based which means you have to study before going.

This rally is coming up in one week so the younger members of our club have been preparing for the past few months. This weekend my friend and I are responsible for setting up a mock rally so that the competitors from our club can see what it is going to be like. Both my friend and I have competed in quiz for four years and now have an officiating position for one of the stations.

Of course I had to come home again this weekend in order to organize this for our members. Between tonight and tomorrow at 1pm, my friend and I have to make sure my barn is clean, put together about 12 stations with various levels of questions, and make sure everything is organized and correct to give the competitors the feeling of the real rally.

Normally, this would be very easy, but with this being my first year at college and me not being completely active with our pony club, this small task seems to become a rather large, daunting challenge. I only have the few weekends I am home to arrange this because everyone knows there is not much free time to work on things other than homework.

With both of our experiences at Quiz, we say that we are perfectly fine never competing there again and only helping. So, we have been roped into taking over what is called the Mega Room which consists of 10 tables with 10 matching questions. This sounds easy enough but when you have to come up with topics, have different difficulties of questions, and come up with so many questions it gets difficult. Not only do you have to come up with the questions, but we also normally make posters with the answers on them so they can match them.

Although this competition is not very exciting, it is a competition that requires everyone's participation. Whether you are a young member or an older member, everyone can have a job. This is the regions first rally of the year and it is a great way to start off the competitive season. Everyone looks forward to seeing old friends and catching up on the latest news of the winter. It might not be the most fun, but it is definitely worth everyone's time.

Weekend Adventures

This past weekend, I came home for the weekend. The purpose of this trip was to clean our barn up so that we could have our local Pony Club come out the following weekend for a seminar. I was pretty excited about this trip because it would give me a chance to spend a lot of time in the barn, ride my horses, and just be around my horses.

Things started Friday night when I got home and went out to clean stalls. Now, I realize that my parents are in charge of the barn when I'm away, but I didn't expect everything to be changed and moved around. I did not even know how to get in my own barn. Every door was locked and last time I checked we didn't lock our doors. After figuring out how to get in my own barn, I walked in to realize that everything had been changed or moved around. I had to search for things that normally had a specific place.

After eventually making it through the Friday night chores, I knew that the barn really did need to be cleaned up and things needed to be put back in their proper location. I was ready to tackle this project over the next two days and make this barn look as spotless as a barn could. I woke up the next morning (well, technically it was afternoon) and I was ready to get started. My mom had other plans though. She was the one that wanted me to come home and clean and now she wanted to go shopping. I couldn't complain because I do like shopping, but this was my first clue that this big job was not going to be done.

After a long day of shopping, I convinced myself that I was going to wake up early on Sunday and work on the barn for a good part of the day before I had to come back to Purdue. As you can guess though, this didn't happen either. I woke up around 10am on Sunday and knew it wasn't even worth it. Instead, I decided to go out and ride my pony, Luke.

To some, this might sound like loads of fun, but I knew he hadn't been worked in a while and was going to be crazy. So, after many failed attempts to just get in the saddle without him trotting off, I was successfully aboard. For the next 30 minutes, I found myself doing tiny little circles with him just to make sure I had some kind of control. After that amount of time and getting very dizzy, we were able to walk around the whole arena without trying to unseat me. I decided to quit on a good note and not push my luck. Needless to say, I came home this weekend too and I still have a dirty barn to clean before Saturday and I still have a pony that needs to be worked more. One of these days, I will accomplish everything I want to do in the time frame that I want it done in. Until then, I guess I will just have to improvise. (The picture is not my barn, my barn is not quite that bad, but it was used for emphasis.)