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Mickey was 8 years old when I met him, and while he was the biggest love-bug on the ground, it was immediately clear that he had never been properly trained as a young horse. This horse is a beautiful example of a horse that would have gone completely sour in the wrong hands… he is delicate and sensitive, and he used to think that the answer to everything was to fight instead of yield…He was incredibly opinionated, and had been lead to believe that if he didn’t want to do something, he didn’t have to! This made him one of the most interesting training projects I have ever encountered… Mickey was the kind of horse that is fast and spooky, very difficult to ride, and is almost too intelligent for his own good! It took the better part of two years to finally get him to understand that life could be a dance instead of a race, but now he is AMAZING to ride! It was a long process, but incorporating regular massage, chiropracting, acupuncture, and a special blend of herbs and minerals with a slow and methodical regularity to his training sessions has really brought out the best in this horse. Surprisingly, his biggest breakthroughs came after we decided to try giving him earplugs! Within a month of being ridden regularly in them he finally became really focused and stopped spooking at every tiny thing…it was transformative for me as a trainer to see what a difference it made- and confirmed our whole theory that some horses may just be more easily overstimulated by what may pass as uneventful for most horses- and since then, we have given all of our horses the option of wearing ear silencers- and amazingly enough, about half of them seem to prefer the muffled stimuli! It has been fascinating watching the progression! Mickey is even getting to the point now where he will happily carry some of our higher level students around a course of jumps! Mickey surprised us all when we took him to his first horse show, just to see how he would like it, and he did GREAT! We have high hopes for his future, but more than anything, we are just really happy to see him becoming a sane and happy horse…
Mickey was 8 years old when I met him, and while he was the biggest love-bug on the ground, it was immediately clear that he had never been properly trained as a young horse. This horse is a beautiful example of a horse that would have gone completely sour in the wrong hands… he is delicate and sensitive, and he used to think that the answer to everything was to fight instead of yield…He was incredibly opinionated, and had been lead to believe that if he didn’t want to do something, he didn’t have to! This made him one of the most interesting training projects I have ever encountered… Mickey was the kind of horse that is fast and spooky, very difficult to ride, and is almost too intelligent for his own good! It took the better part of two years to finally get him to understand that life could be a dance instead of a race, but now he is AMAZING to ride! It was a long process, but incorporating regular massage, chiropracting, acupuncture, and a special blend of herbs and minerals with a slow and methodical regularity to his training sessions has really brought out the best in this horse. Surprisingly, his biggest breakthroughs came after we decided to try giving him earplugs! Within a month of being ridden regularly in them he finally became really focused and stopped spooking at every tiny thing…it was transformative for me as a trainer to see what a difference it made- and confirmed our whole theory that some horses may just be more easily overstimulated by what may pass as uneventful for most horses- and since then, we have given all of our horses the option of wearing ear silencers- and amazingly enough, about half of them seem to prefer the muffled stimuli! It has been fascinating watching the progression! Mickey is even getting to the point now where he will happily carry some of our higher level students around a course of jumps! Mickey surprised us all when we took him to his first horse show, just to see how he would like it, and he did GREAT! We have high hopes for his future, but more than anything, we are just really happy to see him becoming a sane and happy horse…