Super Cool Horse Video

First of all, THG trailer music makes it even better. And watch it twice, once to let it blow you away, and a second time to actually read the words, which are very well written.

Secondly, where has Bre been? I have been in the land of homework, quizzes, college, and ponies. Oh, and in a land called Lousiana. Well, almost in the land of Lousiana haha. I'll get back to you guys soon!

Also, Greta gets another vet check tomorrow! Hoping all goes well! I'll let ya know!

Okay, on dressage horses...

I'm going to try and keep this just shy of bashing. Because I'm kind of tired of seeing all these baby videos of horses bred to be dressage horses, by dressage horses, out of dressage horses and, more frustratingly, the results.

The jumping horses do not have to be an entirely different animal from a dressage horse! A good dressage horse has a big, forward, sloping shoulder so they can get as much movement out of it as possible. They also should have pretty powerful haunches for collecting. They should also have adjustable gaits. Wait, that's a great deal of jumping horses! That is a good, all-around English horse! A lot of your older dressage sires had plenty of babies that could go either way. These new ones? God forbid they have the conformation or durability to potentially jump, even if it's not planned for them. It's a good, solid, tried-and-true conformation base. Why mess with it? It worked for several hundred years.

But then, we couldn't have all those flashy trots!

I'm starting to get pretty darn tired of seeing all these sale and baby videos of horses with really flashy trots. Really flashy trots. And it's all the same. You start them under saddle, and it all looks the same: working trot, extended trot, collected trot, passage even! I certainly can't tell the difference, and the difference should be pretty blatantly obvious, shouldn't it?

And what about the walk? The canter? Why can't I see video of that? If they don't have an equally impressive walk or canter, then why on earth would I want them as a dressage horse? If I wanted a horse with a flashy trot only, I would just go into Saddlebreds or gaited horses or park Morgans or just hit the Scottsdale show!

So, what is it with the flashy trots? Is it because it looks nice to Molly Moneypockets who wants to start riding dressage but doesn't have a clue about horses? (Easy sell: "Look at his flashy trot!") Or do people just think judges are uneducated enough that they'll be awed by those gaits and nothing else will matter? Wrong, in case you were wondering. Does it make up for a sloppy rider? Is it because it's easier to hide them not being genuinely round? Is it so you can "GP quality" (uh-huh, try telling that to 17-year-old "I just retired after many years of working to the top" Satchmo and owners and riders) in a significantly shorter amount of time? If so, please read my quote by Mr. Montgomery on the side bar. Rollkur, breeding: none of it makes up for good ole' time and effort!

So somebody please answer this befuddling riddle!

There's a difference between a nice, tracking-up, fluid, adjustable trot and these overly-flashy, toe-flicking, super-suspended, jumpy, "it would be easier to adjust your mortgage than to adjust this gait" trots that people seem to want to breed for now. Horses bodies aren't meant to move that way. It can really wear them down over time, as evolution has not caught up to their bodies.

Besides, they are hell to sit.

Maybe I'm just overreacting. I probably am. I just saw a string of Totilas baby videos and thought, "HOLY MOLY WHY DO THEY ALL LOOK THE SAME? WHY CAN I ONLY SEE THEIR TROT? WHAT'S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE?!" And proceeded to have a slight spasm of frustration.

I'm probably looking at this all wrong. Somebody please correct me. Why these trots?

Stuff Riders Say - Episode 1

FINALLY SmartPak did one of these "sh*t people say" for equestrians! So true!
And clucking to anything and everything? GUILTY.

Working back to where we left off... plus a cool picture

This is our most recent trot picture. You might need to click on it to see it in a more larger format. Anyway, when I first saw the video, my heart sank a bit because I thought "Wow, her trot used to be so much nicer! I hope this doesn't mean anything permanent has been done!"

I was a wee bit concerned. Until I happened across her SWANA inspection papers again from when she was a wee girlie. Let's revisit this again, shall we?

Head, Neck, Body: Feminine, low set neck, deep sloping shoulder, well formed croup. (7)

Legs: thin below the knees (8)

Gaits:
Walk - energetic, ground covering
Trot - energetic, needs more suspension and understep defined
(7)

And, bam! There was my answer. I had forgotten that we had to work for that lovely trot I was getting out of her before diagnosis, at the peak of our summer training (overload haha). Just like you use your muscles differently and more efficiently to walk correctly or to sit up even, so did she to get that nice working trot. She has a great walk and canter naturally, her trot probably came from her QH momma (okay, not to hate on QHs, because they can do just about everything, but most stock-bred QHs cannot trot like Qredit. If one could, it would be called a freak). We had to work our butts off to get that engaged, more defined trot, like this:



I think we had some engagement going, hmm? But that required a lot of serpentines and all kinds of sick loop-de-loop exercises and inside leg that made her step under, which required a lot of core use from Greta. This photo was a freakishly engaged moment. Normally she was nicely engaged and stretching through the bit. This time she was like "LENGTHEN WITHOUT RUSHING? GAHBLAGHAFARGA!" and her topline muscles to stretch through to the bit were probably saying "SCREW YOU!"

Now, we won't be doing sick, perverted 10-loop serpentines down the long side for quite some time, but it makes me feel better to see that she used to trot like that and we had to work to get her up to a working level+ trot.

And frankly, looking at that first photo, it's still not bad. Even for being a tad on the forehand her shoulder not being completely in front of me, she's tracking up, and that hind leg (and that's the leg with the recovering injury lol) is still engaged, and not because I'm telling her. I put no leg on her at the trot, so she doesn't strain that hind suspensory. To ask her to lift that shoulder and bring that hind end underneath her at this stage of the game would be ill-advised.

She's kinda fat right now too (we've both lost some riding muscle heehee) so that might answer some questions too. The only time I really can do some core-strengthening exercises are at the walk, which it is quite nice to be able to work through the basics. She stretching through to the contact amazingly well.

Yay, dressage, it's like watching concrete dry AND grass grow AT THE SAME TIME!

And speaking of engagement, here's that really cool picture I mentioned. This is Lucy pony and Ally at the beach. Is this horse round OR WHAT?!

Trail Ride w/ Greta 1-15-2012

Another Butters Video (don't get jealous Greta...)

I'd just thought I'd post this up before I add some updates posts on Greta, the Micklem bridle, and... I'll get around to that Traditional Dress post part 2 one of these days (still trying to think of how to put it, bear with me). School begins again in two days, so I'm milking these last couple days of freedom. Granted, I feel a lot freer in college than I ever did in public school. My schedule, even though I got screwed over a bit but I'm a freshman with the min amount of hours so I was expecting that, is quite accommodating for riding and doing other things. Anyway, enjoy some Butters action from yesterday. My eq has a lot left to be desired, mainly I'm popping up a bit over fences (still getting used to the feeling of a jump) and I'm rounding my back in two-point and over fences, that's mainly from lack of core muscles (well, a different set than what's needed in dressage). At least I'm anchoring my heels more! Enough of that, enjoy Butterball the wonder horse.

Greta video update

War Horse: Um... no :(

Well, after all the raving I and what seems to be the entirety of the movie world had been doing, I am sad to say that War Horse was, well... okay.

Was is cute? Yes. Was it memorable? Relatively so. Do I think it should win all the awards it's up for? No. Am I glad I paid for a movie ticket and a pretzel to go see? No. Probably should have waited for Blockbuster.

I actually went to go see it Thursday with all of my fellow barn bums. Which, I will add, it is quite fun to go straight from the barn in your breeches and polos and dusty tall boots to the movies! And out of the whole group, only two of us got really choked up (I think if I had not read the book, I might have too, although I did kind of choke up one scene, but I got over it) and most of us had a great laugh about the training techniques and gasped in unison at the horse running through six strands of barbed wire and then groaning that he didn't even get a scratch! But the training has since become an ongoing joke, along the lines of "just tell him what you want him to do! It really works!"

And teaching a horse to take a harness collar by both horse and human putting their head in at the same time? Let's just say ongoing joke number two is "Let's see whose nose gets broken first!"

The cinematography was beautiful. The special effects and CGIs were incredible. Kudos to the horse trainers, because those horses were quite well-trained and believable in their actions and even had some nice expressions going on, even if they were sometimes easy to tell apart. The riding was actually quite decent (especially the calvary charge scenes, the first one actually gave me chills because it was very realistic).

There was a lot of overacting. The plot was more hoaky than it needed to be (the ending especially made me want to gag). The training inaccuaracies were a minor qualm to me compared to the general sappiness of the movie.

I think Speilberg really could have done something with this. It had the potential to be like a Schindler's List with horses: something that really moved you and really made you think about the services horses have given us in times of war and beyond. But I personally feel Disney kind of messed it up. I could definitely see their involvement, and it made the movie not enjoyable to me. I cried more and was moved more by the trailers before the movie than during the actual movie!

Disney did the same thing with Secretariat, so what was I supposed to expect?

So, it looks like Seabiscuit will remain my favorite horse movie. Because it wasn't hoaky. Because Disney didn't meddle with it. Which I guess is hard not to do with horsey movies.

But movie did make the SNL skit 10 times funnier.

And as a friend said, "If the guy who directed the trailer had done the entire movie, then we might have something to talk about."

So, sorry guys. Maybe you'll like it more than I did. I'll just hold out for Red Tails and The Hunger Games for my potential movies-of-the-year (but please read the books first, I think I will always enjoy them more than the movies, because you get more from them! Same goes with War Horse! I will always love the book... not the movie.)