Still Life with Camera

I bought a new horse today. I wired the money, the owners brought the papers to Sunflower Farms where I ride, my trainer did all the negotiation. I never met the owners, I had to call the barn to ask what name I should wire the money to.  I had him vetted yesterday and I couldn't answer most of the vet's questions.  All in all a very arms-length and unsatisfying transaction.  However, I think he's going to be the right horse for me.  I say that with a little trepidation since I certainly thought that about Navaroan, too.  But I'm not quite the naive horse buyer I was a year ago.  And even if we're not right for each other, life will go on.  Like the Vet Tech told me when I picked up Navaroan's transport certificate, there are a lot of nice horses out there.  The choice itself it surprisingly complicated. Not like picking out any other piece of "exercise equipment."  More like deciding on a mate.  What's more important? Good ...

Darn it!  Connie called while I was on the train tonight to say that someone else has taken Meg.  I'm so disappointed!  And, now I have nothing to distract me from how much I'm going to miss Navi.  I talked with Tammie, the horse transporter and she thinks she'll be at Sunflower midday on Monday.  It's Martin Luther King Day, a work holiday for me, but I don't know yet whether I can be there or not. I've also been thinking about, Stealth,  the other horse I would have bought if I hadn't bought Navaroan.  He's still for sale.  Since I'm not getting any money back from Navaroan, I wonder if I could work out some kind of lease deal for him for a while.  Hmmm.  He's a Georgian Grand, a relatively new breed which is a Friesian crossed with something.  Stealth is a saddlebred, Friesian combo.  He certainly seemed like a sweet, sweet guy.  Maybe I'll try to go see him this weekend.

So my beloved Navi is going but all of a sudden my trainer has heard about the possibility of a sweet, hard-working, 9-year-old Hanoverian mare for me. The owner can't keep her anymore and is looking for a good home for her. Obviously, temperament is vital, and not just temperament, but temperament in this kind of a situation. I don't ever want to put a horse in a bad circumstance again. I've just seen pictures of her - she's really a pretty little girl. Well, not little, actually, she's 17 hands. We're going to go see her on Sunday. So keep your fingers crossed and maybe she'll be the one.

My trainer called over the weekend to talk about Navaroan's not to be fixed spookiness. So I e-mailed and spoke with Laura, his former owner in Arkansas. She was really shocked at how he's behaving - he sounds like a different horse than what she'd had. That's what the vet said the second time she saw him too. In talking with Laura, it all began to make sense to me. I thought Laura had bought him from the breeder, but actually there was an intermediate stop for him. An Andalusian trainer in Florida had him for a while. Laura's impression when she went to ride him was that this trainer was frightened of him and that he'd probably been abused. I read about this all of the time, where trainers just push, push, push regardless of the horse's temperament. And pretty soon, the horse just doesn't trust people anymore. So here I've gone and inadvertently put him into a set of circumstances that's probably very similar to that Dressage Barn. I think whe...

This horse owning experience has been very interesting for me. Let me first say that I'm an older beginning horse rider and that I've loved horses since I was a little girl. I think it's a gene that skipped generations. My grandfather had work horses as a farmer early in the 20th century and family lore has it that he loved them more than he did his own kids. My mother and my children are afraid of horses; my sister and I can't get enough of them. When I first thought about buying, it was the fulfillment of that little girl's dream. And somewhere along the way I had developed the certainty that I wanted a horse so I could learn to ride dressage. I knew it. I had been taking dressage lessons on and off for a couple of years on a few different horses. My best horse buddy, Susan, is very into dressage and the positive effects it has on her, both physical and mental. She says if it weren't for riding, she would be on some anti-depressant or anti-anxiety drug. She...