Frog Field Farm - Freelance Equine Clinician and Consultant

01/10/2023

Articulated perfectly.

For my fellow barn owners/ trainers out there!

Lessons learned long and hard in the horse business as a professional..

1. It's easy to fall in love with your customers. They become a family who you spend a lot of time with. However, in the end they will do what's best for themselves. And, for you and them, those paths may not be the same. Prepare to get your heart broken. Keep business and personal relationships separate.

2. People will not always trust in your experience and will second guess you. They will think they know better because they read it in a book, or saw it online. Don't try to be all things to all people. Do what you are good at. Run your barn in a way that you can sleep at night knowing that you did right in your mind by them and their horses. The clients opinion of that may be different than your beliefs, but you have to live with choices that leave you at peace. That may mean confrontation, hard conversations and even asking people to move on for your own peace.

3. Horses are easy 99% of the time. It's the people who come with them that make things complicated.

4. Remember that horses need to be horses.

5. People will always judge you, and have opinions. The better you are, the more haters will have opinions.

6. Success isn't measured by ribbons and show placings. It's measured in happy animals and the quality of their lives.

7. There is always an exception or quirk that doesn't " follow the rules" in horse care. Do what works, not what the books say works.

8. When you get annoyed by seeing somebody's car pull in to the barn, it's time to let that person move on. Your barn should be a happy place. It literally only takes one bad sour apple to ruin the whole atmosphere and dynamic in a barn.

9. Let it go.... if someone moves on don't be upset by it. Ignore what they say. Don't take it personally. Every barn is not a good fit for every person.

10. This is a business. If a person or horse isn't working for you, or the compensation isn't offsetting your cost, it's time for them to go. The exception to this is your retired horses, see #11.

11. Horses only have so many jumps, so many runs, so many rides. Don’t waste your horses. Teach your students they aren’t machines. You owe it to your retired horses to have a safe, comfortable and dignified end. Your schoolies worked for you. When the time comes they can no longer do that, either give them a pleasant retirement, or put them in the ground where you know they are safe. Do not dump them at auctions or onto other people where you are not 100% sure that they will be cared for.

12. There is no shame in euthanasia for a horse owner. Always better a week too early then a second too late. Do not judge anyone for their reasons for doing this.

13. Most clients fall Into two categories. Those who are "high maintenance", open in their opinions and will confront situations head on. The second is the quiet type who will not say a word and will not openly talk with you about their expectations or issues. You have no idea they have a problem until it's too late. The people in between these two are the clients you want. They will be long term and make life easy.

14. Know your worth. KNOW YOUR WORTH. Your time and experience has a monetary value. Don't do things for free, even if you like the person. Every bit of time or effort you give to clients has value. So when you don't value your effort, neither will a client. They will come to expect "freebies", which always leads to resentment from someone.

15. Be honest. It's not always easy. But in this business it takes forever to build reputation and seconds to destroy it.

16. Remember horses are dangerous. Always use your best judgment and air on the side of caution when working with horses and students. Their lives and your own life can change in an instant.

17. Get paid up front. Keep good records. People don't go to the grocery store and ask for food they will pay for next week. Good business practices keep everyone honest and sets boundaries for clients.

18. Normalize passing on price increases. Service industries, especially ones like ours always "feel guilty " when raising prices. You are not there to subsidize someone else's horse habit. Prices have been going up on costs, so should your fees.

19. The buck stops with you. Your employees mistakes fall back to your responsibility. Always verify and check on important care aspects of daily activities.

20. Make time for family and rest. Too many of us get burnt out from the stress of expectations in this industry. In the end, boarders and students come and go. Your family is who you will have left.

Thanks for reading my thoughts. I hope it can help support some of you feeling burnt out, and maybe help some people who are starting out in their journey into this industry.

Written by Rhea Distefano

07/15/2021

Thank you for sharing this Erin Elizabeth Adcock

Feel Goes Two Ways

I think everybody agrees that having a good feel is a pre-requisite to being a good horse person. Being aware of the subtleties of communication between a rider and a horse and knowing how to adjust with appropriate feel is something we should all aspire towards. If there are people who don’t agree, they are probably not reading this page.

I think the hardest part of having good feel is not in presenting it to a horse, but in listening to the feel the horse presents to us.

Humans are talkers. Our primary form of communication is through speech and writing. Words are our tools of choice when it comes to presenting ideas, directing movement, and expressing emotion. If a horse were to ponder about how humans communicate with each other using words, they would probably think it is a mystical and spiritual form of language that is beyond their understanding.

But with horses it’s different. They emote through body language. To a horse, feel is so easy and obvious – it’s like breathing to them. Sounds make up only the tiniest fraction of a horse’s communication options. And they are hopeless at interpreting sounds and turning them into action. When you teach a horse to trot at hearing the word “trot”, he may give you a trot, but the only trot you get is the trot he offers. You can’t tell a horse to try “extended trot” or “working trot” or “collected trot” and expect it to happen. It’s not within a horse’s ability to decipher complex sounds and turn them into complex actions. When we talk to horses, it’s mostly just babbling to them.

Furthermore, horses are incapable of interpreting the meaning of a sound in context. For example, when we say the words “meet” and “meat” they will have the same meaning to a horse irrespective of the context we use. But humans know precisely how to place different meanings to the words by how we use them in the context of a sentence.

Yet when it comes to body language, a horse can differentiate between subtle changes such as the energy when we approach a horse in anger versus when we approach it in a welcoming fashion. A horse can’t differentiate between sounds by their context, but it can differentiate between body language or feel by its context.

However, when horses talk through body language and feel, it is mostly just babbling to us because our brains are more highly tuned to words. We notice the big changes in body language, just as a horse may hear the word “trot”. But we don’t understand the subtle forms of body language, just as a horse doesn’t understand the words “collected trot”.

We are really poor at interpreting the different meaning of body language and putting it in context. For example, many people can’t distinguish the difference when a horse licks and chews because it is relaxed or processing a thought or is highly stressed. We tend to just assume licking and chewing have one single meaning. But it doesn’t. It has different meanings depending on the context. Likewise, a horse with half-closed eyes could be stressed or relaxed, or shut down. A horse that yawns could be displaying stress or relaxation. The meanings of these behaviours all depend on the context.

So a horse can’t separate the meaning of the words “meet” and “meat” and a human can’t separate the meaning of a relaxed yawn and stressed yawn.

My point is that the hardest part of feel is feeling the language of the horse, and not simply presenting our intent to a horse through our feel. We generally have more trouble reading feel than we do offering feel. We are pretty good at having our say, but not listening to horses having their say.

This is why science has such a long way to go before it becomes useful to the training process. It has not yet developed the tools to analyze and decipher the feel of the horse in context. On the other hand, good horse people are much better at this. People may not hear everything a horse has to say, but we keep trying and our degree of deafness is diminishing as we learn.

Working with horses inevitably involves two-way communication between a horse and a human. There is a constant discussion. Even when you think a horse is doing nothing, he is talking. It takes considerable feel to be good at hearing the stream of discussion coming from our horses and requires thousands of hours of working with horses to develop. Most of what horses express is beyond the sophistication of present scientific methodology to observe. But one day that may change.

Photo: I think the horse and the human are both offering very similar feel.

04/20/2021

I love this post!

04/09/2021

😂

02/25/2021

06/19/2020

100%

Sally Warthen says about Sally Swift:

" She wrote that good riders often make bad teachers, because correct riding is easy for them. They can't diagnose problems they never had."

I have heard George Morris (pictured here with Frank Chapot) say the same thing on numerous occasions. He went so far as to say the reason that he had become such a good instructor was because he actually lacked talent, and had to learn the pieces. He then compared himself to a toweringly gifted show jump rider (who shall remain nameless!) and said, "------ is a far better rider than I ever was, but he is a terrible teacher. He could always just do it, so he doesn't understand the process of breaking it down into learnable pieces."

George didn't lack talent, but his way of looking at things is highly analytical. He, like most top of the line coaches and teachers, is a basics fanatic. You must build on that which is below that.

They even said it in the Bible---"Don't build your house on a foundation made of sand."

That is what is so wrong with so very much of modern riding instruction. The coaches do not absolutely insist that a student learn correct basics before moving to step two, step three, and, you know why? Not always why, but often so---

Because the students will bolt to another "teacher" who will let them do the "fun stuff," leaving the more classical teacher unable to pay the damn rent.

If YOU want to learn how to ride, and your teacher wants you to be fit, learn how to develop an independent seat, learn how to quietly learn about "application of the aids," won't let you jump before you have those basics, are you going to be a dum dum and find a more "nice'" trainer, a more "fun" trainer, or will you suck it up and learn to ride?

Will you stay with the basics teacher until you "own" those skills, or will you move to the barn of someone who will say to your parents, "Now, Mr and Mrs Smith, we really need to buy better horses for Susie here, so she can win more. Wouldn't want her to have to struggle, now would we, poor little tyke"

She won't say that last part, but she is thinking that.

Man, that is how you need to look at this to have any hope of becoming any good, long term. Shirk the basics, and that is the way to build your riding house on the weak and shifting sands of an unstable foundation. Which so so so so many riders will do.

06/03/2020

Thanks Martha Tiller Foster
Just imagine...

What if we (everyone of us) were better at giving others a chance, like this girl did with her horse?

“ I picked him up for $500, which is really, really cheap because he was a very difficult-to-handle animal.

Then I got him and I was like, what did I get myself into? He was just so awful — and I cried. He was a very, very hard-to-handle horse.

I never in my wildest dreams imagined that he would turn into the horse that he is today. He went from just kind of a horse that I got stuck with to, you know, really showing his true colors. And now he's my partner that has my back.”

Brianna Noble rode atop her gelding, Dapper Dan, at an Oakland protest against the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd. A photo of her inspired awe amid turmoil, and she talked to KQED about the experience.

05/27/2020

RIP Kathy :(

04/23/2020

But we wouldn't have it any other way! 😉🐴