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by Cowgirl on July 30, 2011
When I was a kid, my favorite days were the long summer ones when we spent the day horseback. There was always something to do around the ranch…either moving cattle to a different pasture, checking the wells to make sure there was adequate water, or riding colts always prevented boredom from overtaking us. But I can think of some stories when we just had too much time on our hands.
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by Cowgirl on June 3, 2011
I was at my folks’ house last weekend, and was looking through some boxes of old photos, and came upon a letter I had written them many years ago when I was a lonely school teacher just out of college, with only horses to keep me from feeling homesick. Reading through it gave me a mix of feelings—happy to remember the fun day on horseback, sad to think that I ended up buying and losing this mare in a horrible accident, and very glad that I had written it all down in a letter so I could treasure the memories more completely.
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by Cowgirl on May 31, 2011
I’m thrilled to be starting another year with lots of fresh ideas, helpful horse advice, and some really great horse stories. My excitement stems partially from our just getting back from a good visit to Idaho where my parents live. We had the opportunity to help them move their cattle up to summer pasture in the mountains, and it is an all-day cattle drive, so I have seventeen miles of beautiful photos to share with you, not to mention a bunch of good stories. I love visiting my family out there—the scenery is always beautiful, the air is so fresh and clear, the horses are inspiring, and it just feels good to be around the folks who know me best.
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by Cowgirl on May 24, 2011 · 2 comments
For those of us who had the opportunity to grow up around horses, responsibilities and safe horse-handling practices became lifelong habits. But there are a lot of families with children who are starting from scratch, buying their first horse, and have no idea how to go about handling one. Here are some basic guidelines that kids and beginners should know about horses:
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by Cowgirl on April 24, 2011
One thing I love about horses is their individual personalities. Just as every person in the world has his own characteristics, every horse is wired differently. And just like every good group of friends has a goofball in it, the horse bunch I grew up with had its own class clown, Gunner.
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by Cowgirl on April 5, 2011
I have a friend here visiting from Australia for a couple of months, and we went horseback riding yesterday. It’s finally starting to warm up here in the midwest, and with warm breezes beckoning, we put on our riding boots and headed out to the farm.
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by Cowgirl on March 23, 2011 · 2 comments
It’s been awhile since I’ve had the chance to just spend the day following my horse around. But today I was thinking back to when I was a kid, when I would be at the barn all day, not necessarily riding, but just spending time with the horses. There’s a lot to be said for getting solid hours of horse time.
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by Cowgirl on March 19, 2011
Every body’s got a tale to tell, and if you’ve been as enthusiastic about outdoor activities as I have, chances are you have some scars as reminders of your experiences. I noticed a scar of mine the other day, which made me start thinking about how I got that scar, which made me wonder just how many scars do I have that are horse-related? I have to say, almost all of my scars have a horse story behind them.
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by Cowgirl on December 15, 2010
These days leading up to Christmas are crazy. I feel like a kid on a merry go round that’s going too fast for comfort…or maybe like the frantic engineer on a train that is on unfamiliar track downhill and the brakes have failed…or more exactly, what I really feel is that all-too-familiar adrenaline that kept me in the saddle all those times my horse Rudy ran away with me.
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by Cowgirl on November 30, 2010
When I was a kid, we had a paint horse we called Peppy. He was a half brother to both Kokomo and Apache, but he had inherited much more of the Shetland attitude than the other two. He was a naughty pony.
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by Cowgirl on November 11, 2010
We recently took a trip to Idaho to visit my folks. We got to ride horses, go on a cattle drive, take a lot of horse pictures, and enjoy the Idaho scenery while there. They were having beautiful fall weather and we really enjoyed our stay.
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by Cowgirl on November 1, 2010 · 1 comment
When I was sixteen, I wanted to learn to ride English. Growing up on a cattle ranch in the midwest was not condusive to getting a refined education in horseback riding. I learned the hard way—my sisters threw me up in the saddle and I did my best to stay on. But I did a lot of reading as a kid, and lived in a world of complete horse craziness, and in my Western-only world I felt there was a void.
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by Cowgirl on October 7, 2010 · 1 comment
I’m a little baffled today. We brought a couple new horses home to train over the weekend, and last night was the first chance I got to work with Toby. He’s a solid Paint, nine year old gelding, supposedly greenbroke but too nervous and wild for my brother to ride, so he sent him to my place for some training.
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by Cowgirl on October 6, 2010
Sunday afternoon I drove the pickup and trailer over to my brother’s place to pick up two horses. He and his wife are selling their acreage and wanting to move out-of-state, and they think for all practical purposes they should pass on being horse owners right now. So the horses are coming to our farm for further training and evaluation of their potentials and hopefully find their ways on to bigger and brighter things than being pasture ornaments.
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by Cowgirl on October 5, 2010
It was a beautiful Sunday afternoon in the fall. Leaves just starting to change, a crispness in the air, and I was so excited to be riding my mare Daisy, since she had been getting better and better on each ride throughout the summer. A long trail ride through new territory was exactly what I’d been wishing for.
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by Cowgirl on October 2, 2010
Next time you are doing math in your head and grumbling while you figure up how much money the horse, tack, hay, vet trips, etc., etc…are costing you, head out to the barn and just watch your wife or kids riding and working with their horses. Or even better, if it’s not normally your habit, why don’t you go on a ride with them? You may unexpectedly discover that you can understand why this is so important to them.
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by Cowgirl on August 18, 2010
I’ve been musing recently on where the old-style horses have gone. You know the kind I’m talking about, the rawboned, high-headed, ewe-necked, long legged, full-stampede mode movie horses that captivated the world when TV made its black and white debut. The vintage horses nobody hears about anymore.
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by Cowgirl on August 3, 2010
When I was a kid, I wanted a horse of my own more than anything in the world. I had claimed one of Dad’s broodmares as mine when I was five, but she wasn’t a riding horse and I didn’t get to spend much time with her because she was always out in the broodmare pasture. So by about age nine, Dad gave me my own horse.
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by Cowgirl on July 31, 2010
I loved taking our horses for water rides in the summer! There’s no better way to stay cool and still be outside with your horse than riding through the spray of an irrigation system or into a pond or creek for a swim. Summer days with no cattle work to do often turned out that way.
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by Cowgirl on July 27, 2010
I knew I wanted a good riding horse. So I picked the first foal by our Two Eyed Jack grandson stallion and the last foal out of our Three Bars bred Quarter Horse mare, Tasha Jo. This colt was a graying bay roan named Rudy, and I chose him because he acted nice and was built nice.
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