Willow Grove Ranch

05/21/2025

Ooo, some good input from ESI!

Classical conditioning also describes the acquisition of voice cues as well as the acquisition of body postures and weight aids of the rider in horse training.

It is also the mechanism by which the horse learns secondary positive reinforcement such as the clicker or praise.

When training any animal, including horses, remember that they don’t learn words so much as sounds. The sounds they learn are largely the elongated and emphasised vowel sounds.

Try to develop your ‘trainer’s voice’ by emphasising and lengthening the vowel sounds and sharpening the consonants.

By doing this the voice commands will stand out as different from the background noise of human chatter.

To be effective, voice commands must be utterly consistent and simple i.e., don’t add the horse’s name to the command, just say the command the same way every time.

Modern Horse Training: Equitation Science Principles & Practice, Volume 2
by Andrew McLean - available for purchase on our website.

05/21/2025

Kappy is growing like a w**d! Momma Gypsy is taking great care of him!

05/20/2025

05/19/2025

Just crossed my mind...

I'm no influencer and not sure I wanna be. I've been doing this for over 40 years, have chased down SO much education, and brought it home to apply to SO many horses and riders. If the horses didn't thrive with the techniques or the riders couldn't understand them, I either altered them or threw them out. I don't have time for inefficiency or confusion.

I'm done trying to influence people because I can't control what they find appealing. I can invest in those who are interested in learning what I believe in and teach.

I'm done trying to prove my ability by winning at shows while educating the horses ethically. I've already done that in dressage, western working events (everything from pleasure, reining, cowhorse, trail, western riding, ranch classes, blah blah blah), carriage driving, combined driving, in hand, breed and open show hunter stuff, more pattern classes than i can even count...you only get respect from the most recent prize you won. Everyone's memories are incredibly short. And the horses don't care.

I've just begun hanging out in my spot, educating horses and riders who jive with what I'm putting down. Education-based. History-based. Horse friendly. Different goals, different breeds, different uses. Knowing that every horse needs a thorough, broad, clearly understood, solid basic curriculum. Then you can add on skillsets necessary for specific activities.

The curriculum should be horse-friendly and age/experience/disposition appropriate, just like in school. The kids need to understand it, participate in it, and enjoy it enough to stay engaged. I work with big, hairy, four-legged kids.

Now I show to get the horses exposure, to promote an endangered breed (we are involved in Hackney Horses and Highland Ponies, both critically endangered), show a client horse if they want to go that route, expose people to ethical techniques molded to each particular horse, or teach folks who want to learn how to educate and show ethically how to do that. I make it clear, it's about celebrating the horse and growing the breadth of their experience. Prizes are nice, but you can only keep so many trinkets.

Great horsemen are not created on social media. They are created in the manège, over many horses and many years. The most gifted horseman or woman may be working away in some backwater town and may never be heard of outside of the clients who study with them. They may never write a bestseller, teach hundreds of clinics, or create an online course. They may just be a window into a deeper understanding of themselves and the horses/humans they touch.

05/19/2025

The place behind us is for sale. Nice prefab on 5 acres with some small outbuildings. Would love to have a nice neighbor close by!

This 1512 square feet Mobile / Manufactured home has 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms. It is located at 10100 Clear View Ln, Emmett, ID.

05/18/2025

Here is a brief video of a first ride on a youngster where I'm beginning to ask more than the horse getting accustomed to me being on him.

This is Caleb, a 4-year-old Lippitt Morgan gelding in dual track training for riding and driving!

I first ride horses ba****ck briefly to acclimate to me being on their back. After they understand that, I move to riding in a ba****ck pad and maybe with a...

05/17/2025

First extended ride on Caleb. The very first time I hop on, i'm usually ba****ck and am looking for the horse to see me and feel me on their back while walking a bit. Then I educate them on the bit and such before I add the ba****ck pad and steering to the mix. Caleb is on a dual track: riding and driving, so we go back and forth depending on his progress and the staff we have on hand each day.

This day we walked quite a bit, tried little flexions, and trotted a little.

05/17/2025

Developing horses in healthy performance regardless of the activity. Let’s do it!

Atrophy in top lines and performance horses.

Soundness in veterinary science is judged by the horses ability to balance evenly across all four legs, when one leg is sore it presents in a lameness. Traditional one leg lameness is easy to spot, head bobbing and a definite asymmetry in stride. This will definitely be identifiable as lameness in the trot ups for competition and should be pulled up. That being said I am often seeing assymetric movement be passed off as sound. This is soundness grey area, assymetry in my opinion is the stage before lameness, the body is protecting a weakness that is yet to develop to the lameness. Assymetry can be from a plethora of problems from soft tissue to skeletal and very few of these problems are identifiable through imaging for horses. Unless it’s in a distal limb and I would argue that is often a red herring for an issue higher up.

Where it starts to get very tricky is body lameness, one pathway for body lameness is atrophy of muscles but why does it happen? Two main reasons, either the muscles aren’t utilised or the muscles have lost intervation by the nerves. If you’ve never googled “sweeny shoulder”, a common injury in Thoroughbreds I suggest you do that to see how nerves affect muscles. The delicate nerves and vascular systems in the horses body are all
Interconnected, I don’t like to focus on one area because the horse is ONE body. But for efficiency I’ll focus on a few, the trapezius(cervical and thoracic) waste away when horses are ridden on the forehand and behind the vertical. The trapezius is also affected by saddle fit and can impede the shoulders movement, the scapular cartilage is often damaged in horses with poor saddle fit.
Logissimus dorsi, affected by riding behind the vertical and hand dominated posture that impedes lateral spinal movement, easily atrophied if worked in tension.
Multifidus is an over looked muscle group in the back, it has a massive impact on DSP spacing due to the way it attaches and can pull DSPs towards each other(kissing spines) this muscle group can be protective or destructive depending on how you condition them. There are many more important muscle groups I will go in to detail in my book.

The main thing to remember about muscles is they are extremely compliant to their loading, meaning they either develop or atrophy. Just look at the huge range of development in humans, a ballerina and a body builder are both athletes but have developed their bodies in radically different ways.

Competitive eventing horses are judged on two things, their soundness in the trot ups and their ability to complete the three stage course, Dressage, cross country and showjumping. Horses who display atrophy in their top lines, will do dressage behind the vertical, be heavy in the riders hands and movements on the forehand. You don’t need a great topline for this Level of dressage, you can carry your horses front end and still score well enough. Horses with atrophy will display big lofty scope on the cross country to clear fences utilising both speed and hind end power. You don’t need a great top line for cross country. Where atrophy will bite you though is in the showjumping, because you do need healthy top lines to be able to either shorten or lengthen a stride to a show jump. You do need the horse to be up and off the forehand to lift the front end because unlike cross country you can not run at a show jump flat and fast. Show jumping is the leveller in eventing at high level because the fences aren’t solid and clever horses get sloppy knowing they can drop rails with hanging shoulders and lazy hind legs. For a good show jumper you need a horse who can collect well, not just be held together by the rider. This is the stage where healthy toplines matter, whether riders know it or not…..a young horse may get away with it but horses over 10 years old wont have elastic youth on their side.

The horses topline tells me everything about how that horse works, when muscles are atrophied they arent working…..it’s that simple.

Year after year we see these horses in the trot ups and the internet goes wild. Soundness and what can be proven are two very different standards. Vetrinary science is built on a peer reviewed, rigorous and reductive method but I feel the problems are more nuanced than science can explain currently. I see horses in dissection constantly that I’m amazed haven’t just laid down and died. Horses that shouldn’t let humans ride them from massive internal issues. Every single one of those horses displayed behavioural issues that were passed off as quirky, naughty or being difficult. I would argue that competitive horses have the mental grit to do the job even with sub par bodies, they are the David goggins of horses! The argument is that david was self aware enough to understand the impact on his body long term and we expect this servitude from the horse without them understanding the impact.

The argument for top line atrophy and performance is “they wouldn’t be able to do it if their bodies were ruined” unfortunately the evidence I see in dissection is the complete opposite. Horses will endure incredible hardships because they are wired as prey animals with the most incredible survival instincts and competive horses have extreme mental
Fortitude. I dont have any judgements or answers, what you do with your horses is your business but I believe in education and understanding for the things we are yet to learn.

The body keeps the score

05/17/2025

We got a wonderful surprise this morning, a whopping Hackney Horse c**t, Willow Grove Kopernicus, aka Kappy. The Hackney Horse is critically endagered worldwide so each new foal is a genetic treasure!

05/13/2025

Mia, a spicy Shetland mare, in her first walkabout between the shafts. Because horses and ponies can be worried about this step, I have the girls carry the shafts the first time so if anything goes awry, we can allow the horse or pony to go forward out of harm's way.

05/13/2025

Caleb, 4 year old Lippitt gelding, in the poles phase of driving training. A single pole is placed in the tug loops on each side, then both poles surround him to mimic what he will feel between the shafts of a vehicle. He handled it very well!

05/11/2025

This is really close to my heart if you are willing to give it a read....

If you have known me for long you know I preserve and promote the critically endangered Hackney Horse. Most people I run into haven’t even seen a Hackney Horse except in pictures and videos. Then they see one in real life and realize what a rare treasure they are. I’ve shown 3 of my own purebre