Seize the Day Farm

Seize the Day Farm Lori Berger is a 3X WDAA world champion and ARIA certified instructor specializing in dressage

Another Memorial Day parade in the books! Honored to be the parade marshall in a small town with a big heart.
05/27/2024

Another Memorial Day parade in the books! Honored to be the parade marshall in a small town with a big heart.

Great photo of our indoor from our awesome new neighbors up the hill!
04/07/2024

Great photo of our indoor from our awesome new neighbors up the hill!

01/20/2023

The most common bad horsemanship action?

When I think back over all the things that I would do differently with so many horses, if I had one of those magic “do-over” buttons, the one that I realize I was most guilty of would be letting my frustration at not being able to achieve what I wanted have me get forceful with the horse.

I didn’t want to blame my own ignorance and ineptitude for not being able to ride well enough, so I figured out, in some convoluted way, that my horse knew what I wanted and was just too stubborn to do it.

The second that I shifted the blame from me to the horse, that the horse was “being bad,” it gave me “permission” to punish the horse for his “misbehavior.” The fact that I wasn’t skilled enough, or educated enough, or had the right temperament to be a trainer didn’t matter.

I suspect that all around the world, right this minute, there are any number of riders, drivers, horse handlers, who are able to convince themselves, the same way that I used to, that the problem is the horse. And once they flip that incorrect switch, look out horse, because you are going to get ground on.

It would be good if people would listen to advice so that they didn’t have to go through the same mistakes others have made, but most people have to figure it out for themselves, assuming they ever do.

You can get frustrated and get stronger, or you can stay chill and be gentle. The second way is so many light years better that you’d like to think more people would figure it out sooner, but actual experience tells us that there is plenty of blame shifting, coercion and force.

Force doesn’t work. It makes the horse more nervous, more resistant. The rider gets more forceful. The horse gets more scared---See where it ALWAYS goes? From bad to worse. But it’s your choice---

01/20/2023

People frequently ask us how we choose the horses we rescue; they come to us by many different routes, and the reality is that often there is very little choice involved! First and foremost, DER is committed to working with law enforcement when there is a seizure or reports of severely neglected horses, and if we have the space, we take in those in the most critical condition and assist in finding shelter for the remaining ones. Our priority is to get those most in need to safety and to provide them with medical care, regardless of age, breed or gender.

Another way horses come to us is when we are contacted by horse owners who have been diagnosed with a serious illness or are elderly and simply cannot physically care for their horses any longer. It’s hard for them to give up their beloved horses, and we will always step up to help if we have room; we will as well when an abused or neglected horse is being voluntarily given up by the owner. We are also contacted by folks who wish to surrender their horses because they are no longer rideable, have medical conditions or because the owner has lost interest. As a matter of principle, we do not take these horses; we do not consider them to be in immediate need of rescue, although sadly, they may end up at risk further down the line due to irresponsible ownership and/or disregard for the animal’s future welfare. Horses are a long-term commitment and when people are not willing to honor that commitment it is the horse that pays the price: the long downhill slide to poorer and poorer quality homes, and for too many, the kill pen.

If we have space, and there is not a pressing need locally, we then consider helping horses outside of Vermont. This runs the gamut from owner surrenders to helping out-of- state law enforcement, rescuing horses in need from auctions or kill pens, and networking with other rescue organizations.

Auctions and kill pens are filled with horses in desperate need of help, which makes it incredibly hard to choose. More often than not, it’s the look of complete hopelessness in a horse’s eye, no matter the age, size or breed, that is the deciding factor in who we save; once you see this defeated and heartbreaking expression, you’ll never forget it. We have to go into these situations with a flexible mindset, because we never know what we’ll be faced with: emaciated, injured and sick horses of any age, good useable horses down on their luck, once-valuable breeding stock used up and discarded. Sometimes we will consider what types of horses we already have back at the rescue; if we already have mostly seniors who are not as easily re-homed, we will try and help a couple of younger horses. Or, if we have mostly younger horses in training, we will try and help a couple of older or middle- aged horses. Due to our current space limitations, it is most practical for us to have a variety of horses of all ages, sizes, and breeds.

Adoption plays a huge part in our ability to rescue and rehabilitate horses in need. The fact is that we can only choose more horses to help if those we have already stepped up for can be placed in loving, forever homes. The more horses we can place for adoption, the more horses we can bring in and help. Whether you are looking for a pasture pet, trail buddy or even a partner with competitive potential, your choices affect ours!

Shown is Phoenix, our newest (bucking horse) rescue who is still in PA in quarantine recovering from an illness. He is one of the lucky horses who got rescued from a kill pen and escaped slaughter.

The only certified equine rescue in the state of VT! Help them to keep doing the important work of rescue, rehab, and ed...
12/07/2022

The only certified equine rescue in the state of VT! Help them to keep doing the important work of rescue, rehab, and education.

Are you looking for a unique holiday gift for the horse lover in your life? Would you like to give a meaningful gift that will make a direct impact in the lives of abused, neglected and slaughter bound horses? Please consider making a donation in any amount to The Dorset Equine Rescue in honor of a loved one and we will email you a printable certificate like the one shown with the wording you provide. Please feel free to email us the wording that you would like included on your certificate. As always, don’t hesitate to reach out with any questions.

Email us at: [email protected]

A donation can be made through this link:

https://dorsetequinerescue.networkforgood.com/projects/172019-year-end-giving-2022

Thank you for kindness! 🎄

A good reminder that it's about embracing the process, which by its very nature is inherently frustrating and exhilarati...
12/03/2022

A good reminder that it's about embracing the process, which by its very nature is inherently frustrating and exhilarating by turns. Learning is a process of repeated failures, and with horses there is no such thing as complete mastery. Find joy in the "failures" as much as in the accomplishments, because there are far more of them!

From a post by Elizabeth Austin Schneider:

A little thought on riding where you are and not comparing oneself to anyone else or what you used to be able to do. The more I teach, the more I learn, the harder it is to ignore the underlying feelings of frustration.

Dressage is hard, everyone else can do it better. No matter how hard we work there is more to learn. Don’t get me wrong it’s rewarding too, but a lot of the time, especially in the beginning it’s just confusing and frustrating. Sometimes we just don’t get it. Sometimes we get it but our bodies don’t, won’t, or can’t cooperate. Maybe we had a terrible day or simply don’t have it all together.

I watch my daughter, her absolute joy. Her confidence and her fears, the changes and things she surprises me with every day and what blows me away is that while she learns exponentially, she is the least accomplished rider in the barn. She doesn’t care a lick. She gets on, she experiments, she gets told the same thing 15 different ways, she does it for a moment, then she flops around like a rag doll. She has no ego attached to this, no timeline. Just joy of getting better and excitement when she “I did it, I actually did it! All by myself.”

For the rest of us it’s a little more complicated. Betty learned it faster, Sarah is so elegant, Kaitlyn gets to ride more days a week, Jessica doesn’t have a bad back, Carol has enough money to buy a horse, and on and on it goes. It’s hard not to compare and get a little bitter no matter how much we like other riders, or to not be snotty when we really don’t like them.

Honestly though I would kill to ride on my best day like my trainer’s worst day. My students feel frustration when I get on a horse who 2 seconds ago didn’t turn and off he goes on the bit supple as can be. They would love to ride the way I do when I feel like I couldn’t ride worse. We will always struggle to be better and there will always be someone who has already figured out what is a lightbulb moment for us.

I teach a lot of people every week, a lot of basics and firsts happen in our arena, it’s gratifying to see someone get it but usually it’s a lot of frustration and sometimes laughing at our failings. We are humbled over and over, our amazing lesson horses show us exactly what we need to work on. My students improve and move on to new and equally frustrating lessons, mostly with a healthy sense of humor and some envy of those who have passed that next test of competency. I feel the same damned way when I go to lesson, I trailer to a fancy facility full of fancy horses with clients who are frequently better than I am and who get to lesson more than I do. I climb aboard and hope my mare decides to come to work today because it’s possible we will get to do airs above ground instead, probably in front of a millionaire or an Olympian. I get humbled too. I sometimes leave the ring ready to cry, but I always come away with important information. I go home and I ride that ride 1000 times in my head. I get on my horse and I remember those moments where it came through and it made sense and I search for them. I work on it over days and weeks until I no longer have to search but I know where and how to find those moments and string them together. Sometimes only for a stride or two, sometimes for the whole ride if I’m lucky. But I always go back, looking for the next missing link to my education and I try really hard to not resent that other rider’s perfect leg or their flying changes, or their perfect pirouettes because I know they fought for it. I know they have been down the same road of not being able to turn, not being able to get the transition and that at some point they didn’t know their diagonals or how to sit the trot.

Riding isn’t a sport of better than. It’s simply a journey we all go on and everyone is at a different point in their journey. If you see someone struggling and you’ve been there before, please take a moment to share that you have walked that path instead of being haughty and looking down at the person who hasn’t had the privilege of learning what you have yet. We are in it together.

11/26/2022

Did you know that Americans spent more than 8.9 billion dollars last year on Black Friday? Can you image how much good we could do in the world if a portion of every sale was donated to reputable nonprofits who are working hard to make our world a better place? Imagine how many more horses and donkeys we could rescue if we only had more land and funds.

Here are three ways your holiday shopping can support DER and make a BIG difference in the lives of our rescue horses.

1. AmazonSmile is a website operated by Amazon with the same products, prices, and shopping features as Amazon. The difference is that when you shop at AmazonSmile, the AmazonSmile Foundation will donate 0.5% of the purchase price of eligible products to the charitable organization of your choice. This really does add up and makes a difference. Don’t forget to choose The Dorset Equine Rescue as your charity of choice. Here is the link:
https://smile.amazon.com/ch/46-3192988

2. 100% of all proceeds from your purchase in our online shop go back to support our current rescue horses. Please visit our shop here:
https://dorsetequinerescue.org/theshop/

3. Make a meaningful gift to DER in a loved ones honor in ANY amount. We will happily create a printable custom certificate saying a gift was made in your loved ones honor and email or mail it to you (or to them). This can be a one time donation or a monthly recurring sponsorship. Please contact us to customize: [email protected]

We can not do what we do alone, but with your continued support, we will be able to continue to grow our organization into an even stronger, more sustainable rescue so that we can help even more equines in need for many more years to come. Thank you all so much for all you have done to help us get where we are today! The horses truly show us how grateful they are every day.

To the best of my knowledge, to date the only Grateful Dead- themed freestyle at the WDAA world show 🤣
11/10/2022

To the best of my knowledge, to date the only Grateful Dead- themed freestyle at the WDAA world show 🤣

11/10/2022

I never do this, but I am going to do this.

I am going to talk about safety.

And I am not going to mention hats once.

I’ve seen one too many sad stories about people tumbling off their horses, one too many melancholy pictures from A&E, one too many shy, shamed admissions that the nerve has gone.

People feel ashamed that they are afraid to get back on their horses after a nasty fall. But there are two kinds of fear: the useful, sensible fear that keeps us humans alive, and the paranoid amygdala fear that says everything is going to hell and we will never amount to anything. The first one is the one I listen to. I don’t, eccentric as it may seem, want to die.

That fear tells me a lot of good stuff. It tells me that if the red mare and I are out of practice, we will need to go and do a bit of preparatory work before we ride out into the hills again. It tells me that preparation and practice and patience are everything. It tells me not to rely on luck or what the hell; it tells me to do the work, day after day.

So, in our field, we do the work. We do it on the ground, for days and weeks and months, until the fear nods its head sagely and tells us we are ready. We do stuff which looks boring or nuts to a lot of people. And that’s because I don’t want to be the person who has to sit up all night in a chair because of seven broken ribs, or who can hardly speak and is the colour of putty because of a smashed up pelvis, or who is hobbling about on a broken ankle. I live alone. I have to do my work and look after dogs and horses. I can’t break my ankle.

I have a whole boatload of rules that many people will scoff at. I don’t care. For instance, I won’t get on a horse who can’t stand still at the mounting block. Won’t do it. It’s not only dangerous in and of itself, but that inability to stand is what my friend Warwick Schiller calls ‘bolting at the standstill’. That horse cannot control itself, and so we’re in trouble, right off the bat.

I spend years teaching my horses to control themselves. I learnt an entire new horsemanship from scratch to do this. It is never complete, because horses are prey animals and flight animals, but it goes a hell of a long way.

You literally can teach horses to think their way through problems, rather than react.

You can teach them to move easily between the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system, so they can bring themselves down after a fright.

I’ll give you a specific example: when Clova first came to us, it took her as long as forty-seven minutes to bring herself down. I once timed it on my telephone. And that was not after a fright, that was after the tiniest bit of pressure - just me asking her to trot round me on the rope. Forty-seven minutes. I stood and breathed and waited and broke my heart, a little, thinking of the things she must have been through in her life.

Now, it takes between three to seven seconds.

I watched her do it the other day, out on the trail. An unexpected duck flew up off the burn. It gave her a tiny fright. Four seconds later, she dropped her head, relaxed into her loose rein, and licked and chewed. We taught her that, because it’s a lifesaver, for her rider. It also makes her own life so much easier and happier.

We do a ton of other stuff that helps safety. We teach all our horses to stand still, we teach them all personal space, we teach them focus and connection. This means they won’t trample over us in fear. When horses get scared, they go blind. They’ll knock you over because they don’t know you are there. They are in full survival mode. I won’t work with horses like that. It’s not their fault, but they scare the jeepers out of me.

Actually, that’s not true. Our Freya was like that, and I did work with her, because I wanted her to relax and be happy and find herself, and so I had to work through a lot of very sensible fear. It was a balance between keeping myself safe and giving that horse what she needed, all the time. Thank goodness those days are behind us. Kayleigh was sometimes scared and I was sometimes scared and we were absolutely right to be afraid. There was danger, and we reacted to it rationally.

The focus work is not just so the horses won’t send us flying when they are in survival mode, it’s also for things like feeding time and putting them back into the field.

I have a ridiculously strict rule in the field. All our children obey it to the letter. I owe it to their mothers to keep them safe. It is: we lead the horses in, find a good space, turn them to face the gate, check whether they are relaxed, check whether they are focused on us (rather than on the bears in the woods), check whether they are connected to us, and only then let them go.

I do all this because I love being with horses and I don’t want to be scared of them. A horse who can regulate her own nervous system is so much easier to be around. She’s easy with herself and that makes the humans happy and confident. A horse who knows about personal space is a pleasure, in every interaction. A horse who has control over himself is a joy, not a terror.

Horses will always be intrinsically risky. We’ve all tumbled off, at one time or another, the posse and I. But I like to reduce the risk to the lowest possible point. Every time one of us tumbles, we learn a boatload of lessons from that. It’s almost always that I’ve let something slide, got a bit cocky, ignored a warning sign.

I’m not very brave, and I’m glad I’m not. I used to be deadly ashamed of this. Everything in my childhood was geared to kicking on and riding through it. That was what my dad did, with his steeplechasers; that’s what he famously did when the docs told him he could never ride again and he was back the next year in the Grand National. That was how it was done, in our house.

But I don’t have that kind of physical courage; not any more. I am afraid of breaking things and hurting things. So I train my horses in the ways of slowness and peace. I train them to know me and know themselves, so that fear does not swamp them when it comes. I train them to trust their humans, so they don’t have to go into that hard, terrified survival mode. They always have someone, in their corner, on their side, who will stand on the ramparts and not let the mountain lions pass.

I think a lot about what horses want. Sometimes, I think they want someone who will stand between them and a hungry lion. I am not physically brave, but I would do that for my red mare. I can’t tell you that she knows that, not for sure (I will never entirely know what she knows), but my guess is she has a sense of it. And that is why we are a team. We will protect each other until the last lion is down.

11/10/2022

When an old friend invited me to come see her barn, I had no idea I'd get a full tour of this beautiful spread on the top of a hill complete with her History of Bits collection! The barn is a much-loved, moved and reconstructed 1830s building. It does my heart good to see another one saved and used as it should be!

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210 Monarch Hill Rd
Tunbridge, VT

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