North Star Equine

15/02/2025

08/02/2025

Practicing what I preach; slow, steady, and building a horse for the future not for today. I saw something in his sale video and took a chance without ever seeing him in person. He arrived with a slew of things I knew we’d have to fix. We have done body work, ground work, and gotten him on a good feed program. The first few rides were rough - so stiff. So dull. But also so reactive. So we’ve been taking it slow and building it up. Teaching him. I am continually so grateful for the people in my corner who have believed in me all this time, who push me and remind me constantly of the good in me. Today was a good day and I’m just a little bit obsessed with this horse and what’s to come.

30/01/2025

Good boy Neville.

25/01/2025

By Ariel Univer As a trainer, I keep very few secrets from my clients. Where some may be more tight lipped or filtered, by nature I’m more of an open book. This is true for myself professionally and personally. It has served me well at times… and at other times caused me some issues. For […]

25/01/2025

With the cold weather this week we’ve taken a step back into foundational groundwork for some of these kids - ones who struggle with reactivity and confidence. Today Olive conquered the tarp, walking and eventually lunging across it. Neville is working on his canters on the lunge line and got his TMJ and poll worked on. And I got to jump Redwin again as he needs someone confident to say “yes we are” over fences. Tilly faced her nemesis the bird. And Thor was his usual easy going self.

22/01/2025

I owned Felix for nearly 15 years…..and only once twice in later years can I ever remember catching him resting and him staying down long enough for snuggle and a picture. This guy…..was snoozing when I arrived for 5am club this morning and let me go in and rested his head in my lap. It was a nice way to start the morning.

20/01/2025

Does this bow make my ears look small? Neville suffers from a little bit of reactivity for noises - hence getting the “stick”. He picked up really quickly that it was no big deal and didn’t warrant a fuss. Here’s to building a good horse for the future.

19/01/2025

Starting off our crews show season with the IDCTA virtual dressage show. These virtual shows are a great, inexpensive way to see where horses are at, knock some rust off, and get out some show jitters. Very fortunate to have such hard working, helpful clients. Everyone is working on their own goals - whether it was proving they COULD, riding a new horse, or coming back from an injury.

19/01/2025

Some times you have to take a step back. For the next little while this little miss is going to be getting some help with her noise reactivity. Today’s lesson was a feed bag; flapping, crinkling, and being rubbed all over. Lots for her to think about. Always grateful to owners who trust me.

17/01/2025

Somebody is feeling better about their body. Look at him move.

16/01/2025

I will never understand why the FEI REQUIRES nose bands but allows some of the bits they do. I think it’s even MORE impressive to get true connection and engagement with less equipment. 🤷🏼‍♀️

Bitless dressage allowed and nosebands and double bridles optional in new Danish rules

Read more via link below

09/01/2025

I don’t know a single horse person who won’t tell you there is something about being alone in the barn, just you and the horses. No interruptions. No distractions. Just quiet breathing, soft munching, and your own thoughts.

08/01/2025

I love this. So much. And it is so accurate. Often times problems are multifaceted and you have to attack from all angles.

This photo probably doesn't look like much, I'll admit that outright. And yet, this picture is worth a whole post.

It is - yet again - proof that everything is connected to everything.

It was reported to me that this horse had a propensity for weaving when I bought him. I saw it on the long trailer ride from Tennessee to Vermont this past March. I saw it early on during the first couple months he was with me. I've dealt with weavers before: stereotypies like this come from the horse being "mentally displaced". It's a coping mechanism, like children sucking their thumb, but taken to an extreme after long periods of stress from which the horse could find no relief. When it gets to that point, it becomes like a hard-wired habit and can be virtually impossible to break depending on how easily the horse is triggered into become mentally displaced.

When I see horses exhibiting this type of behavior, it tells me a great deal about their ability to "stay in their own body" when they encounter something stressful or uncomfortable. It's a disassociative tendency: the lights are on, but nobody is home. Horses like this often live in a semi-disassociated state all the time: they aren't okay, they just aren't not-okay enough to exhibit the stereotype behavior of choice 24/7.

Fixing this issue requires playing the long game and implementing a flexible and multi-faceted approach. Rarely can you directly address the actual stereotype behavior because it's a symptom of other things at play. So you "attack it" at all angles: you address diet, you address physical sources of discomfort, you address husbandry practices, you address routine, you address holes in the horse's foundation of understanding regarding handling, groundwork and riding, you address social needs...you find anything and everything where the horse has struggle and you do as much as you can to improve those things. And you do it in such a way that you chip away at the horse's levels of internal worry and anxiety and stress (which, honestly, often includes thoughtfully causing the horse some low levels of worry or stress so you can prove to him that he is safe and can be okay after all).

This is not an exact science. It's a constantly shifting, complex, non-linear process that goes at the horse's pace. Sometimes it's a bit like whack-a-mole: getting one thing better stirs up something else. Sometimes it gets worse before anything gets better.

And then something like what's captured in this photo happens, and you see where all the work has paid off.

This morning, the equine dentist came to do the whole herd. It was rainy and cold, which meant we wouldn't be able to do everyone outside in the alleyway off the barn. Being stalled/confined is one of Whiskey's biggest triggers for weaving. Having his friends taken out of his sight has been the second. Both were going to need to happen today.

I brought the donkeys into the barn, knowing that while Whiskey would be able to sort of see them, that separation was likely to be triggering for him. He immediately came to the gate to check out where they had gone. I knew he could sense they were there but he was still a bit troubled by the fact that he couldn't see them easily. For about fifteen minutes he walked around the track, to the run-ins, to the field gates, checking all the spots where he thought they might be. He called for them quite a bit. But he never got frantic or panicked or stirred up more than that. He came and checked back in at the barn gate a few times, getting a bit more assured each time that they were in fact there.

And then, about twenty minutes in, he picked a spot near the barn, cocked a leg, and relaxed. He stayed that way for nearly a half hour, until it was his turn to be caught and brought in to have his teeth floated, which he handled beautifully and without stress.

And he never once went to weaving.

One of the biggest gifts we can give our horses is the ability to think through problems and make themselves feel better by relaxing. Of all the things I have done for this horse, I imagine the most important to him is that in every. single. interaction we've had for 10 months, it has never worked out in any context for him to tense up, push against, or try and leave something that caused him worry. Never. Not a one. I haven't ever forced that lesson on him: I've just made it hard for that to work anymore, until such a time as he decided to engage with me and try something else. It's in this conscious decision-making by the horse - the decision to do something other than what they have been doing - that the real change is born from.

And I saw that real change today, in real time, with a real choice to let go of his worry and find peace within himself. If this is the only thing I ever end up being able to do for any horse, it will be wholly worth it because from here all things are possible.

08/01/2025

There is a reason, I think, that horsemanship is so hard to teach, and that is because it's truly an art and not a science.

You can go to school for art. You can learn from masters of a particular art form. You can study the chemical composition of your medium and learn about how those mediums behave in different circumstances. You can learn about the history of your art, how it originated and how it's evolved. You can study trends and dabble in different methodologies.

But no matter what, in order to become an artist, you have to experience it. You have obsess over it. You have to go to bed thinking about it and get up thinking about it. You have to become a little bit consumed by it. It drives your passion and your curiosity. You have to dedicate a part of your soul to its inception, creation and development. In some ways, you have to get to the point where you cannot separate yourself from it, as it has become a part of you and you of it.

I have received requests in the past asking me to write more about specific techniques, "how-to's", if you will. I will admit I struggle with this because it feels to me kind of like someone asking me how to have a conversation. I can give you a very general framework, but a conversation is intimate and personal. To write one for someone else would seem to me to be a request to boil down everything that is beautiful and awe-inspiring about horsemanship into base mechanical elements: important, but ultimately in my experience not AS important as the energy, flow and feeling of what is happening between the horse and the human.

Yes, you need a basic skillset to be an artist. You need to know how to hold the brush. You need to know how to choose a canvas. You need to know a thing or two about how your medium behaves and how to bring out the best in it.

But what ultimately creates art is the person behind the tools and the feeling within them. And since no teacher can create this for you, we simply have to try and set up scenarios and allow space and spark inspiration for people to go seek it within themselves.

07/01/2025

It is harder to undo a completed product to fix the foundation than it is to do it right from the beginning. Feeling a little flustered with the process this week - this was a nice reminder that I’m not alone; that other professionals believe this as well. And doing right by the horses is never wrong.

🧱

06/01/2025

Feeling grateful I have a very large collection of tools coupled with education to be able to problem solve. Hello, my name is Neville and I might have the tiniest feet for my size. 🤣.

31/12/2024

Don’t look at it as an inconvenience - look at it as a training opportunity.