Summer Read: The Nature of Horses

Authors of horse books generally come in two varieties: Horsemen and women who write about their expertise. Their strength is horses. Writers and journalists who love horses and want to write about them. Their strength is writing. It’s rare to find books by authors who […]

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Bug products worth the cost and effort?

    No Mas to my old routine! This summer, I’ve decided to stop my zealous and expensive efforts to keep flies off the horses. Why? At 20 to 25 bucks a bottle, fly spray is expensive. Read what readers pick for Best Fly Spray. […]

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What Would Joe Do

Joe Camp keeps popping up on my radar. He’s been busy for decades with dogs (writer/director of “Benji,” etc) and horses (author of scores of top-selling horse books), but lately we’ve been moving along parallel ‘Nature is Best’ paths. He blogged about kissing wormers goodbye […]

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A Horse’s No Win Situation

That was the tough, take-away message from Dr. Rebecca Gimenez when asked about how to protect your horses in the event of a tornado. Close them in barns and you run the risk of harming them when the barn collapses. You may also stress them […]

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Lean, Steady, Agile is what your horse wants of you

What?? You failed to read the “Method for estimating maximum permissible load weight for Japanese native horses using accelerometer-based gait analysis” abstract on the National Center for Biotechnology Information website?? (It’s on our NickerNews Links page) You’re forgiven. In fact, one of the BestHorsePractices goals […]

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Equine Grief

Barbara King is a member of a small group of articulate scientists discussing and contributing exciting research on non-human emotions. It’s a fascinating field and one that has, over the generations, weathered challenges of anthropomorphizing and, on the other end of the spectrum, outright dismissal. […]

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Weighty Matters

Together with the horse, we’re Olympians. Together, we’re scholarship athletes. We’re a legendary duo, crossing continents, scaling mountains, swimming rivers, and outsprinting nearly every other species on the planet. But somewhere along the line it became OK to partner-up with our horses as overweight, out-of-shape […]

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Nature is Best Balm

      It’s one thing most of us riders have with us all the time. We’re as likely to have it as a cell phone, money, or pocket knife. Lip balm. You know I’m not into product pushing. But I started thinking about lip […]

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Jeff Griffith’s Doughnut

For some time, folks have been telling me to check out horseman Jeff Griffith. I did and loved what I saw and heard. Griffith worked alongside Buck Brannaman for years, managed the La Cense Horsemanship program in western Montana, and developed an instructional DVD series […]

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One woman’s journey to ‘Feel’

Jackie St. Thomas was one of several riders to work with Leslie Desmond at a recent clinic in Marion, Massachusetts. St. Thomas initially discovered Desmond years ago through “True Horsemanship Through Feel,” the book Desmond co-wrote with Bill Dorrance. Then she signed up for a […]

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