Blackwater Swamp Stomp: Our First Colonial Spanish Horse Team Endurance Race

Yesterday our team of Colonial Spanish Horses and an American Indian Horse participated in our first official 30 mile race, The Blackwater Swamp Stomp. I do not care much for the idea of competition, but still I think it appropriate to announce the list of winners.

 Mandy was the biggest winner in yesterday's race. She worked hard to condition Midnight and was riding a horse that could go forever. But he went a little too far. He took off after some horses that passed him and Mandy ended up well off course and separated from the leaders in our team.  She rode him down to a walk and dismounted safely. She finished the ride and kept him in control. She was disappointed, but she took it all with the greatest show of maturity.

Brooke came in just after Mandy in the category of over all winner. She had been riding for about a year and a day and finished the race on Red Fox, a Corolla/Tenn Walker (our only horse who was not an HOA horse in our team)

But we also have to rank Curie up there at the top. Not only has she been riding only a year, she did much of the training of Long Knife, a Corolla mare.

But then where do we place Terry, who worked harder conditioning her horse than anyone on the team and rode the smallest horse there and one of the very few (if any) stallions? Surely, that makes her one of the top winners.

Certainly the winner for best relationship with her horse and most concern for her horse's care and safety has to go to Audrey who completely shocked me with the potential that she brought out in the mare, Baton Rouge. I had no idea Baton Rouge had the speed and stamina that Audrey brought out in her.

And Ariyana, who is becoming nearly as tough as Holland, the Shackleford that she rode, came in first in the youth division. She rode Holland the way Holland needs to be ridden, hard and steady.

And Abigail on her Corolla, Little Hawk, who she trained came in 7th over all. a feat made that much more remarkable by the fact that she hung back and rode with the rest of the team for the first 17 miles.

Yesterday a lot of people got the chance to see what is so special about Colonial Spanish Horses and got a chance to understand why it is so vital to prevent their extinction.

And that made everyone there winners.

Waste Not

I hate to waste living things. As we cleared the New land we did not have funds to build a conventional fence around the area that we were converting to pasture. With the help of the kids and a few adults we built a pole and post fence from the green timbers that was .64 miles around the land. As those posts and poles age out we are in a better financial position to replace them with conventional fence.

We have gotten nearly three years of pasture use out of that land that we would not have gotten had we waited to have the funds to put in a conventional fence. On the other hand, we could have put in a conventional fence at 5the time and forgone many other improvements made to the program, like the acquisition of  additional breeding stock for our livestock conservation programs.

I have begun another massive undertaking. Jacob's Woods is seventeen acres. I am intensively thinning it, leaving oaks, and large pines and hardwoods. I will be taking out several hundred maple and small pines. We have already begun the project and have builts a massive brush pile wind row from the tree tops that will wonderful wild life habitat. I hope to be able to get a stand of native warm season grasses growing where the sunlight will now find the ground. The area will, if everything  breaks right, become a silvopasture for multi species use and will also open up much more of our land to riding.

I can't abide the idea of letting all of these posts lay on the ground to rot. I have a design in my mind of the construction of a building frame of modern two by fours with the poles attached in the frame at six foot intervals. The walls would not be chinked. I would want a modern tin or tin substitute roof with enough over hang to keep the rain out of the structure.

It will be a lot of work, but it will be interesting work and will create great memories for the kids that help create the building.

I can already hear negative thoughts coming through this computer.  "Why not make it perfectly historically accurate if you want the kids to have a really first rate learning experience.?" Along with the constant refrain of "If you build it won't it eventually rot and fall in?"

The answer to the first is that I would prefer to build one historically accurate, using only historically accurate tools, but our program is multi faceted and we do many things at one time. Making a quality, 19th century small barn would require every minute of every day that we have music, horse training, riding lessons, soil and water conservation projects, programming for veterans with PTSD, livestock care, breed conservation, and everything else that we do.

The other negative thought has always perplexed me. "Well if you do that won't it just eventually decay and collapse?"  Of course it will, and so will I and so will you.

Only the rocks live forever. Not building a structure  because we cannot build a perfect structure makes as much sense as not living a life because we cannot live a perfect life.

More work to be done. Time to get up earlier out of bed!

Here's What The Round Pen Can Teach You

Natural horsemanship teaches one to learn to communicate with a creature with whom we share no fundamental emotional motivations. It teaches that the horse must be accepted as a horse and that silly efforts to humanize the horse get in the way of that communication.

We cannot reach across such a divide and communicate effectively without developing a great deal of empathy. First and foremost, the round pen teaches empathy.

Natural horsemanship teaches one to understand the use and the limitations of power. The horse's fundamental emotional need is security and the horse cannot feel secure in the presence of a human who does not demonstrate sufficient power to allow the horse to feel secure. Secondly, the round pen teaches the use of firm direction instead of intimidation.

Natural horsemanship teaches one to understand that leadership must be given for a horse (or a child) to succeed. Natural horsemanship, when properly applied, simply means to trains and relate to a horse using  communication techniques and rewards and sanctions that the horse instinctively understands. In short, instead of trying to teach the horse to speak English, natural horsemanship endeavors to teach the human to speak horse. The round pen teaches effective communication.

Natural horsemanship, when practiced long enough, teaches the limitations of human control over events around us. If a person will put in the hard work to make it happen, natural horsemanship can provide the antidote to perfectionism, obsessive neatness, and the need for artificial structure in one's life. The round pen teaches that no amount of planning, worrying, nitpicking, organizing, and over thinking makes it possible to control the events that shape lives. Working in the round pen long enough teaches a deeper truth--that too often the obsession to control events and people burns time, energy and resources that could have been used to actually solve a problem. The round pen teaches the superiority of action over rumination.

Natural horsemanship teaches self reliance. It teaches that the horse needs you and no one else can come in and do the job for you. Training a wild horse or starting a domesticated colt without teaching the owner every aspect of what is done in the natural training of the horse will result in a bad life for that horse. The round pen teaches that when faced with challenges in life we must take them on. More importantly, the round pen teaches that when we do work hard and take on challenges we are often capable of success

Natural horsemanship creates better horses. More importantly, it creates better people.

The Comeback: I Did Not Used To Be Dead Inside

It has been nearly a decade and a half since I conducted my first professional training for prosecutors on using the lessons of natural horsemanship to more effectively communicate with kids who had been molested. It is odd to look back over the notes of that presentation to see that I had urged that no single prosecutor be responsible for these cases for more than a year and a half.

I have been prosecuting these cases for over twenty years. About a decade ago I was doing a training session for detectives when I mentioned that in every case  I had  succeeded in making the child  comfortable enough to testify.

The oldest detective in the room said, much louder than I am sure he ever meant to, "I'm sorry."

I was taken aback by the interjection and I looked over and made eye contact with the the speaker. He looked a bit sheepish for having spoken as loud as he did and simply said, "That means that you have been down there in it with them."

I had never thought of it that way. Please understand that I have never personally experienced any abuse or victimization myself.  "Being down there in it with them" is simply a description of the power of empathy. Empathy can lead to self inflicted wounds. Being "down there in it with them" requires one to take on the pain of other people. And sometimes with kids the only way to lessen their pain is to take some of that load on yourself.

Please understand that I am not complaining. What I do has given my life meaning and I prefer a life of meaning to a life of frivolity and air-headed idiocy.  I certainly do not feel any resentment towards the victims in my cases. Were it not for these cases Beth and I would have never gotten to know Ashley. Were it not for these cases our program at Mill Swamp Indian Horses would not remotely have the meaning and impact that it now has.

This is not the writing of some kid who just found out that life is not fair and feels the need to whine about that fact to everyone present.

I have spent many hours over the summer in prosecutor training on trauma informed practices. I am delighted to say that I did not learn a great deal that I did not know from the horse lot.  I did learn how to sharpen our program for patients at the local veterans hospital who have PTSD. I got great ideas on how to best use the limited time that we have together to help program participants gain insight on trust, communication, and understanding why they feel they way that they do and how to begin climbing out of the pit.

I learned what burnout is. I am not burned out. Burnout is best illustrated by the automaton who goes through the motions without  being able to care. I am not close to such feelings.

And this gradual erosion of self is not depression. It is not a symptom of depression.

But there is a deadening that happens over the years. It is as if my taste buds are dying. I eat life as ravenously as I ever did, I just don't taste the flavor of the  life that I am consuming. Perhaps it has manifested itself most painfully in the lack of relationships with my horses that I once had. The horses have not changed, but I have. Beginning at the moment that I heard of Lido's death I gradually began to replace the excitement  over the birth of a foal with a strong feeling that I needed to keep in mind that, like every foal ever born, this one will eventually die and odds are that I will outlive it.

Putting emotional energy into developing a close relationship with things as ephemeral as living creatures begins to feel like a very unwise investment.

But then the oddest things can happen. Look at that picture above. Her name is Honey. She was the first super success that I ever had training a horse. She is not a Colonial Spanish horse. She is a registered Paint. I had not seen her for a decade. That is how long she had been living out of state with the family of a former rider of mine who has grown up and is getting an advanced degree away from home.

So this week Honey came back to me.

 And I touched her.

And it felt like it used to when I touched horses--soothing, powerful and transforming.  Who knows how long this feeling will last? For now I will settle for just being very pleasantly surprised to find something that I thought I lost over the years.

There Are Horses Under Those People

Some of the worlds rarest horses-- three Corollas, a Marsh Tacky, and a high percentage Grand Canyon  in this picture--deep in the woods on a hot fall afternoon--wading into a sea of marsh cane (one of the main sources of arrow shafts for Powhatan Indians)

It has been a long time since I have even used the word, but we are in the early stages of a drought. Hunting season is coming on us so we will be out of the woods for most of the next ninety days.

That time will be spent honing riding skills, turning 17 acres of woods into silva pasture and additional riding areas, running a sanctioned endurance race in two weeks, training donkeys to pull poles from the woods, building fences, and having a good time playing music and getting to know each other better.

In January we will be back in the woods. Looking forward to seeing the winter wildlife and working our land to improve it as wild life habitat.

Will be spending this week at a training on prosecuting crimes against children. When that is what you do for a living it makes it hard to understand why the sight of this one (walking along in the field beside the Little House) would be a scary thing.