all in Aftercare

It’s the first week of May, last Saturday SHOULD have been Derby day (thanks for that, COVID-19) and it was a beautiful, sunny, 80-degree day in Kentucky. This morning I delivered a foal wearing coveralls, and tomorrow it’s going to be 26 degrees. I guess you can say we are still patiently waiting for the arrival of a consistent spring, but that just goes along with the anything-but-normal year that we are having.

Today, I get to introduce you all to my second entry to the 2020 Retired Racehorse Project Thoroughbred Makeover. This is an extra-special introduction, as I have decided to add this talented guy into my personal string of performance horses. I have been searching for just the right horse for about two years. I sell approximately 50-70 Thoroughbreds a year for sport horse careers, so you can understand just how picky I have been. When Mr. Park walked out of his stall at the racetrack, I knew immediately. It was eerie.

In this horse life, we are truly blessed to meet so many amazing equines. We are equally as cursed, it seems, as far too often our amazing friends fall out of contact. While we might have them in our stable mail, watch races, and keep up with their work tab, eventually the notifications stop.

In my many years of professionally training various horse breeds for multiple disciplines, I have found my greatest tools to be my background in natural horsemanship and my mounted police training to create a partnership built on trust, leadership, and confidence. When working with my own horses or helping other people with their horses, I have seen huge improvements and endless possibilities with the addition of those two training modalities with horses and riders of every discipline and level of experience. 

Full disclosure: This one is going to be hard to write …

But as depressed as I have been feeling, I am starting to think that maybe it will help to put it all out there.

Horse racing is a notoriously private industry. Some people think it’s taboo to talk about the bad things and only stick to the good, but knowing about the bad makes celebrating the triumphs much more special.

Term of Art won’t be competing at the Thoroughbred Makeover this year. He may never be sound again, or the harshest of realities is that this may be something that we aren’t able to fix.

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