CL Love Equine Services

09/06/2026

I’m going to tell some stories that will hopefully reach someone that just needs a little snippet of help.

Today’s story is about a little paint mare, raised with love, and actually decent boundaries, but with no concept or agreement that at some point we have horses to do some sort of job. This was back when I bought, trained, and sold Hunter prospects , and helped a few people on the side, but made my actual living as an accountant.

This little mare had been to a full time trainer to get started under saddle, but the owner took her home because the trainer wasn’t accomplishing much other than beating on her a bit. Don’t hate on him yet, this mare was a case. I am lucky that this mare didn’t hurt me in the beginning, and I realize today that I need to utilize the lessons she taught me more often.

This mare had been so desensitized that she was afraid of nothing, she’d been saddled, walked around, done a lot, except actually have to work.

Fast forward to our first session in the round pen, luckily back then I did these sessions with a line and not completely free. We do some yielding of all the body parts, backing, etc, all is good. I send her out in a circle and she walks one circle and quits, refuses to move, as I escalate my asking she kicks out at me, I pop her with the lunge line to tell her no for that, she tries harder to tell me no, until we end up at the point that she is coming at me with teeth bared, front hooves pawing at me in the air, I am now the one moving my feet. We ended this session back at simple yields, I was pretty fried. The owner was present for the whole thing, so there was no question about how we had progressed to a knock down, drag out, fight. For those that might say this mare was screaming that something was wrong and I wasn’t listening, there was nothing physically wrong, the mare actually ended up quite joyful about work.

Stay tuned for part two:

09/05/2026

Many years ago I had the opportunity to work with a brilliant horseman and his brilliant psychologist wife, Tim and Bettina Jobe, The Natural Lifemanship Institute. One of the key takeaways from their clinic, which in hindsight, a couple of horses had taught me years earlier, was identifying the difference between ignoring and resisting in the horse, and which one warrants increasing pressure (the ignoring) and which one warrants keeping some pressure, but definitely not increasing it (the resisting). I am going to cover all of the backstory to this whole learning process in a few posts, because it will get long. The saddest part of the horse human interaction is that we are all going to be in different places of learning and sometimes we are going to hit the wrong answer, most of the time this doesn’t have dire consequences, but when you’re dealing with a 1000+ pound prey animal, it can, for possibly both human and horse. From my horse interactions, I’m going to venture to say that when a horse has been pushed to the point of fighting in the past, you can bring out a fight response from increasing pressure in an instance that is fairly obviously ignoring, and having prior experience with that might be the key to de-escalating the situation. Tomorrow we will start with the story of the spoiled paint mare whose name I don’t remember (it has been over 20 years), sorry if I’m triggering some of the resistance free trainers using the word spoiled to describe a horse. Monday we will talk about Indy, who coincidentally was also a paint. Tuesday we will talk about trigger stacking, which in my mind is much more applicable to me, but I’m willing to consider the concept for horses.

09/04/2026

I didn’t get my pile moved out of the barn before the monsoons last night, and because of the monsoons, the horses were pretty much hanging out in there all night making a new huge mess that I really didn’t want to clean up by hand. Luckily, my little 2 wheel drive tractor with the landscape tires made it up the hill for me to scrape the barn out. I have some piles to spread outside, as I didn’t want to get the tractor off the gravel until I was headed down the hill for the day, but so much less work than having to scoop by hand into the dump cart.

09/04/2026

I was reminded today, of course on my new favorite trainers page, B1 Horsemanship, of how some popular training maneuvers get overused. He was talking about disengaging the hindquarters, and why he doesn’t teach that anymore, go on over to his page to check it out. I want to talk about the one rein stop, which I don’t know about it being overused, but certainly over recommended for horse control issues. I can think of all sorts of instances where trying a one rein stop might be dangerous, too many to mention, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend it outside of a situation where we could go over all of the ifs, ands, and buts, around its use. I am also taken back to memories of being run off with as a very small child, and when we were stopped and everything was ok, my dad chastising me for not ‘pulling the horse around’, like 30 pound 5 year old me was capable of pulling a full sized horse around to stop it. I love trying to help people on the internet, but all the things that can be misinterpreted and misused stop me in a lot of instances.

09/04/2026

Gate opening and closing etiquette on a ranch or farm, leave things as you found them, there may be several different reasons for everything.

09/03/2026

Oh my gosh, we have finally reached that magical time of year that Savannah says it’s ok to venture to the big pasture, hopefully I won’t have to mow it anymore. Savannah is my old TB mare, by the way, that convinces everyone that the big pasture is not a good place to be, for at least 2 months every summer.

09/03/2026

I am really glad that I went with the open barn for now, it has been reconfigured so many times for different feed sources, round bales to the current large squares, and horse circumstances, like when my c**t was still intact. I actually have a nice little tack and grain area now, someday I will have a whole tack room. The horses also really love to come and go as they please and hang out together in the barn.

09/01/2026

One of those, don’t try this at home moments, cleaning my barn with the horses tied in it, with the tractor. I do clean this barn every day, but the horses really like to use it as a bathroom. I shoveled everything to the center, and then decided that pulling it out with the tractor was a splendid idea.

08/29/2026

08/29/2026

Current completed work, removed the ugly pile of debris that has been in the middle of my yard forever, and got my first real gate.