Horse Personality

August 22, 2011
No rain for us this week either.  Guess we aren't doing something right.  But life goes on, even though we are in one of the worst drouths in history.  Here is a little about our life. 


I got the Newsletter out last week. It is a pretty good sized job (or at least it is for me) to get these little five pages written. But it is well worth it when I get back e-mails saying something in it has helped someone. I got back two e-mails like that today. Advertising is one of the hardest things for me and Jere to do. We even have trouble getting our brochure and business cards put out in feed stores and vet offices!! I would like to hire someone to just do publicity and promotions, but can’t justify it yet. So back to the drawing board for me. Our publicity depends on booths at various horse events, our brochures and cards distributed in stores, the newsletter and blog I write, face book and our web page and the thing that is the best advertising, word of mouth. We have done some print advertising, but felt it didn’t really pan out.

The Blog is another hard one to do, because it takes so much time, but I have recently bought a little book that shows how to produce ideas to write, by putting some word that you want to write about in a circle, and then brainstorming words that seem to go with it. As I get older, I find it harder to think of things to write about and this little technique seems to help a lot. One thing I like about the blog is that it flows better, because I know I can write about what I want.

On to Horsemanship….We believe one of the best things that ever happened in the horse world was for Linda Parelli to wake up at 2:30 in the morning and start writing the Horse Personalities out. Before, we knew that horses were somewhat different, but we didn’t know what to do for each personality or what characteristics each horse had. We think this will change the horse world the world over. Many people have started using this program to figure horses out and while some people are doing a little different system, it is still helping the horse to learn. Think what it would be like for schools to use a system something like this on kids. They would learn according to how their personalities are. I know that sure would have helped me in school!!

We have four geldings here now in for training. We try not to put more than two horses in the smaller pastures we have, so there are two geldings in each pasture.

The first is named Gully. He is a 3 year old and is Cully’s horse. He is a left brained extrovert and if he doesn’t get enough work or things to keep him active, he will tear stuff down, get into the fences and skin himself up and so on, generally making a nuisance of himself. His pasture mate is an older horse named Willie. Willie is about 10 and has seen it all. He has all sorts of scars on his front legs, so we aren’t sure what his life was like before.  But Willie is a left brained introvert, who gets along no matter what. When we first put Gully and Willie together, Gully tried to dominate Willie. But soon, Willie had enough of that and started backing up to Gully and kicking him! A couple of days of this and they both get along by staying away from each other. Sort of like a truce. They really don’t like each other, they just get along.

We have two more geldings in another pasture. The first is Lucky, a young paint. He is left brained extrovert, but he is very non-confrontational. Lucky just wants a playmate, but he is always the low man on the totem pole. He is a very sweet, easy to get along with colt.

The gelding we have in with Lucky is Choco. He is brand new, but he seems to be a left brained extrovert too, with dominance issues. He and Lucky started out fighting like crazy and we thought maybe poor old Lucky would get to be the boss of somebody, finally. But it was not to be. Chaco pushes Lucky off his feed, and Lucky knows his place and moves to another pile of hay. They seem to really like each other now, and will play “bite face” all day.

It is really interesting to watch these horses and the other horses we have here in their herd. Sometimes they change from being one horse personality to being another in the same day and sometimes even when we are working them in a round pen session. The best way to figure out what your horse is, is to sit and watch what they do with other horses.

I hope you all have a very profitable and worthwhile week. We have a couple of private lessons and lots of regular lessons. Cully’s brother-in-law is also coming down to stay a while and work some horses. We are looking forward to that. Hopefully, I will get some pictures into the blog next week.