Final Days before the Futurity!

I’m all excited about the Snaffle Bit Futurity, this is Thursday, tomorrow I pack and Saturday we haul to Reno. My purpose of this blog is to tell you how my thoughts have been in the past on this emotional roller coaster. I’m going to tell you the snaffle bit thing is a real roller coaster. There will be times when you feel like your horse is real, real, real good and then things fall apart, and you think, “Oh my God, do I have enough time.” Then the next thing you know you say, “I have too much time, I wish it would hurry up and get here”. I’m on the high right now – on the peak of one of these roller coaster rides because right now my horse Turbo looks really, really good.

To give you an idea of what has been going on here, as usual most everybody has – we’ve detected along the way some minor soreness in Turbo’s hock and stifle, it comes along with these baby three-year-old horses doing what they do. I’ve been very, very careful not to stress Turbo and keep the dirt just right. You want to keep the dirt fairly light, you don’t want too much water in it, because the heavier it gets the more difficult it is for these horses to use. So, anyways, we’ve been staying sound.

So now Turbo appears really sound, the veterinarians have checked him out, Dr. Van Snow has been looking at him, and Van is the guru as far as soundness goes in this area. Van said he’s the soundest one he’s seen this year, so that makes me feel pretty good. But last week I did take him to a friend’s house and worked down the fence and I was not happy. He’s been kind of at Club Med here, he’s had an easy life, so I said that we are going to have to push a little bit and see if I can get this fence work fixed up. He didn’t want to commit to the ground, he did not want to just dig in, the natural instinct of course is to just go practice some more fence turns. Well good lord, you take so much out of them doing that, you teach them to roll into those turns instead of stop and stop straight and then turn, you teach them to anticipate the turns cause sometimes cattle slip under their neck, which is a penalty. It’s the wrong thing to do and it harbors the urge any of us have, to directly confront the actual maneuver. Well I thought, “ let’s just do it like you would tell somebody else to do it”. And that would be to go back to FUNDAMENTALS, go to fundamentals and try to fix it.

So I talked to my friend Cody Morrow who helps me on a daily basis, he’s my ground man and is very, very valuable to me because he’s got really good eye. So Cody said he thought I was on the right track when I mentioned it, he said let’s bring in some big old fat mother cows in, I mean some old cows. These cows will run. But their moves when they gallop are lot more lumbering and bigger strided, so they’re not particularly quick but they will run. They have enough stamina that they will go across the pen and make a couple of laps, where some of these younger cattle just kind of go into a corner and run into the fence, where mother cows don’t seem to do that. For three days we didn’t do any short work or end work or boxing on the end, just turned a cow in with me, and went right ahead and got right to that cow’s hip with Turbo’s nose, just a little further up than the hip and probably 5 or 6 feet out from the cow. We went around and around, and across and around, if a cow went out across the middle of the pen, Turbo circled them. If a cow even blinked his eye like he was going to stop or slow down, boy we parked Turbo right then. So he got kind of checky by the third day if one was going to slow down a bit, he would slow down even more. So on that third day I said “well here we go!” I sent the cow down the fence fairly fast, I would say 2/3’s speed wide open, not completely, so it was more like 65-70% of full power, the arena had perfect dirt, all the conditions were right, and I sent him by the cow once each way, and boy ole Turbo committed, I mean he really got on his butt!

But you see the theory is he thought he was so dominant, he was so comfortable running up there. I didn’t like the feeling he gave me, when I went up to my friend’s house to work, he ran up a little strong and was more tuned into me than he was the cow, just didn’t have that real cowy dominant feeling that a fence horse needs to have. So anyways, lesson for you folks you always go back to fundamentals. If your horse isn’t stopping you don’t go to the stop to fix it, you go to the approach. If he’s not turning or changing leads, you go to the approach or the fundamentals or the ingredients that make that particular maneuver happen, as we did with the cow work.

After that I feel really safe, so yesterday I worked some fresh cattle and I went out of the herd, you know I don’t think I worked him over 4—5 minutes at the most, I don’t think it was that long, more like 3-4 minutes, I worked two cattle and he was so crisp and so willing and he had lots of draw to him, and picked himself up and came across so good, and he was so cowy, incredibly cowy, more so that I felt he ever has been, I had to quit! Of course my nature is you want to keep doing it, but I got just a little bit and I could feel the rest was there so I quit. Now today I’m going to put one of those smaller cattle in and gallop around the pen behind it, and just rate that one. I stopped him once yesterday and I did circles and transitions and lead changes, just had to do it once each way, and he got straight A’s all day. He stopped one time. My weakest stop when I showed him last was in the center of the arena, so I just stopped him once in the middle of the pen and not going real fast, he was great.

The horse is really a finalist – he’s a really, really good snaffle-bitter if he gets the breaks – so pray for me folks, if he gets the breaks then he will be. Today I’ll follow him around a little bit and I’m thinking what am I going to do tomorrow – tomorrow would be my last day for riding and you know what, he’s on vacation tomorrow! Because he hauls for 9 hours on Saturday and he won’t get his 2 days off like he normally gets. If I ride him tomorrow he’ll have only 1 day off and he’ll spend that one in the trailer, and then I expect him to be a show horse, give me a break! So the smart thing to do is keep him sound just keep it on ice, everything that is working really good, and tomorrow we’re going to do the same thing that he gets every day.

Which by the way, I’ll tell you what he gets every day, I go out at 10:00 am out to the ranch and I put the therascope on Turbo, which is a machine that keeps this horse really sound. It’s what we call a pre-event treatment, this machine oxygenates all the cells, I don’t know exactly how it works, all I know is that it costs a whole bunch of money and so he gets the royal treatment with this. I know it works because I’ve used it in my bath and it really works good on me! I feel great the next day. So it’s a preventative and if there is anything that is starting to happen as an injury goes, it helps to fix it quicker. I put the therascope on him every day, and I have this big vibrator, it’s a massager for horses, so he gets the therascope then he gets a massage, then he gets brushed, and a bath. He pretty much gets the Club Med treatment like I say! So anyways everything is looking really, really good I’ll ride him today a little, and try to make it short and I don’t know what else to do. Tomorrow he gets to relax and Saturday I’ll haul him to Reno and hopefully everything will go right!

So now you know a little bit of what we are doing, so thanks for reading folks!

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