Fable Farm

Our trailer-in saddle fitting day at Fable Farm in Rochester, MN is coming up soon!

Here are the details:
📍 July 22 | 9:00am–6:00pm

💲 $180 per saddle
💲 $20 trailer-in fee

If you’ve been thinking about getting on the schedule, now is the time. This dedicated days are a great way to get your horse seen without waiting for a full regular appointment slot.

Spots are limited and filling quickly, reach out today if you want in.

Whatever you practice is what you're going to develop.

In the pursuit of better horsemanship, I've walked many different paths. Some of them have been dead ends. Some of them have required bushwhacking. Some of them I've gotten a bit lost on - or at least I felt lost in the moment - only to come out on the other side and realize I was never really lost in the first place.

One thing I've never done, though, is quit trying.

Oh, I've paused at times, for sure. I've sat with frustration until it went quiet on its own. There have been days I've questioned why I'm doing this at all. Days where I'm filming the session and I get off, or stop right in the middle of everything, rewind the footage and watch it back like it might confess something I missed the first time. I've gone to bed turning over what didn't work and woken up still turning it over. I've tweaked and adjusted and scrapped it all and started again, and again, and again.

I know folks who call horses their happy place. They go to the barn the way you'd slip out a side door - to get away from life, from the noise of family, the weight of work, the small daily wars we all carry. And I sometimes wonder if I'm doing something wrong, because horses have never been a place where I could hide. If anything, they've been the opposite of an escape. They've been a mirror held up at the worst possible angle - the one that shows you exactly what you don't want to see.

Horses have stripped me bare, over and over, and set me down in front of whatever I was avoiding. My impatience. My inconsistency. My need to be right instead of clear. My tendency to ask for softness while holding on so tight my hands forget how to open. There's no hiding from an animal built to read your body before you've finished the thought. They don't care what story I'm telling myself on the drive to the barn or the walk out to the pasture. They only answer the truth of what shows up in the round pen.

Maybe that's the trade I've made without ever quite deciding to. Other people get a refuge. I got a teacher who doesn't grade on effort, only on honesty. And somewhere along the way I stopped resenting that and started needing it because the version of me that horses ask me to become is a version I actually want to be, in the barn and out of it. Patient. Present. Willing to be wrong long enough to get it right.

So no, horses have never been my happy place. They've been something better and harder: the place I go to practice becoming who I'm trying to be - one paused video, one restarted session, one small honest correction at a time.

Assuming past behaviors in your horse doesn’t benefit you or your horse. We don’t know what situations may arise, when we aren’t present, that may affect how a horse feels about something.

He had loaded without issue for five years and then on a Wednesday in May he stopped. Not dramatically. He came to the ramp and he stopped and he looked at the interior and he communicated clearly that the interior was no longer acceptable and he was prepared to hold that position indefinitely if I intended to argue about it. I have thought about what changed and I have not identified the specific event. Something shifted in his experience of the trailer between a loading in March and that Wednesday in May and I was not present for whatever it was and I cannot go back and observe it. What I could do was rebuild. I moved the trailer to the barn area and I left it open for a week with hay visible inside and no requests made of anyone. Day eight I asked for his nose inside. That was the only ask. Just the nose. I rewarded the nose and I walked away. Day twelve one foot on the ramp. Day twenty two feet. Six weeks of incremental daily sessions with no pressure and no timeline except the one his comfort level set. Week six he loaded. Stood in the trailer for five minutes while I walked around it. Ramp closed. Drove to the end of the lane and back. He unloaded fine. We practice every week now. I will not assume five years of fine loading means forever fine loading. He showed me it does not mean that. I will not forget the lesson. 🐴

This has been my journey for the past 35 years breeding Warmblood sporthorses.

I know this woman and have deep respect for her as a horse person. I’m privileged to have met her through the Harry Whitney clinics at Mendin Fences in TN.

A common thing I deal with in my travels are horses with stereotypies. In this context, we're defining a stereotypie as a physical action the horse takes that is an outward manifestation of that horse's internal stress...but that specifically has no other purpose or function.

In a horse that bolts, for example - the bolting serves a specific purpose, usually as a release valve for the build-up of internal anxiety. It happens in specific instances or is triggered by certain types of handling or by riding. It is not something the horse does unless they need to.

But in a horse with a stereotypie, the behavior is repetitive and may present even if the horse doesn't otherwise appear obviously stressed. It is often absent-minded, as if the lights are on but no one is home.

I've come to understand horses with stereotypies as horses that have lost the ability to be comfortably present. They have experienced prolonged stress to a degree they not only could not escape from but failed to cope with through normal and by comparison healthier measures. At some point something broke within them mentally and they resorted to the stereotypie. It's my personal belief having worked with a lot with these horses that something neurological changes in them once they get to that point and while I've successfully reformed several of them, I know that they are susceptible to returning to those old patterns if not well managed.

My husband and I just celebrated the one year anniversary of his receiving his green card. After a seven year waiting process during which we were living with the knowledge that he was not protected from deportation during this time (and the understandable anxiety this caused), we flew down to Mexico for his visa interview. The morning of his 7AM appointment I walked down to the consulate with him at six o'clock. I was forced to leave him standing in the long lines queuing outside as family members were not allowed to wait with visa applicants, and so I made my way back to our Juarez hotel room to wait.

For nearly seven hours I sat inside that room, staring at the white cinderblock walls and watching the clock. I tried to read for a while. At some point I moved on to a series we'd be streaming but my mind was buzzing. Every half hour or so I found myself leaving the room and walking down the hall to the elevators, by which there were large glass windows facing the direction of the consulate. I would watch for a few minutes to see if I could pick out Ober walking back towards the hotel. If I had to guess, I probably did this three to four times an hour for nearly the entire seven hour period, only to return to my cinderblock walls to find another way to manage my growing anxiety.

At some point I started pacing the room. It felt maddening - I'd think to try and text Ober only to remember he had been instructed not to bring his phone. I knew I needed to eat something but the thought of food made me nauseous. Nothing I had available to me could preoccupy me and keep me from my own thoughts and the spiral I was starting to enter. Why was it taking so long? When would he be back? Every noise started to make my heart rate spike: a voice in the hall, a door opening or closing, the sound of footsteps. I remember laying on the bed staring at the ceiling, attempting to count the black dots in one of the tiles. I remember thinking how this must be how people lose themselves because to be present in that moment was something I was rapidly failing to manage. I also remember thinking that this must be how a caged animal feels - no choices, no out, no understanding of when things will change, just the constant and insufferable anxiety and fear.

Ober did eventually come back - I met him coming out of the elevator on one of my desperate forays to that glass window. I don't remember much about that moment other than meeting his eyes and seeing the corners of his mouth turn upwards and knowing instantly it was all okay. That exchange broke the dam on not just the last seven hours but seven years of fear and worry. It also permanently altered something within me.

I've met other horsefolk who have stories like this - things that they experienced and couldn't help but walk away from changed. Stress is a necessary thing in life and we cannot entirely avoid it, but too much has consequences.

Sometimes we recover from those consequences. While humans can make meaning of experiences - even highly traumatic ones - horses cannot. They are designed to live entirely in the present and the presence of a stereotypie tells us that that ability has been altered. The only way that I know to help these horses find their way back to peace is to get creative in addressing that lack of presence, one moment at a time.