Story courtesy of Chronicle of the Horse. 

Cat running through the jump ring at WEF

See more stories at http://www.chronofhorse.com/
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News flash –

Great story tomorrow. I thought Sims was a big yearling wait until I saw this. Spoiler alert – he’s amazing!
As always, thanks for riding along.

By Susan Salk on March 25, 2014

reprinted with permission from http://www.offtrackthoroughbred.com

Alyssa on Stan now as a top dressage contender. Stan, a 17 hand beauty, has blossomed under his owner’s care.

Clipping the lead rope onto her horse’s halter, Alyssa Stevens began to pray.

Please let him walk off the property and onto the trailer waiting across the street.

Her heart hammered, she felt a little like she was stealing her own horse, as she lead him away from the California rescue facility where she’d found, purchased and boarded ex-racehorse Stan the Man before her experience there had soured.

“I bought him in 2008 for a $5,000 adoption fee and continued to board him in the same place, taking lessons on him, and even volunteering for them,” she says. But after nearly a year later, in which Stan had a bout with colic, and began to look to her a little shell-shocked, as if he was losing too many battles with more-dominant herd members, Stevens decided to cut ties.

Stan the Man
Sire: Welcome Dan Sur
Dam: Lil Sweetness
Foal date: April 25, 1994

When she arrived, Stan was bleeding a little, perhaps she thought, from the nips and kicks of more aggressive horses. And the facility owner’s dogs were barking a kind of aggravated if not threatening chorus, as Stevens walked onto the property to get her horse. A van and driver waited across the street, door to the back open and ready.

“It was April 2009, and up until that point, I’d never taken him anywhere off the property. We’d just ridden in a round pen. I’d never even taken him on a trail ride,” she says. “So I had no idea how he’d respond to being asked to walk up the driveway, cross the street, and get on the van. I just kept praying as he walked beside me, and it was amazing. He came right with me and hopped right on.”

Following the tense departure, Stevens and Stan rode an hour that day to his new home, only five minutes up the road from Stevens own home in northern California

Stan, back in the day, with the nicks and cuts from other horses.

At the new facility, whose close proximity allowed Stevens to visit him everyday, Stan blossomed.
“When I first got him, I thought he was an aloof horse. And I thought well, that’s just the way he is,” she says. “Probably about a year and a half after I moved him, he started changing. He started whinnying when he saw me; he started being my horse.”

And now Stan is so connected to Stevens that she practically needs to reserve him a room when she travels!

“I went on vacation last year for a week, and when I got back, everyone told me it was just awful with him. He wouldn’t eat, he was moping around— he was so depressed!”

That connection has also done wonders for their riding partnership.

During a recent dressage clinic with Sabine Shut-Kery, an accomplished German equestrian, the pair received high praise.

“She told us after the clinic how it was such a pleasure to teach someone who has such a wonderful connection with her horse,” she says.
Six years together and the trust and connection is stronger than ever.
The 17-hand gelding has gone from being nearly unmanageable maneuvering around an arena to being so smooth Stevens plans to enter him in dressage shows this year.

“When I first had him, I couldn’t even take him on a trail ride, because he was considered hard to manage. Now we go on beach rides, rides through the woods,” she says.

Thinking back to their uncertain beginnings together, and even a couple of bucking sessions early on that left her in the dirt, Stan the Man today isn’t even recognizable as the same horse as he was back then.

“It was quite an ordeal for me to make the step to move him from his first barn, but after I finally did, he has become an amazing horse,” she says. “Now I take him to clinics with world-class dressage riders and he’s the star of the show, even surrounded by Warmbloods and Friesians—he’s absolutely amazing, and we have such a connection.”

 
I appreciate this story so much.  We have to adopt them, buy them, find their spot where they are well treated and commit to spending enough time undoing what bad other’s may have done.

This was written on Facebook today by one of our riding friends. Michelle is the same age as Lauren. I think her message and frustrations are important to all of us with children as we try to guide them in their future direction. I thought Michelle did a great job expressing her concerns, her options and fears. I hope we can all share this as for ourselves or with our children as appropriate. My daddy (Harvard grad and airplane exec) always said find what you loved as a child and do it your whole life. Good advice! Thank you Michelle for letting me share this.

There is so much riding on college students who are preparing for their careers. Not to say that there shouldn’t be – you should definitely be focusing on your studies. But what’s really difficult and what I’ve come to disagree with is knowing what you want to be when you grow up and exactly how you’re going to get there. By the time I was able to talk, parents, relatives and teachers were always …asking me, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” and it was never socially acceptable to NOT have an answer to that question. By the time I turned ten it was “What do you want to be when you grow up so you can make money?” and I thought, “I want to be a jockey!” or “I want to be in the rodeo!” or “I want to be a horse trainer!” and everyone says “No, no, you can’t do that. You won’t make much money.” And so it goes.
Then by 16 or 17 you’re prepping to go to college and it seems like you’ve got to make this decision on exactly what you’re going to be and how you’re going to get there in a very short time frame. In your mind you’re going to be XXX and you’re going to go to XXX school for four years and study XXX and do XXX internships. Then after college you’re going to get XXX job and then you will move up the rankings and things will be holly and jolly.
Except that’s not actually how it goes. My dream was to be a horse trainer so I went to a liberal arts school with a great equestrian program and if I really applied myself and persevered, everything would work out. But again, that’s not how it goes and life changes and you find yourself in one of the darkest places of your life even though you worked very hard and did everything you were told to do.
You see, that’s just the thing. Instead of raising your kids to follow this 4.0 plan where everything goes according to XXX and if you get off track then you are lost forever – you’re a failure, you’re nobody. Instead of teaching your kids that, why don’t you let them find something their good at, encourage them to stick with it and let them figure it out? Because let me tell you – speaking from first hand experience – going to what I thought would be the college of my dreams where everything would settle into place and then having to transfer out and leave literally everything I ever knew about my plan for life? That is the scariest, most anxiety provoking experience that still haunts me every time I make a mistake at school or take a spill off my horse. Feeling wave after wave of disappointment because that big shiny plan that I, my teachers, parents, relatives and peers cooked up shriveled up and died.
Then I moved back to Houston in hopes of creating my own type of equestrian program and the sound of it is much easier to hear than it is to walk out each and every day. I no longer have a university spoon-feeding me lessons on equine health and first aid, or scheduled ride times, or whatever. My future in the horse world is now relying solely, completely on me and that is so terrifying.
I’ll admit the expectations that others had for me and that I had for myself nearly caused me to crash and burn. I started to hate horses; I even began to be disinterested in my own horses. Riding horses began to be unappealing and I would dread a lesson hours in advance.
It took a shocking spill off my horse two weekends ago for this all to hit me and to understand all my anxiety about making mistakes. My endless fretting and worrying before and after each and every round, scrutinizing my every flaw because surely I wouldn’t be able to be a horse trainer if I made this many mistakes. How would I make money like this?
That is not going to be the case any longer. I don’t know where I’m going. I don’t know how to get there. Everything is a mess right now. I’m going to make mistakes, big ones. I’m going to go careening off my horse into jumps in front of my prior trainers. My heels will sometimes turn up and my leg won’t always be quite right. My back might arch and I’ll miss my spots and sometimes I’ll fold forward. Sometimes I’ll fold forward before every jump. Sometimes I’ll forget a course or two or three. Sometimes my confidence will be so dented that I won’t be able to look my horse in the eye.
But I have been riding horses for almost fifteen years and if that has only taught me one thing it is that I love horses. I want to be a horse trainer and I want to ride in the Grand Prix. I don’t know how I’m going to get there but somehow, I’m going to make it happen.

Please leave any comments or inspiration you might have for Michelle.

I love seeing good rescue stories and this one is outstanding!

By Associated Press  As posted on Mail Online PUBLISHED:10:51 EST, 3 May  2013| UPDATED:13:58 EST,  3 May 2

He may never run for the Kentucky Derby  roses, but Illinois race horse Magna Fortuna and his owners are celebrating a  victory none-the-less — his survival. The three-year-old gelding’s name means  ‘great luck’, and he was a long shot when he won a recent race at Hawthorne Race  Course outside Chicago – one of the biggest race tracks in  America. His mother Lulu was purchased for $300 at an  Indiana slaughter auction by Gail Vacca, founder and president of the Illinois  Equine Rescue Center.

Lucky: Magna Fortuna, with jockey Julio Felix up, rides  to a 9 3/4-length win during a horse race at Hawthorne Park in Cicero,  Chicago

Dark horse: The three-year-old gelding whose name means  ‘great luck’ was the longest of long shots when he won the race

Vacca found out later that Lulu was pregnant  when purchased. When the foal was born he was first named  Taxi – that was until Vacca traced his  lineage back to an impressive sire — a $2.58 million career stakes winner called  Magna Graduate. Speaking about the race, Vacca said the horse – who was the number six spot in the seven horse race – led the entire  way. ‘He was out for a joyride,’ she said  afterwards. ‘He didn’t even look back.’ Magna Fortuna’s ‘biography’ explains the  moment Vacca rescued the horse’s mother  Silver Option from slaughter: ‘Ms Vacca was at the auction looking for any  thoroughbreds that may have come from the tracks in Illinois when she spotted a  smallish bay mare that was in obvious discomfort from being severely lame in  both front feet.  ‘Unfortunately the mare was already in a  “kill pen” just waiting to be loaded onto a trailer for the grueling ride to  slaughter in Canada.’ After being taken back to Illinois, Silver  Option soon gave birth to Magna Fortuna, who was originally named Taxi until his  routes were traced back to his race-winning father. It was then that Vacca decided he would be  trained to race. Since the victory, offers have flooded in to  buy the horse but so far they have been rejected.