Willow Acres Boarding Stables

09/02/2026

Remember back when Devin skeered me walking into the barn early am a while ago? Sometimes opportunity presents itself. 🤣🤣🤣 The funniest part was D asking me “ do you have something you want to tell me?!” and I had forgotten I left baby dead snek on his boot.🤣😂

08/21/2026

Silly Curly

08/13/2026

LOUDER!!!!!!

Correct aggressive behavior. Period.
Lately people have been sending me videos of horses that are accidentally being trained to be aggressive, and it’s terrifying. In one video a mare shoulders her handler, pins her ears, and kicks at her. Initially, the woman jumps out of the way to avoid the attack. Then she walks back in cautiously, takes all the tack off, and leaves the horse alone. She uses some behavioral science technobabble to validate the horse’s absolutely dangerous behaviors, and makes zero attempt to discipline or even interrupt the behavior.

Don’t do that.

That poor horse is going to hurt someone, and possibly get put down, all because she wouldn’t just smack her once….. or even back her up with authority. Something…. Anything!!!!

I don’t care if a horse is 20 feet away from me- if they send serious threats in my direction, I’m going to do something to let them know that is a bad idea! Maybe I just chase them off, and the second they head away from me I leave them alone.
We have a baby c**t, and shortly after he got comfortable with humans, he thought it might be fun to bodyslam one…. And before he could finish that thought he learned that behavior is inappropriate and that humans are not play toys.  it didn’t take much because it was immediate. The longer you allow those behaviors the harder you have to correct them.

If you absolutely refuse to set boundaries with a horse, that means someone else is going to have to discipline that much harder later…. The person who clocks that horse in the face, to protect themselves from getting bitten, is not the bad guy. The person who allowed or even encouraged that behavior over and over again, and taught that horse that aggressive behavior is fine, is the one that is responsible.

If a horse tries to bite, kick or run you over, you ARE allowed to protect your space…. With whatever force necessary. (Same if you get attacked by any other person or animal.) But maybe let’s teach horses boundaries so it never gets to that!!!!

07/23/2026

If you are wise enough to seek an instructor like this, lucky enough to find one, KEEP THEM!!!! These are the ones who will up your horse game.

Reasons why everyone needs a riding instructor who knows you well enough to absolutely murder your ego...

7.30am lesson before work.
Pre second coffee (I’m not mad enough to attempt without one at least), bleary eyed, and to fully set the scene I’d taken 3 attempts at putting Demon Mares bridle on successfully.

We started with trot-halt-trot transitions.
After about three of them I get feedback.
"They're bad."
A pause.
"Very, very bad."
Good morning to you too.

Now, another instructor might have gone with something like, "Let's work on getting those a bit sharper." Not mine.
Mine looked at what I'd produced and decided brutal honesty was the best policy.
And do you know what? That's exactly why you need an instructor who knows you.
Someone who's known you long enough to know you won't burst into tears and give up entirely because your transitions have been described as "very, very bad" before 8am.
Someone who knows you'll laugh, attempt to fix them, and probably admit they were right.

Because, well unfortunately, they were.
By the end of the lesson they were actually bordering on average.
But I do love the fact that there was absolutely no attempt to protect my feelings first.
Just a swift slap down of the ego, followed by 30 minutes of constructive rehabilitation.

It's efficient, really.
Nothing says "trusted instructor" quite like someone who can destroy your self-esteem before breakfast... and have you thanking them for it on the way home. 😂🐴

Thank you Carrie Bryant 🤣🫶🏽

07/05/2026

06/14/2026

One of the common things I see when a horse is having a problem is people immediately trying to guess what happened to that horse in the past.

Maybe he was abused. Maybe someone kicked on him too much. Maybe he was never turned out. Maybe he was ridden too hard. Maybe he was never handled correctly. Maybe somebody scared him. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

Most of the time, those thoughts come from a good place. People are trying to understand the horse. They are trying to explain what they are seeing. They are trying to be fair to the horse. I understand that part of it.

The problem is that those guesses usually do not help you evaluate the horse standing in front of you.

The first reason is simple. You will probably never know if your guess is right or wrong. If you decide a horse acts a certain way because he was abused in the past, how are you going to prove that? How are you going to know if that is actually what happened? How are you going to get accurate feedback on whether your interpretation was correct?

Most of the time, you cannot.

That means you are building your decisions on something you cannot confirm.

The second problem is even bigger. When you start working from what you think happened in the past, you stop working from what the horse is actually telling you right now. You start explaining behavior instead of evaluating behavior. You start making excuses instead of making decisions. You start treating your suspicion like it is a fact.

That is dangerous.

The horse in front of you is giving you hard truths. His feet, his body, his expression, his response to pressure, his willingness, his resistance, his timing, his softness, his brace, his focus, his lack of focus — those are things you can see. Those are things you can test. Those are things you can work with. Those are things that give you feedback.

What you think happened five years ago is a guess.

Guesses have no place in decisionmaking.

The horse may have had a rough past. He may not have. He may have been mishandled. He may have simply never been trained. He may have learned to avoid work. He may be scared. He may be spoiled. He may be confused. He may be disrespectful. He may be physically limited. He may be several of those things at once.

My job is not to write a story about his past.

My job is to correctly read what he is showing me today.

That does not mean I am unsympathetic. It does not mean I do not care what a horse has been through. It means I care enough about the horse to deal with the truth in front of me instead of getting lost in a story I may never be able to prove.

A horse does not need me to feel sorry for the version of his past I invented. He needs me to be accurate. He needs me to be fair. He needs me to make good decisions based on what he is actually doing.

If the horse is scared, I need to recognize fear and help him through it. If the horse is confused, I need to make the answer clearer. If the horse is evading, I need to recognize that too. If the horse is ignoring me, crowding me, bracing against me, or taking over the situation, I need to deal with that horse honestly.

The past may explain how a horse got here, but it does not change what is standing in front of me.

Training has to be based on what the horse is telling me now.

Not what I suspect.

Not what I imagine.

Not what would make the story more emotional.

The proof is in the pattern. If I watch the horse closely enough, the horse will tell me what I need to know. My job is to believe the horse in front of me more than I believe the story in my head.

05/12/2026

Then there’s this group. Meagan says since “all the TB’s out here have one collective brain cell the size of a chia seed”🤣🤣🤣 they ran for 5 minutes of their grazing time. Gleefully.

05/12/2026

Is anyone gonna tell them?!😂