And awful the next The same horse can feel like two different ‘beasts’ from one ride to the next, and from what we’ve been reading, the reason usually has less to do with the morning of the ride than with the eighteen hours before we got on. The previous 18 hours Every one of us knows the…

What new wound research means for our horses Most of us will have, at some stage, dealt with a wound, whether our horse has come in from the paddock with a gash or we spot a kick mark that wasn’t there yesterday. It is the everyday emergency, and a new study suggests that how we handle…

What really happens between last feed and first A look at the overnight hours, the part of the feeding day we plan the least, and what new work on the equine body clock suggests we could be doing better. Most yards have a feeding routine that ends at evening stables and resumes at dawn. Concentrates fed, hay…

What Dartmoor teaches us about valuing our own. If you have never stood on Dartmoor, picture a high, windblown moor in the southwest of England, and scattered across it, in small family groups, semi-wild ponies that have grazed that ground for thousands of years. They are tough, low-set and unbothered by weather that sends everything else…

Few horses carry the mystique of the Akhal-Teke. Bred for more than three thousand years by the nomadic Teke people of what is now Turkmenistan, these desert horses are known for a fine coat that can catch the light like metal, and for the deep, almost singular bond they form with one person. They are…

How a Selle Français mare from a small farm in Seine-Maritime carried Steve Guerdat to the one individual title that had always eluded him, and why her pedigree reaches back through more than half a century of French breeding to the horse that won his first Olympic gold. When Steve Guerdat and Dynamix de Belheme cleared…

The Toyota SA Senior Showjumping Championships are held at Kyalami Park Club this week. Here we explain how the competition works. The Toyota SA Senior Showjumping Championships run at KPC from 5 to 9 August, and the biggest thing to understand is that the championship is not a single class, but rather a three-part system. Two…