Blog

With the summer months quickly approaching it’s soon to be the days where our barn rats hang out at the barn all day. Guest blogger, Kristin Jacob, was recently approached about what can our young riders do throughout the summer with their horse to build a successful partnership outside of showing and lessons. A great question with a great, passionate response by Horse d’oeuvres sponsored rider, Kristin Jacob! Click here and learn how you can “ride outside the lines” and build a strong horse and rider partnership.

Fill out the form to pre-order your Horse d’oeuvres sun shirt! We are so excited for these shirts – they are so comfortable and protect your skin from the sun! And they’re purple (have you caught on to the fact that we LOVE purple?). The shirts should be in stock by the end of June. As soon as we receive them, we will send out invoices to those who pre-ordered and will ship them out the day they arrive.

All shirts are $55 and we will have all sizes from XS-XL. You can choose from a white shirt with purple vents with the Horse d’oeuvres logo on the left sleeve, purple shirt with white vent with the Horse d’oeuvres logo on the left sleeve, white shirt with purple vents without our logo and purple shirt with white vent without our logo. Click here to pre-order

Megan Bryant of Purina Animal Nutrition graciously donated her Tuesday evening to cover the nutrition chapter of the USHJA Horsemanship Quiz Challenge study guide. It was such an educational evening! Nutrition is such a vital piece of our horses’ health and success and one of the least discussed topics of our horses’ daily routines. Did you know that our performance horses should be consuming 20,000-24,000 calories a day? Or that our horses should consume 2% of their body weight in forage daily (that’s roughly 20lbs of hay!)? Did you know the stomach consists of only 8% of the horse’s digestive tract? Continue reading…

Week six of the USHJA Horsemanship Quiz Challenge was one of my favorite weeks thus far. Though mental skills is not a chapter in the study guide, Kristin and I felt that this is a huge part of being an equestrian. In our sport, we really tend to focus on our horse and what we are producing rather than where we, as riders, are mentally. Tonya Johnston, mental skills coach based out of Northern California, graciously took the time out of her busy schedule to FaceTime our girls and talk to them about mental skills of an equestrian. Continue reading…

Week five of the USHJA Horsemanship Quiz Challenge was a blast (but what’s new). We covered the grooming & blanketing chapter and then had Helen Gould cover current events and history of the sport. Though, much of the history of the spot wasn’t in the study guide, it was a huge hit and so wonderful for everyone to hear how our sport has evolved. Helen has a special connection when speaking with the girls, they absolutely admire her. Continue reading…

As we are now half way through our USHJA Horsemanship Quiz Challenge study sessions, I heard one of the girls last night say “wow, it takes a village.” It’s quite amazing to watch these young equestrians learn and submerge themselves into the everyday life of being a true equestrian. They’re learning the ins and outs and understanding how many different professionals it takes for us all to be successful. Truly, it takes a village. Continue reading…

We had such a fun and educational night with Dr. Downey of Quality Equine Vets. She covered the horse health, first aid, and bandaging chapters of the USHJA Horsemanship Quiz Challenge study guide. The girls learned so much! But, before we get to what we learned, our girls reported back to the group about the research they found on their four-legged best friends. Continue reading…

Week two of our study series for the USHJA Horsemanship Quiz Challenge presented by The Plaid Horse was great fun. Our creative sides came out while we covered the Anatomy & Physiology and Horse Identification chapters. We went over the basic anatomy of our four-legged best friends, whipped out some X-rays from previous injuries, identified confirmations and learned about our horses pedigrees. Our goal with this session was for our girls to learn and understand the way our horses are built and why this is so important to know as an equestrian. Continue Reading…

Horse d’oeuvres is so proud to be co-hosting an eight week study session with Blue Star Farms and Blue Cloud Farms for the USHJA Horsemanship Quiz Challenge! This program, put on by USHJA and The Plaid Horse, is such a wonderful and beneficial program to educate equestrians on all things equine. Specifically teaching them the importance of everything outside of the ring. While at the World Cup, I had the pleasure of meeting Piper Klemm, owner and publisher of The Plaid Horse, who is a huge advocate for this program and teaching young equestrians about the horse world. She graciously agreed to FaceTime into our first study session to introduce this program.

The 2017 World Cup Finals held in Omaha, Nebraska was the first time I’d ever witnessed McLain Ward and HH Azur is person and no better words describes the pair than “so, so special”. The talent, preciseness, composure and the bond these two have is something I can’t describe and something I wish upon every horse lover to witness in person. The pair is incredible. They’re World Cup champions. They’re the World No. 1. Continue Reading…