Desmond Sanford “Sandy” Hawley was born in April 1949 in Oshawa, Ontario. While hot-walking horses at a Toronto racetrack when he was just 17 years old, the future Hall of Fame jockey decided to abandon thoughts of being a plumber and follow a career as a jockey. According to the Canadian Horse Racing Hall of Fame website, Hawley was employed as a groom and hot walker for trainer Duke Campbell who coached him along carefully. Sandy still credits Campbell as one of his greatest sporting influences. In those days he earned just $73 a week. In just a few years he would be earning $250,000 a year.

Six-time Olympian and longtime member of Canada’s dressage team, Christilot Boylen of Schomberg, Ontario, announced her retirement from international team dressage competition on July 8, 2020. Christilot Boylen was born in 1947 in Djakarta, Indonesia, and, with her family, moved to Toronto in 1951. According to the Eurodressage website, she bought her first horse at age 10 with savings she earned acting on the children’s TV series The Howdy Doody Show. She trained her first Olympic mount, Bonheur, and at just 17 years of age she received special permission to compete for Canada in the 1964 Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo.

Chances are very good that anyone who keeps horses for several years will encounter colic at some time. Mild episodes may resolve on their own before a veterinarian can arrive and more serious equine abdominal discomfort can often be managed with medication.

Contact, to the average rider, seems to refer only to the contact through the rein, but really, contact is communication with your horse and the rein is just one form of that communication. There are a couple of other points of contact, being your hips and seat, your legs through your thigh and calf, and your heel and foot.

Veterinarian Jerry B. Black, DVM, describes the typical conformation of the barrel racing horse as being of the “sprint horse” type, and explains that many competitive barrel racers come from the Quarter Horse race tracks. “Foot size, conformation, and balance are important due to the concussion placed on these athletes,” he continues.

First let’s begin by locating the navicular bone in the horse. Each of your horse’s hooves contains two bones: the distal phalanx (coffin bone or P3) and the distal sesamoid bone (navicular bone). The navicular bone is a small, boat-shaped bone that is bordered by the coffin bone, middle phalanx (P2), and deep digital flexor tendon (DDFT). It is approximately six centimetres in length and two centimetres in width in the average 1200 pound horse.

It sounded like he was being dive-bombed by seaplanes when I spoke with Pedro Cebulka recently. “That’s another one coming over now,” he’d say with a laugh as our conversation about his life and times had to be put on hold again and again. He and his wife, Janet, were staying at a cabin belonging to some friends on a camper-van trip around Vancouver Island in British Columbia just a few days before heading back to their Canadian home on the lake at Invermere, BC. The man known in the equestrian world as “Pedro the Ringmaster” has an insatiable lust for travel, and simply loves being on the road.

Why Are Feeding Guidelines So Important? You may have heard of the National Research Council (NRC) and the Nutrient Requirements of Horses - but what are they and why do they matter?

It’s no secret that the horse transport industry attracts people who think in terms of a fast or easy buck; the rate of start-ups claiming to be “horse haulers” is testament to that. The number of disreputable haulers makes the choice even more difficult. So, what’s a caring horse owner to do when the commercial horse transport landscape is as alien as the far side of the moon?