On the first pack trip of the summer, three of us rode for nine days through some great mountain country in Willmore, dodging rain and snow storms. Swollen rivers on the way out caused some concern, and one horse and rider combination went for an unintentional swim! The trip definitely provided some useful lessons.

By Jess Hallas-Kilcoyne - The show season is beginning, which means increased travel and exposure to horses (and possibly diseases) from other regions. Here are some tips to help keep your horse safe and healthy at competitions.

Kurboom Freestyle Music Design helps dressage riders make the best artistic impression possible in their freestyle tests by creating affordable, original kürs. Kurboom offers a variety of services from performing simple edits, to helping select music to suit horse and rider, to putting together music chosen by clients, to speeding up or slowing down music tempos to perfectly match the horse’s stride, to creating completely original music.

Fluidity™, created by Oxy-Gen®, is the only oral buffered hyaluronic acid (HA) product available to help lubricate and cushion your horse’s joints. Although HA is commonly administered by injection, studies have proven that orally administered HA is able to survive the digestive process and be absorbed into the blood stream. Buffered oral HA is effective in repairing joint damage and reducing the inflammation that is commonly caused by trauma or overuse.

By Jess Hallas-Kilcoyne - We are pleased to present the winners of our third annual Readers’ Choice Awards, honouring remarkable horses and horse people for their achievements and contributions to Canada’s horse industry. Each of our 2012 Readers’ Choice Award winners is truly remarkable and we are grateful for the opportunity to recognize them. Our only regret is that, out of the hundreds of nominated individuals, only ten can be named as winners. Here are a few of our runners-up whom we feel are deserving of honourable mention.

Slow feeders offer so many advantages, including improved health and well-being for all grazing animals. Horses are grazing herbivores with a very small stomach (8 to 15 litres) that is ideally designed for small, regular meals, as food passes through the stomach very quickly. In pastured areas, horses graze almost continually.

2012 Readers' Choice Award Winner - A legend in the Canadian horse world, Eve is best known for being a co-owner of the legendary show jumper Big Ben, a founding National Director of the Canadian Warmblood Horse Breeders Association, and a gifted riding instructor. To this day she continues to teach lessons at St. Alban’s Stables, in Brockville, Ontario, and to promote the breeding of the Warmblood horse in Canada.

How often do we riders wonder what our horses are thinking? A Marvelous Mustang is a fascinating story seen through the eyes of Skandranon Rashkae (“Skan”), a Spanish Mustang. Author and Skan’s owner, Janice M. Ladendorf, relates the tale of Skan’s first four years of life, from his birth as a wild horse on the range at Horse Head Ranch in North Dakota, to his capture, gentling, and eventual acceptance of life as a riding horse.

For the last 20 years, the endangered Przewalski’s horse, also known as the Asian wild horse or takhi, has been re-introduced to its ancestral ranges in the Gobi Mongolian steppe, or grasslands, in an immensely successful conservation program. For millennia, the Przewalski’s horse ranged throughout the grassland steppe from Eastern Europe through Central Asia to China.