After my internship was over and before my next job began, I did a little stint covering a backyard practice in Virginia, while the owner of the practice went on an extended vacation. Her need for a long vacation should have been my tipoff.

“You know what it takes to be a successful horse trainer?” My boss asks, sliding a cold beer across the bar to me. “No. What?” He slowly raises his glass to his lips, then speaks out of the side of his almost covered mouth. “Three things.” He takes a draw off his longneck for dramatic effect. “You have to have gray hair, be a good salesman, and be able to cheat on your wife without remorse.” “Nothing to do with training horses?” I ask

Supplements People often ask me what oral supplements I recommend for their horses. This is invariably after I just injected a joint or two, and their horse is still hanging in cross ties, groggy from the sedation. Before my eyes glaze over, and I start to look like their horse, I try to get out something along the lines of, “Spend the next 12 months saving that money, then you can pay me to put the medication right where it’s needed next year”. Then I slowly raise a finger and point at their handsome steed, at this point looking more like my victim, than something that could carry them into battle. Most of my clients recognize when I’m just makin a funny, and new clients usually pick up on it pretty quickly, due to my lack of a poker face. But it’s a serious question and it deserves a serious response, so I usually follow it up with a good visual that sums up my true convictions.  I hold my index finger and thumb in the” I’m crushing your head” Kids-in-the-Hall pincer position, and say, “This is how much a difference oral supplements probably make in your horse’s soundness”, then I take both arms, straighten at the elbows to show the size of the fish I caught last week and say, “and this is how much difference you get from the training decisions you make every day.” This is a good time to quickly summarize my feelings on the utlility of each product, before moving on to what really matters

From diapers til 12, my dream was to be a jockey. I grew up in Nova Scotia, where the only horses around were the Standardbreds that were too slow to make it on the local bush league tracks.  We lived too far from town to do much after school, but get off the bus and run to the pond to see if the ice was skateable . My only respite from the depression of what seemed like the last outpost of equine civilization, was the monthly anticipation of that which sustained my dreams: the arrival of The Bloodhorse magazine. I guarantee I was the only subscriber in the province of Nova Scotia, even though I could barely see over the counter at the $2 windows