leasing your first horse

I know the answers to all these questions and I still don’t feel qualified to buy a horse without help. (In order: No, Yes, if you have to ask this question then only Adult, Depends on the horse and what you intend to do with it) I suggest that until you have the familiarity with horse handling required to actually treat the animal well, volunteer with a local horse rescue (they always need tons of help!) AND take lessons from a facility that will teach you how to properly care for a horse as well as riding it. Bonus if you spend time at a horse rescue is that you’ll get a lot of experience with a variety of horses, AND you might just happen to bond with a special one while there.A horse can live into its 30s with good care. That is an extremely long commitment for most people. On top of the cost of buying the horse you’d need to factor in the obvious things like food (do you know proper equine nutrition or have someone around to advise you on it?), vet checkups, farrier, stall bedding if you have a barn to keep it in, boarding payments if you don’t and plan to rent a stall, medications (even common ones like wormer and bute), fly spray and/or some method of fly control. If you have your own property there’s also the cost of maintaining proper fencing (in some cases also the cost of removing improper existing fencing to put safer fencing in: barbed wire kills and injures so many horses it’s barbaric). Also you’d most likely want to hire a trainer to work with you and your horse so that you can become a better rider.If you’re asking these questions, it also suggests you would not know how to shop for a horse that actually suits you, and fits your needs and skill level. Plenty of shady people out there will dope up a horse to make it look complacent when it’s got problems. Some horses may be too much ‘horse’ to handle as a beginner. Some may have been trained in a certain way, or have learned fears that may make them difficult to handle.Also, if you’re totally new to horses, DO NOT GET A FOAL. An inexperienced rider + an inexperienced horse = injury or death for one or both. You really won’t be able to ride the horse until it’s around four if you want that horse to be a lifelong sound horse. Don’t try sooner, despite the Kentucky Derby running thoroughbreds as 2-year-olds. There’s tons of medical studies out that talk about the damage to growth plates and bone structure as a result, and your horse most likely won’t be in top athletic shape like a Derby contender anyhow since I imagine you will not be sending your horse to a top-rated trainer, nor having it be ridden by someone as small and light and who knows how to balance expertly on a horse as a professional jockey. These people have years of training to hopefully not completely ruin a young horse (and accidents still happen). You would not.

I've always bought my horses young and green and trained them myself, and I'm glad to say I haven't broken one yet. I've repaired a couple that had been badly broken, but I haven't broken one. I prefer my horses mentally and physically intact.My first pony, when I was 13 and she was 3, was gentle but not trained. She didn't even respond well to a halter. I started by teaching her to lead correctly, then a little longeing, then I pretty much just started getting on her, bareback, because I didn't have a saddle. Yeah, not the greatest training strategy. I was 13, ok? She didn't give me any fight about riding, though.A wise old horseman's adage is A green horse and a green rider is a bad color combination. Another version is Green on green makes for black and blue. Yeah, we had our ups and downs, but in our second year together, we cleaned up at the 4-H shows, in Western Pleasure and Equitation, barrels and poles, dollar bareback, egg and spoon, and most of all, trail class.These days, I'm working with several young horses and an aged mustang mare who was captured from the range last fall. Our hand raised coming 3 filly accepted her first rider with “Oh, there's a person on my back. And…?” Before I had my 12 year old lightweight assistant trainer mount up, I flapped a towel then a saddle pad on the filly's back. “Meh” Then I put on a bareback pad and cinched it up. Not even a flip of her ear. Then I stood on a mounting block - on both sides — and leaned over her back and patted her. She sniffed my head. We did some longeing and ground driving, bitless, of course. No sense adding a new sensation and potential source of pain in these early stages of training. We've hauled out to ride in the open desert twice now, and the filly has ridden like a champ.The mustang mare has given me a whole new set of challenges. I've been using food treats to train lately, but this mare wouldn't even eat grain when I got her! And no way was she allowing a human close enough to touch her! I've been busy training the 3 mustang foals and our filly and her yearling brother, and allowed the mare to make up her mind about human contact. With all the mustangs, I initiated contact with a foam pool noodle on a longe whip, in a 30′ square pen. I put their grain down and let them start to eat, then approach quietly. If they move away from the food, I just quietly follow with the noodle until they return to the food, let them take a bite of food because stopping and thinking is always the right answer, then try again to touch them. My goal is that the horse decides that nothing I want to do with them is worse than leaving food. This is the basis of our relationship that I'm establishing here. I don't want to build it on chasing and domination and fear. I want to create trust and calm understanding. Once she's caught, I can put a bareback pad on the mare and pick up her feet, and I'm going to keep on working on that trust thing before I think about mounting up. Until I can walk up to her in the pasture and casually put a halter on her head, she's not ready for riding.

Rather than giving you a boring step by step process of learning Python, I would share my personal journey about how I started learning Python.Here is my personal learning experience:What motivated me to start learn Python ?I fell in love with Python after reading a bunch of answers on Quora about how people were doing wonderful things with Python.Some were writing scripts to automate their Whats app messages.Some wrote a script to download their favourite songs,while some built a system to receive cricket score updates on their phones.All of this seemed very excited to me and I finally decided that I would love to learn Python.How I started learning Python ?I started learning Python form The Complete Python Masterclass: Learn Python From Scratch as it was the recommended course for beginners.I found the course to be really interesting yet simple for beginners like me.However, if you are a professional programmer then I would recommend you to learn from the official docs : 3.7.2 DocumentationHow much time it took to learn ?Topic: Python basics, control structures, functions.Time : - 1 Week.Learning experience:Learning Python basics is a piece of cake, it is extremely simple to get up and running with Python. Basics like variables, operators and control structures are extremely easy to learn as opposed to other languages like Java.Topic: OOP & Regular ExpressionsTime: 1 Week.Learning Experience:This section was a bit tough as I didn’t had a clear understanding of OOP principles. I had used OOP in Java but still was not clear about the concept but eventually with some practice I was able to understand OOP in Python, the self keyword and the init method.If you are a beginner then I would recommend you to focus on this section as it is widely used while making complex applications.You might not understand a lot of things at first, but give things time to sink in and it will make sense.Topic: TkinterTime: 1 WeekLearning experience:This was the most exciting as I finally learned how to build desktop GUI applications using Python. Learned about the Tkinter library which allowed us to build interactive GUI with Python. It felt as if everything I have learned till now started making sense. When I was finally complete with this section, I was able to build my very own calculator.Here is a screenshot of what I built:Topic:Data AnalysisTime: 1 WeekLearning experience:Learned about the Numpy and Pandas library which are extensively used to perform data analysis with Python. If you aspire to be a data analyst/ data scientist I say you focus on learning the basics well. I also learned how to read data from an excel/ CSV file and visualise the same data on a chart. In the process, I also learned about Jupyter notebooks which is an excellent IDE for data visualisation with Python.Here is a screenshot of me plotting some graphs:Topic: DjangoTime: 2 WeeksLearning experience:This was by far the most difficult topics I had ever learned. I had no previous experience learning anything related to server side web development and hence it took me a while to understand terminologies like authentication, URL routing, API and models.I had initially given up on this section as it felt very complex but I took my time and worked my way through it with patience. I took notes on pen and paper and made sure that I understand every line of code even before I use it.Eventually the efforts paid off and I finally started to understand what Django really is and how it works.It took me 2 weeks to get done with the Django basics and a lot more practice to finally complete a Django project on my own.I built my own todo app and a simple book store site using Django and a little bit of Bootstrap.Here is a screenshot of the bookstore I built:Topic: Flask & Web CrawlerTime: 2 Weeks.Flask was a piece of cake after learning Django as Flask is just a micro framework.I didn’t personally dabble much with Flask as I liked and preferred Django over Flask.Building a web crawler was interesting as well, I built a crawler which was used by search engines back in the early days to crawl web pages, find links and store those links in a file.Topic: Automation with seleniumTime: 1 Week.After learning almost everything about Python selenium felt pretty easy.Selenium is originally used for testing purposes but it turns out that you can automate various tasks with it. I learned how to build a Facebook auto poster with selenium.It took me around 9–10 weeks to complete and I was happy with the process and eventually learned a lot about how Python works.Note that I was dedicating 2–3 hours every day for learning.Final conclusion:It was a great experience learning Python and I now feel a lot more confident as a programmer. The main source of confidence was being able to build something of my own, however small it may be.Although my learning process might seem easy but there was a lot of struggle and moments of frustration in between.Here are a few of my tips if you want to start learning Python:Have patience, if you are a beginner it will take time to let things sink in.Aim at building small tools/projects, don’t just learn the syntax and jump to a new programming language.Frustration and pain is a part of learning process, embrace it instead of avoiding it.Errors/ issues are expected, don’t let that discourage you from learning.Be consistent, if you are not consistent in learning it might take a lot more time and effort.Happy learning !

I was annoyed about some self-discriminating questions, like were you a member of the NSDAP. Of course not, I was born decades later !! Still to this day I am annoyed with this questions, if I want to do sabotage in the USA?Seriously, just think about this questions. What brilliant mind did not think about to update them or expect that somebody will answer them with YES !!

Here’s what my horse looked like the first time I saw him:Although, to be honest, I think I still have an ultrasound picture lying around somewhere, but it’s not scanned in. The mother was owned by two friends of mine, I’d been considering buying her only she kept going lame, vets couldn’t find a reason, but we eventually concluded it was because she was born with only one eye, so she kept her head turned as she walked in order to see better, and that made her entire gait a bit unbalanced. With a rider, she kept ending up straining herself in one leg or another.If you have any sense at all, breeding a mare that is inexplicably coming up lame regularly, and was born with only one eye, is on the big no-no list. But I have never claimed to have sense, and I loved Melanie, for her bright mind and cool temper, and I didn’t want to see her put down for being unable to work. So I ended up going 50/50 with one of the owners - we’d breed her, I’d pay half her board and other costs as well as breeding costs, and we’d own the resulting foal 50/50 as well. And in the picture above, you see the result, from a may morning in 2008. The foal (Prime Diamond) turned out to be a colt, with two good eyes, and the only times he’s been lame has been when he’s been too irritating to the other horses and gotten kicked. He’s a bit of a brat, especially when he’s bored.And here they both are, about three hours later, when Prime Diamond got his first look at the outside world.Melanie’s tendency to lameness did get better after foaling, I rode her for a couple of more years, until Prime was big enough to ride. My co-owner is far more experienced than I am, so she was the one to train him in the basics. Now I ride him most of the time, and another friend has him 2–3 days of the week. She does jumping, which I don’t, on account of my falling off far too easily. And here the three of us are, with me on the horse:He looks a bit unhappy, because standing still to get a picture taken is really horribly boring and can we please go do something fun instead? Like running?The name “Prime Diamond” is partly for the very even diamond-shaped star in his forehead, and partly as a mix of his parentage - the stallion was Don Primero, and his mother’s father was Diamant which means Diamond. We usually just call him “Prime”.

How did you learn about us?Rumors about rural houses having little Security.Location: 5/10Location was alright. Around 500 meters to the nearest neighbor. But unfortunately an hour away from any sizable population (20,000 plus being a sizable population.)Transportation: 10/10Transportation was top notch. The owners of the property never lock their Minivan or Pick-up truck. The keys are always left in the vehicles. Both are moderately new and somewhat non-descriptive so a perfect getaway vehicle. Not only did they prvehicles they also kept trailers in a easily accessible unlocked shed.Security: 9/10Security was lax. There is a gate but it isn’t locked. Doors aren’t locked unless the house is left unoccupied for more than 2 weeks. No cameras made it really easy. They did have a dog which made it a bit of a pain. He was easily disposed of as he was just a Labrador Retriever puppy. Owners are very light sleepers don’t rob if they’re around.Products: 10/10No place has better selection. The place had 3 DSLR cameras, 3 Workstation class desktops, 3 tablets, 4 drones, 6 Smartphones, 9 external monitors and 11 laptops. All of the items were of premium design and value (aka Apples or equivalent). The freezers and shelves were well stocked the rest of the property was much more appealing though.They also had a shop on the property with many tools ranging from mechanics to carpentry to fabrication. The tools were of medium quality. The shop also stored 2 ATV for added convenience. The shop wasn’t the jackpot though.The shed was the real treasure trove. This drive in shed held heavy equipment all with the keys in the ignition for easy accessibility. The average equipment’s value was around $100,000, with a combined value of around $1.5 Million. Unfortunately the heavy equipment is hard to transport and the market is too small to get away with it.The products all seemed gift wrapped for the taking. Everything was easy to find as it looked organized.Laws in the area: 10/10Owners aren’t allowed to use lethal force or even have a premeditated weapon for self defense. A robber in the area once accidentally locked himself into the garage place he was robbing. As the owners did not come home for a couple days he resorted to eating dog food. The end result was the owners were charged for negligence of the robber. Laws almost protect us. Owners are not supposed to attack us in any way or they may be charged.Would you recommend to your friends?If everybody is gone a resounding yes. Unfortunately that’s not very often as the house is occupied by Home-schooling kids, a Writer and the owner is a farmer who mostly works on property. Also if you intend to use brute force, bring a weapon. All the occupants are big. The average height is around 6 feet.BTW bring friends to help loot. It really requires a team of people to loot the place.

No, shoeing a horse causes no pain. Horse shoers, also called farriers, are well trained to perform all aspects of hoof care and balancing for soundness, comfort and correct movement. The old shoes are removed by filing away the clinches (more about clinches later…) and then pulling the old shoe along with the old nails.The horse’s hoof is constantly growing so before applying new shoes the shoer trims away the excess hoof wall. Often this means cutting off about 3/8 inch of hoof. The bottom of the hoof, called the sole, also grows constantly and needs to be trimmed, so after the shoer removes the mud and debris from the cleft of the hoof he or she will carefully trim the sole and frog (pad) to remove the excess and deteriorated hoof material. It is kind of like giving the horse a pedicure, but much more complicated because the hooves must be shaped correctly so that they land, break over and travel in a balanced manner as the horse moves or runs. Each hoof is different and each horse moves differently, too, so the shoer must shape each hoof to aid the horse’s movement.The old shoes are not put back on as they will have been worn thin, even though they are made of metal. Horses are heavy and apply a lot of force and friction to their shoes!Each of the new shoes is carefully shaped to match the shape of each hoof. That way, the shoes don’t interfere with the careful shaping and balancing of the hooves.The shoes are held on with a very special kind of nail. If you look at a shoeing nail closely you will see that the shaft of the nail is not round. It is rectangular with flat sides that taper to a very sharp point. On one of the wider sides of the nail you will see a pattern of parallel lines that have been scored into the metal, giving that side a distinct texture. When the shoer places the nail he or she makes sure that textured side is turned to face the hoof wall. As the nail is driven into the hard, insensitive hoof material that textured side causes the nail to bend. As a result, the tip of the nail exits the hoof partway up the hoof wall - generally about 3/4 inch above the shoe. (Since 3/8 inch hoof material was cut away the old nail holes are now out of the way for applying new nails.) As soon as the nails are fully driven into and through the hoof wall, the shoer cuts off the exposed points of the nails and then bends the remaining stub firmly down against the hoof wall and smooths off any rough edges to avoid them injuring the horse. It is the bent nail shafts, called “clinches”, that hold the shoes in place.

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