Kids learning to ride in balance at Windrock Farm on a hack with Cari and Lauren leading the kids on Mr. T and Goldie.   The rider is in control, however, if there is any sudden movement of the horse, we have control of the bridle with a neck rope to prevent any mishaps.  It is critical to instill confidence in the rider from the very beginning of lessons.

The ultimate goal is for the horse and rider to be molded to each other.  Together they form a finely balanced whole, a living work of art, which is beautiful and graceful, and which works with the precision of a clock.

The Real McCoy is an outstanding athlete with a great mind.  He jumps anything you put in his path, he has excellent ground manners, beautifully trained in dressage basics and he has a charming personality.  McCoy is 15.3, bred out of a quarter horse mare and sired by Makuba, a successful athlete.  He will excel in dressage or eventing or jumping.  Please contact us to try him.

A new book to teach you how to ride effectively and safely from day one to day one thousand.  Excellent exercises to test your skills as a rider and your horse’s training.  Beautiful illustrations by Mary Bridgman and photographs demonstrating clearly how to ride better.  Order Whoa Means Whoa! from Blurb now.

Levi is a confident bold jumper, he has a motor, great personality,

loves cross country, uncomplicated to ride, super event, dressage or hunter prospect.

Learning to ride at Windrock Farm

sometimes hanging out with Webster is the best thing to do on a sunny afternoon….

Rules to Ride By

go slowly to go fast

patience, patience, patience

take one step at at time

Ride bareback to improve your balance

(excerpted from the new book Whoa Means Whoa! available soon)

Tony is coming to Windrock Farm in April.  He is a 10 year old talented pony with a great personality and temperament.  He is very smart and is very comfortable to ride.

Happy Birthday Estella, and congratulations on your new pony!!!

One of our favorite ponies found a new home and is having a great time in the parade with his new owner.  Congratulations!

Diego has no fear of horses because he is growing up around them and loves to sit on the biggest horses in the barn.  Fiona is riding Peadar who is a kind gentle horse and Simon is on Shadow, with Lauren giving him some pointers.

The genome of a domestic horse has been successfully sequenced by an international team of researchers.

The work, published in the journal Science, may shed light on how horses were domesticated.

It also reveals similarities between the horse and other placental mammals, such as bovids – the hoofed group including goats, bison and cattle.

The authors also found horses share much of their DNA with humans, which could have implications for medicine.

Horses suffer from more than 90 hereditary diseases that show similarities to those in humans.

“Horses and humans suffer from similar illnesses, so identifying the genetic culprits in horses promises to deepen our knowledge of disease in both organisms,” said co-author Kerstin Lindblad-Toh, from the Broad Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, US.

“The horse genome sequence is a key enabling resource toward this goal.”

To generate a high-quality genome sequence, the researchers analysed DNA from an adult female thoroughbred named Twilight.

The horse’s DNA was sequenced using capillary DNA sequencing technology (known as Sanger sequencing) to reveal a genome that is roughly 2.7 billion “letters”, or nucleotides, in size.

In addition to sequencing the genome of a thoroughbred horse, the researchers also examined DNA from a variety of other horse breeds.

These included the American quarter horse, Andalusian, Arabian, Belgian draft horse, Hanoverian, Hakkaido, Icelandic horse, Norwegian fjord horse, and Standardbred breeds.

The team surveyed the extent of genetic variation both within and across breeds to create a catalogue of more than one million single-letter genetic differences in these breeds.

This is slightly larger than the genome of the domestic dog, and smaller than both the human and cow genomes.

So far, scientists have also sequenced the genomes of the platypus, mouse, rat, chimpanzee, rhesus macaque and, of course, human.

Horses were first domesticated 4,000 to 6,000 years ago. Over time, as machines have become the chief sources of agricultural and industrial muscle, those roles have shifted to sport and recreational activities.

As a kid, Rex Peterson rode Trick horses and ponies–this one is Motor Scooter, performing at Rodeos and events across the country with his family.  Click here for more Photos from the archives.

As a result of working in film for nearly 4 decades, Rex Peterson has designed several products to make horse training more efficient and safe. The Neck Rope designed and made by Rex Peterson can be used for many purposes, including ponying kids on their first few trail rides across country. It is important to get out of the arena as soon as possible for the rider as well as the horse. You can see in this video how easy it is to control the pony when he speeds up or wants to turn the wrong direction. This method allows the kid to feel the independence of riding while having a safety line for any errors.