A New Filming Project
After realizing that we were going to take him up on his offer of free horses, we got the idea that this might be an ideal project to film from start to finish on all four horses. There should be plenty of “real life” horse training sessions to film and teach with as these horses progress from their current “low value” status toward being very highly valuable horses. We plan to show how we do ground work, long lining, introducing the bit, first pulling of objects, first harnessing, first hitching to vehicles, seasoning activities, hoof handling, and riding on all four horses. As you can see, we hope to get lots of useful footage to use for our future production of educational materials, both written and filmed.

Regular Website Updates
While many of these educational materials will take a while to produce, we got the idea that our web site visitors might enjoy getting a day by day progress report on training activities with each individual horse. The “natural driving” way of training that we are promoting here at Bowers Farm is radically different than what most trainers are doing with their driving horses, so this should be interesting for “believers” and “non-believers” alike. We’ll try to work it out that we update these daily activity reports at least once a week, and hopefully, we’ll get it worked out that we can update the website activity reports for these horses even more often than that. Follow the links on our web site to get to this new and interesting feature that will show you what we’re doing with these four horses. You can check back often to see how things are going on this project!

Question and Answer
If you have questions or comments about this training project, send Steve an email. Each week, we will post some of the better questions along with Steve's answers here on the web site. sb@bowersfarm.com

View Q and A Page

Gus is a four year old light sorrel Belgian gelding with flaxen mane and tail, with a star, strip and snip on his face. Of the four horses, Gus and Clyde were the two that were a little hard to catch when we showed up with the horse trailer to get them. When we first met Gus, he’d stand there to be haltered, but you could see it makes him a little nervous. He’s the only one of the four who seems to process his fear by snorting lightly.

Clyde is a four year old bay Belgian x Clydesdale stallion (as of March 23, scheduled to get castrated on March 24, weather permitting), and a full brother to Katie. Clyde would have been gelded sooner, but he had an undescended testicle, which complicated prospects for getting him gelded. Fortunately, earlier this winter, that problem corrected itself, so it seems like castrating him will not be a seriously complicated surgery, other than the fact that he is getting some age on him. We have considered leaving him a stallion, because he is an extremely well built horse, and he surprisingly shows very little dysfunctional stallion behavior (he’s not much into squealling, and not at all into nipping). But we only considered that for about three nanoseconds before we came back to our senses. Life with a stallion on the property is not really much of a life at all, unless you’re being highly compensated for the trouble. If he were a purebred, perhaps we’d think differently. He’s going to make a great gelding.

Klaus and Gus are full brothers, a year apart, making him five years old. He’s the same size and color as Gus, with a snowball shaped star on his forehead. Of the four horses, Klaus was the one that the previous owner did a little more training on. He showed us the harness and cart that Klaus has been hitched to a few times single. Klaus is the horse that stepped down on the previous owner’s foot while being trimmed, breaking some bones that needed pinning through surgery.

Katie is a five year old Belgian x Clydesdale mare. She’s a light bay color, and seems to not have much problem putting on weight. We think she looks pretty cute in this “pleasantly plump” condition, so she’s not on any sort of a diet right now. She had been on alfalfa hay, and since moving to our place, she’s been switched over to grass hay. Katie is a mare that is easy to walk up to in the pen – appears to be a real sweetheart.