HI Spy: What’s the biggest challenge that you and your horse have overcome?

My horse Hannah spooks at everything, in her early training, it was a windy day and a plastic bag came out of no where! She went side ways so fast, I was still in proper riding position in the air right before I hit the ground, over and over, we did this ending up with me on the ground, I started teaching her not to spook, and a week later on our normal riding trail, this huge snake is just lying in the middle of the road! I am braced and scared that when she spooked I would fly of right onto the snake. But hannah just kept walking and walked around it like it wasn't there at all. Way to go Hannah!

I met my horse a bit over a year and a half ago. I had just started riding at a new barn, and he was being boarded there. His owners never rode him, so he wasn't handled too much. I started to ride him, and discovered he had many anxiety problems and the way he dealt with them was by running like a maniac. During the first lessons I had with him, we were simply trying to get him to calm down enough to at least slow down to a trot. And those weren't his only problems! He hates cross-ties, and would always shift around nervously in them. Plus he was extremely spookish. After about a month of riding him, I got free-lease on him. The following summer, we had made enough progress that we took him trail riding. He was AMAZING! Never spooked once, even when all the school horses had a fit over something. That was also the first time we knew of him being around cows. By the end of the day, I had him herding cows like a pro. So that weekend, we took him team penning. He did well for the first half of the night, learning quickly. But then he started getting anxiety attacks, so we left him tied to the trailer the rest of the night. But throughout last summer, he improved a lot and we started taking him more places and doing more things with him. Last November I bought him. We are still working on a lot of stuff, but now he stands calmly in cross-ties, will walk calmly, trot calmly on good days, and even sometimes canter calmly. Overall, he has gone from the horse that got no attention to being the horse that is often a favorite of any kid that comes to the barn - whether I let them have a pony ride on him or not!