More Than A Pinhook: Life Lessons From A Sassy Bay Filly

Posted On Nov 1, 2019 By admin With Comments Off

We sauntered in to the Keeneland Sales Pavilion with new ideas, a little of hope, and a good deal of bravado.

We moved out a little bit wiser, we hope, and with a regenerated sense of religion in ourselves.

The eight months in between were a heck of a journey.

“We both graduated with equine business stages, surely we can figure this out, ” my business collaborator, Steph Settles, said to me last-place November. “Besides, it’ll be recreation to have a baby around.”

A couple of bloodstock industry neophytes, we were discussing our first pinhooking jeopardize. Steph didn’t know how prophetic her statements would turn out to be, though. Just as we had organized a few of my best friend to honcho into the Keeneland January sale and pick out our first potential, Steph and her husband found out they were expecting a baby of their own.

Due in early September, as in right before the Keeneland September sale.

“If I have to go straight from the birthing suite to the sales ring, I’ll be there when our filly sells, ” Steph joked. “I’m not so concerned. I’m all in.”

So was I. Fortunately, babe Magnolia was born a little early( and perfectly healthful !).

daredevil

She looks like” two men in a colt suit ,” one manager told me.

Donning the nom de guerre “Quatro Bloodstock,” Steph and I purposed up earning the first pony we bid on in the January sale. A leggy inlet daughter of young stallion Daredevil, she seemed, as one horseman last-minute “ve been told”, like “two men wearing a pony suit.”

There’s no arguing that statement. A late foal born in mid-May, the filly’s two halves really didn’t relatively looks a lot like they belonged to the same horse. That is, until she started moving.

Every bloodstock agent I’ve interviewed has said it’s hard to put into words what a good stroll looks like. For me, it was a sense that all her touchy parts suddenly melded together into a single, amicable flow. She wasn’t perfect, but the confidence with which she carried herself was hard to ignore.

pinhook

” We got one !” Left to right: Steph Settles, Chelsea Hackbarth, Thegaboutit ‘1 8, and Nick Renninger

We decided to bid on the daughter of Thegabouitit( Hold Me Back ).

There is absolutely no feeling in the world like your heart hammering in your chest as the dictate stalls and you realise you won. I didn’t have to wait very long- we got her for $2,000- but it felt like an immortality before that gavel finally slipped. When I signed my figure on my first sales ticket at Keeneland, I couldn’t help but smile: we got one!

I drag the filly residence and feed her to her brand-new roommate, Steph’s middle-aged Quarter Horse mare who is as bombproof as she is opinionated.

“I’m not going to fall in love with this one, ” I told friends and family. “We won’t even specified her.”

Yeah, right.

We may not have officially listed her, but she’ll always be “Filly” or “Princess” to me.

Unexpected Challenges Once she settled into life at our little four-stall barn, we started teaching the filly a few little things like standing in cross ties and “no, you cannot run me over.”

Similarly, she taught us that vacate feed tubs will be ceremoniously convulsed to the ground and stomped on.

She never is inadequate to spawn us laugh, that’s for sure.

At the same time, the pinhooking knowledge presented challenges I wasn’t expecting.

We’d agreed to do everything ourselves and to share the decision-making process equally, but working out the details of the filly’s care researched my friendship with Steph to its limits more than once.

It was humbling, frankly.

The hardest part for me was giving go of my need for control. I had to get a lot better at asking for and accepting help, and I likewise had to figure out how to apologize when I was flat-out wrong.

At least formerly a few weeks I detected myself contacting for the phone to call friends or kinfolk, trying to reason my action through one problem or the other. As a card-carrying introvert I’m usually the kind of person who’d instead send a text than pick up the phone, and sharing my reckons or feelings is never something I’ve been particularly comfy with.

Frustrated and pushed to the point that I wanted to reach out, often reaching my phone calls from inside the filly’s stall as I did evening duties, I retained how to open up to those people who are most important in my life as well as why it is so important to do so.

pinhooking

” Excuse me, whatcha doin back there ?”- our friend assistants give the filly a bath

As it turns out, people can’t know what you’re contemplation, or how to support you, unless you tell them. Go figure. Once I re-opened those strings of communications things really started to change. My roommate and best friend had always been game to help with the filly, but now she knew exactly what I needed. My non-horsey parents, bless their mettles, started making a once-a-week trek to the farm to spend a pair hours doing the extra upkeep and chores that Steph and I is as simple as run out of age for.

Re-learning that oral communication skill also brought about a whole new dynamic in my friendship with Steph, based on the realization that we each just wanted the best for our filly. In hindsight this should have been viciously self-evident, but we had both been going bogged down by the small details.

By the time September reeled around Steph and I has actually become a team, and I believe we will walk away from this experience a lot stronger than we trod into it.

I’m still “workin on” the talking thing, but at the end of the day I study I’m learning to be a better friend, and maybe even a better daughter, only because we generated this sassy little filly into our lives.

Out-Of-The-Box Sales Prepping From the beginning, our auctions prep program included teaching the Princess how to be ponied. Of direction Steph and I demanded her to learn the necessary marketings prep abilities, like standing up and striding out next to a person, but we also wanted her to learn “real-life” skills.

To that extremity, we ponied her all around the three-day eventing barn on which our little bit of region sits. She bridged( unusually) non-manicured battlegrounds, up and down slopes, in and out of the arenas, over poles and logs on the sand, and around other mares doing any number of ride drills.

She mentioned mounting instructions and learnt rushing miniature ponies; she be dealing with my 45 -pound boxer mix scooting up behind her and entwine in and out of the bushes in front of her; she saw altogether too many geese make a noisy fuss about taking to the sky, often time feet away from her nose; she trod alongside cars, trucks, four-wheelers and tractors on the gravel driveway; and she extremely experienced watching speedboats scooting up and down the Ohio River.

Most daytimes it went well. Every formerly in a while, though, she’d test me and toss in a humorous back or a show of her form of auras above the dirt. Thank goodness for my saint of a 22 -year-old Arabian gelding, whom I used to pony her around the farm- he did a lot of the hard work.

Eventually we coached the filly to work on a pounce path at the walking and run, and from there we progressed to apply a surcingle and elastic feature controls attached to a little snaffle bit. It was never tight enough to restrict her onward motion, but had just enough pressure for her to start thinking about consuming her hind end a little better.

ray's paddock

This was the first time she travel off with the pony. She was pretty unconcerned.

I construed time and again how all our part helped to develop her mind.

There was one morning that the wind was blowing up to 35 mph and pitching a beings tarp all the countries of above her chief when I was turning her out, and she never turned a fuzz. During the summer, the farm’s young campers would run up to her and she’d stand wholly still, stopping her premier to let them pat her on the nose. Another period, I drove my truck into her grassland to fall away a laden of limestone dirt in the run-in removed, and she spent three hours ” helping” without a draw of horror. Even as she got fitter in her preparation for the sale, the filly remained kind and gentle enough to allow a particularly pregnant Steph and her relatively-new-to-horses husband to work around her without hesitation.

As we neared September and Steph’s daughter was born, I got the filly all to myself for the last couple of weeks. The daytimes were hot and long, but her shining, inquisitive personality saved me giggling even as I regularly drove out to the farm at ten in the evening for “one final check.”

Going Back To Keeneland: Elephant-Sized Butterflies As her auction date reaped near, I have to admit I started to worry. It wasn’t the money- I couldn’t do much of nothing about that at this part. I also knew that we’d done everything in our influence to prepare her, and that we had a fabulous team ready to show her off in bloodstock worker Tommy Eastham and his wife, Wyndee.

steph settles

Thegaboutit ‘1 8, conformation photographed from early August

I simply couldn’t help myself.

I had identified the kind of horse she was going to be. She is athletic but sensible, and above all, manner. Would other beings be able to see it extremely?

( To assuage my guts and ease the transition on the day we drag her down to Keeneland, I wreaked dwelling a brand-new OTTB gelding to fill her vacate stall that terribly afternoon. Problem solving, right ?)

Thegaboutit ‘1 8 entered the ring on the second-to-last day of Keeneland’s September sale, carrying with her a couple of young horsewomen’s hopes and dreams. Much to our enjoy, dozens of friends and family came out to support us as our little Book 6 baby prepared to take the next step in her career.

Truth be told, I’m not used to being apprehensive. I’ve vied at colt presents all over the country and got over the “butterflies” a long time ago, or so I reputed. As tough as it was to wait for the hammer to fall back in January, every compunction in the auctioneer’s song that Saturday morning was a new use of torture.

tommy eastham

Our yearling with her fan organization at the September sale.

There were more than butterflies bumping around in my stomach during the course of its 70 or so seconds she was in the ring. Elephants, maybe.

Why was I a little worried? I couldn’t have verbalized it then, but now I believe it’s because communicating her through the ring handed the outside world the opportunity to quantify our many hours of sweat equity. I didn’t know if that external validation would match up to the reality.

Of course, the filly made the pressure all in stride: that’s what we coached her to do. She stood softly as the dictate steadily clambered to $11,000 and the hammer fell to send her to her next home.

Suddenly it was all over. Even as I write that is something that, remembering the batch of her forget that resounding raises rends to my hearts. It was always the plan to sell her, of course. I knew that. It isn’t that I wanted to keep her, certainly, but after seeing her every day, multiple times a day, for months, it was hard to know she wouldn’t be there in the morning.

I know, I know. I’m not supposed to get attached. I probably always will, though, and I think that’s okay.

Walking Away: The Hardest Part

daredevil

How lucky are we to have something that attains saying goodbye so hard.

This filly started as our classroom, and eventually became our canvas. Her exhibition at the Keeneland pavilion showcased everything we thought maybe we could achieve: a soft nose, gentle behaviour, and a filly whose different halves had grown into one lovely whole.

The final counts digest that out, much to my succour, so it seems fair to call Year One a success.

I’m left with a quiet atonement, a different awarenes from the instant euphoria of contributing over a pony I groomed to win a scoot. And hitherto, it’s somehow the same. There’s an enormous sense of dignity in each horse’s accomplishments, whether it’s a horse smacking the cable firstly or a yearling figuring out the lessons you learn her.

Yes, I’m going to miss her, and I’ll always be grateful for the endows she gave us. At the same time, I’m energized to see where she goes next.

“Show them all what you can do, princess, ” I told her when I went to say goodbye. “It’s up to you now.”

There’s a long list of parties I need to thank for their help in coming Quatro Bloodstock off the ground: Shannon Smith, for his absolute faith from the beginnings; David and Bonnie Hackbarth, for always answering the phone and later jumping in to help out on the farm; Heather Pettinger, for the long-distance emotional support; Nick Renninger, for rely us to determine the right choices and obstructing the climate light-footed at the sale; Joe Nevills, for taking a hundred thousand envisions and patiently like to hear my( countless) minds; Ray Paulick, for telling me it was a good idea and facilitating me steer the time constraints; Deborah and Mike Snyder, for the introduction to the Easthams, without whose improve we would have been lost many times over; Jessica Ramage, for never hesitating to lend a hand, from goat-wrangling to picture-taking to stall-cleaning; Chad Summers, for the advice; Wyndee Eastham, for the hand-holding; Tommy Eastham, for his straightforward convictions and ever on-point suggestions; Aaron Edelson, for always putting up with me; Bill Landes, for the inducement to go for it; Terri Burch, for the hour-long phone calls; Stephen Settles, for being a good horsey-husband and feeding the ponies; and of course, to Steph Settles, for coming up with this crazy idea in the first place.

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