HGG Community Forums

Hey everyone! I haven’t been active in a moment, but here’s why :) (I apologize for the read in advance)

Back in 2023 I started working at a barn that retrains racehorses, I did stalls and rode the owner’s horses and sale horses, and I quickly developed a favorite. Danny (JC: “Dancing Position”) was 9, an event project, and had been in and out of work due to personal reasons. I loved everything about him, his movement, his confirmation, his coloring (bird catcher spots maybe ?), and his puppy dog personality. He was for sale and his owner wanted 5 grand for him, I knew I didn’t have that sort of money so I just accepted that he’d be sold sometime in the following year. I rode him as often as I could, 3 to 4 times a week. I would lesson with his owner, a US Eventing Olympic shortlist rider, and a Grand Prix Dressage rider, and finally understood what it was like to ride a nice horse. How soft he was, how much power he had, how quiet he was, I started to become attached to him and quickly he became the only horse of my bosses’ that I rode.

As 2024 came along I lost a lot of my confidence and got in my head about my riding ability, and convinced myself I wasn’t an advanced enough rider to keep helping in Danny’s training. Around March I stopped riding him as a whole, and rode a different much younger mare. I loved her a lot, I loved the challenge of riding a hot and very green horse, but the owner of that mare ended up selling her around June. In July I quit working at the barn, and word came around that the owner was looking to get the barn sold in order to move south. While I had been riding the other mare, Danny had been tried by a small handful of teen girls but ultimately nobody took him home. I reached back out to the barn owner in August asking if she needed any horses ridden or worked, and she told me Danny needed rehabbing and some easing back into work.

Of course I was ecstatic to work with him again. It was a rocky start, he had injured his front right leg, had it injected, and wasn’t rehabbed correctly right away because as always, he had been set on the back burner. After working with him for a couple weeks it became confirmed that the barn was sold, and the owner, Danny’s owner, would be headed down to Aiken. She asked me multiple times to give her an offer on him, and I again did not have much to offer, the last time she asked me I had 400 dollars set aside (lol). I ended up telling her I wouldn’t buy him until he was sound again, and she agreed that that was a smart decision. A week before her moving date I talked to her one on one about leasing Danny, she would be leaving the state and probably not coming back, and I wasn’t ready to let go of him, even if he still had a long way to go. So on September 14th I asked her if I could lease him, and in reply she told me, “Well what if I just gave him to you?”

And that’s exactly what happened, in the next week I signed a contract, and bought him with a singular one dollar bill I pulled from my tip stash. It was a long 3-4 months of rehabbing, lunging him, tack walking him, regretting tack walking him, lunging him more, regretting lunging him, hand walking, changing farriers, changing his diet, putting him on grain and supplements, it was all worth it in the end. With consistent work he’s really shaping up to be a wonderful and naturally gifted dressage horse, I cannot wait to get him in the ring this year, and I cannot wait to see what our future holds. This horse makes me feel like the luckiest girl in the world, and I will be forever grateful that these opportunities fell into my lap :x

(Pictures below)