Foxberry Farm

GoPro jumping

Ride along with me on Sonic Boom during the $25,000 Tryon Grand Prix - GoPro Helmet Cam! Sonic Boom in our first $25,000 Grand Prix at Tryon International E...

A few images from today's dressage show at the farm.

The History of the Budweiser Clydesdales

The Budweiser Clydesdales are easily some of the most iconic, recognizable horses in modern American culture. More than just a mascot, the Clydesdales have been an integral part of Anheuser-Busch for more than 80 years.

Learn more here: https://bit.ly/3eLG0Bz

Summer Sizzler Dressage show is underway. George has it under control!

A weekly update across eventing, jumping, and dressage, covering results, leaderboard shifts, and the next Open qualifiers.

The Open Weekly: Team Announcements and US Combinations Around the World

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She never set out to write a children’s classic.

She wanted to stop people from hurting horses.

By the time Anna Sewell began writing Black Beauty, she had spent decades watching them suffer. As a teenager, she slipped on a rainy road and permanently injured both ankles. The treatments of the day only made things worse. For the rest of her life, she lived with chronic pain, relying on horse-drawn carriages to get almost everywhere. Unlike most Victorians, she didn’t see horses as scenery or machines. She depended on them. She spoke to them gently. And she noticed everything.

She watched exhausted cab horses whipped through city streets. She saw animals worked until they collapsed. She despised the fashionable “bearing rein,” a leather strap that forced horses to hold their heads unnaturally high simply because wealthy owners thought it looked elegant. It was painful, unnecessary, and everywhere.

Confined to bed as her health deteriorated, Sewell spent six years writing the only novel of her life. Too weak to write for long, she often dictated chapters to her mother, Mary, who carefully transcribed them. Her revolutionary idea was simple: let the horse tell the story.

Instead of preaching, Black Beauty invited readers inside the mind of an animal. Suddenly, the horse wasn’t property. It had fears, memories, joy, exhaustion, and pain. Readers who had walked past working horses every day found themselves unable to look away.

Published in November 1877, the book was an immediate success. Anna Sewell died just five months later, never knowing it would sell more than 50 million copies, be translated into dozens of languages, and become one of the most influential animal welfare books ever written.

At her funeral, her mother made one final request: the horses pulling Anna’s hearse would wear no bearing reins.

It was a quiet tribute to a woman who changed the world simply by giving a horse a voice.

Counting the blinks may reveal if a horse is under stress.

https://bit.ly/3u8cAD9

In the Blink of an Eye: Could the Amount of Blinking Indicate Stress in Horses? A recent study at the University of Guelph asserts that there is a non-invasive method to assess stress in horses, and it involves blinking.