Tammy Johnson Training

Life is short and you only get one. Buy the pony and make it a good one! 🐴🥰🙌

♥️🌟

I locked twenty-five high school seniors inside a dirt ring with a heavily scarred, supposedly dangerous rescue horse, and the principal almost called the police on me.

The heavy wooden gate slammed shut with a sharp crack that echoed all the way across the schoolyard. I slid the rusted metal bolt firmly into place. I had just trapped myself, twenty-five restless teenagers, and a twelve-hundred-pound battered animal inside the fencing.

The agriculture teacher dropped her clipboard in the dust. Her eyes went wide with sheer panic.

The kids instantly stopped laughing. The cell phones they had been staring at dropped to their sides. They looked at me like I was a complete lunatic.

I’m not a teacher, and I don't work for the local school district. I’m a farrier. I spend my days trimming rough hooves and hammering heavy steel shoes onto the feet of horses.

My hands are permanently calloused. My flannel work shirts are always stained with sweat, and my boots are perpetually caked in mud. I was only supposed to be there to give a simple, thirty-minute vocational demonstration on basic equine hoof care.

It was supposed to be an easy morning. But I had taken one long look at these kids when I walked into the yard.

They were slumped against the wooden fence boards. They were staring blankly at the dirt or glaring off into the distance. A few looked completely exhausted, with heavy dark circles under their eyes.

One boy in the back was shaking his leg so fast it looked like he was vibrating out of his skin. Another girl had her sleeves pulled down so far over her knuckles that her hands were completely hidden from the world.

I knew that exact look. I knew that heavy, suffocating silence. I knew right then that a shiny new horseshoe wasn't going to do a single thing for them.

I took my heavy metal hoof nippers and tossed them into the dirt. They hit the ground with a loud, heavy thud that made half the class physically flinch.

"We aren't talking about hooves today," I said. My voice wasn't loud, but it carried perfectly across the quiet, dusty pen. "We're talking about things people decide to throw away."

I turned and walked over to Buster. Buster is an old, broken Quarter Horse, and he is not pretty to look at. He has a massive, jagged, hairless scar running all the way down his left hip.

Half the mane on his neck is permanently gone. It left patchy, scarred skin behind that never quite healed right. When I first found him at a local livestock auction, he was severely starved and dangerously angry.

He was just days away from being loaded onto a trailer to be put down. People at the auction said he was too far gone. They told me he was too broken, too traumatized, and completely useless.

I ran my rough hand gently over the raised, white scar tissue on Buster’s hip. He let out a low, rumbling breath, lowered his massive head, and rested his heavy chin completely on my shoulder.

I turned back and looked directly at the twenty-five teenagers staring at me in stunned silence.

"I bought this ruined horse on the exact same day I planned to take my own life."

The silence in that dirt paddock was suddenly deafening. It felt like all the oxygen had been completely sucked out of the space. You could hear the distant highway traffic, but inside that ring, nobody moved a muscle.

The girl in the front row, the one with the oversized sweater pulled over her knuckles, completely stopped breathing. Her eyes were locked onto my face.

"Four years ago, I lost my daughter," I told them. I kept my voice incredibly steady, refusing to look away from their faces. "She was exactly your age. Seventeen years old."

I swallowed the lump in my throat. "And I didn't see the signs. I was so busy working, so busy providing, that I didn't see how much she was quietly hurting inside until it was way too late."

I let that sink into the quiet morning air. "After she was gone, the guilt absolutely ate me alive. It consumed every waking second of my day. I stopped going to work. I stopped talking to my friends."

"I sat in an empty house until the silence became unbearable. One Tuesday afternoon, it finally got to be too much. I walked out to my main barn, locked the heavy sliding door from the inside, and I grabbed a long piece of rope."

A boy in a varsity football jacket swallowed hard. The agriculture teacher had her hand clamped tightly over her mouth, tears welling in her eyes, but she didn't dare step forward to interrupt.

"I was standing there in the dark, in the dusty light coming through the roof, fully ready to end everything. Buster here, he was terrified of people back then. If you walked into his stall, he would flatten his ears, bare his teeth, and try to kick you."

"He hated the world because the world had only ever hurt him. But on that specific day, in that dark barn, he didn't attack me. He walked right out of his open stall and came straight up to where I was standing."

I reached up and scratched the old horse right behind his ears. He closed his eyes in pure contentment.

"He didn't bite me. He just lowered his big, heavy head, pressed it right against the center of my chest, and leaned his entire twelve-hundred-pound weight into me."

"He physically pushed me backward, forcing me to step away from that rope. And then he just stood there. He stood there like a warm, breathing statue, pressing his heartbeat against mine, refusing to move."

I paused, looking at the faces of the teenagers. Several of them had thick tears silently streaming down their cheeks.

"I couldn't leave him. He was totally broken, and I was completely shattered. Somehow, in that dark barn, we just kept each other standing up."

I took three steps away from Buster. I left the scarred old horse standing completely alone in the center of the dirt ring. He stood quietly, blinking in the bright morning sunlight.

"This horse was told he was useless," I said, my voice dropping down to a raspy whisper. "He was told by the world that his pain made him a burden. He was told he wasn't worth the feed it took to keep him alive."

I looked at the girl in the sweater. I looked at the boy with the shaking leg.

"I want to know right now... how many of you feel exactly like him? How many of you are just dragging yourselves through these school hallways every single day, smiling when you're supposed to, but feeling completely crushed and invisible on the inside?"

I didn't ask them to raise their hands. I didn't ask them to speak a single word. I just stood there in the dirt and waited.

Ten seconds passed. Then twenty. It felt like an absolute eternity. The wind rustled the dry leaves along the fence line.

Then, the girl in the baggy sweater shifted her weight. Her worn sneakers scuffed softly against the dry dirt. She stepped away from the safety of the wooden fence.

She didn't say a single word to me. She didn't look back at the other students. She just walked straight across the paddock.

She walked right up to the massive, intimidating horse, reached out a trembling hand, and pressed her small palm flat against the ugly, jagged scar on Buster's neck.

Buster didn't pull away. He didn't flinch. He just closed his dark eyes and let out a long, warm sigh. His soft breath ruffled the hair on her forehead.

A second later, the boy in the varsity football jacket stepped up. He walked over with his head down. He stood on the other side of the horse and firmly placed his hand on Buster’s shoulder.

Then another girl stepped forward. Then two more boys from the back of the class walked over.

One by one, they left the perimeter. They didn't speak. They just formed a tight, silent circle around this battered, discarded old horse.

They gently laid their hands on his scars, his back, and his neck. One boy buried his face completely in Buster's sparse mane.

I stood back and watched the boy in the football jacket start to physically shake. Heavy tears silently spilled down his face and dropped into the dry dirt below.

The girl in the oversized sweater was crying so incredibly hard her shoulders heaved with every breath. But she never took her hand off Buster's scarred neck.

Out of twenty-five kids in that class, sixteen of them were touching the horse.

Sixteen kids were standing in a dirt pen, silently screaming for help without making a single sound.

We stayed exactly like that for the rest of the period. Nobody talked. There was just the sound of the wind, the quiet sobbing of exhausted teenagers, and the steady, rhythmic breathing of an old horse.

He stood perfectly still, absorbing every single ounce of their pain. He held them up, just like he had held me up in that dark barn four years ago.

When the loud school bell finally rang, echoing harshly across the campus to signal the end of class, not a single person moved.

It was the very first time in the history of that high school that a bell rang and teenagers didn't immediately rush for the exit. They stayed anchored to the animal.

I slowly picked up my metal hoof nippers from the dirt. I walked over to the heavy wooden fence and unbolted the gate, swinging it wide open toward the campus.

"Horses don't judge," I told them quietly as they finally began to step back and wipe their faces with their sleeves. "They don't care about your grades."

"They don't care about what clothes you wear, how much money your parents make, or what nasty rumors people post about you on their phones. They only know what you feel in your heart."

I reached deep into the chest pocket of my flannel shirt. I pulled out a thick stack of dirty, crumpled business cards and dropped them squarely on the top of the wooden fence post.

"My farm is exactly five miles down the county road," I said. "There are always dirty stalls to muck out. There are always heavy water buckets to fill. And there are always horses that need brushing."

I looked at the girl in the oversized sweater one last time.

"If the noise in this school gets too loud, or if you ever feel like you're standing in the dark with nowhere left to turn... you come to the barn. The gate is never locked."

Three days later, on a freezing Saturday morning, I walked out to my barn just as the sun was starting to rise over the hills.

The girl in the baggy sweater was already there. She was sitting quietly in the thick hay inside the very first stall, gently brushing the dirt from Buster's scarred coat.

A few minutes later, an old pickup truck pulled into the driveway. The boy in the varsity jacket stepped out, grabbed a pitchfork, and walked toward the stalls without saying a word.

They had found their safe place. And for the first time in four years, my barn didn't feel so empty anymore.
elife

While I don’t spend much time on social media, the recent post on Noëlle Floyd titled “Dispelling the myth of "the perfect position,"” with Karl Cook, as well as McLain Ward’s well-reasoned response managed to reach me early this morning. It’s one of the few times I’ve seen something on social media that I thought deserved a comment from me.

I worry Karl’s statements can be interpreted by young or inexperienced riders to mean working hard to create a good position isn’t necessary, when I believe it is the most important fundamental of learning to ride. I worry he missed the “why” of correct position.

The entire point of classical position is not about the right look or winning. It is about safety and clear communication. Safety for rider and, in my opinion most importantly, safety for the horse.

Around JMS, I’m known for saying “the best way to win consistently, is to consistently do things properly.” Winning can mean success in the ring, but winning can also mean a long, safe, healthy partnership for horse and rider.

Every aspect of horsemanship must be based on sound fundamentals. There are far fewer true accidents than people would like to admit. Everything we do in the barn to care for the horses properly is based on safety and what we do in the saddle is the same. If you fall off your horse because of bad position, you’re not going to be able to keep them safe as they gallop off without you. Just like if you don’t do everything properly in the stable, you are risking illness or injury.

Our riders are always working hard to improve their position. Beezie is often held up to be one of the epitomes of classical equitation and she still works with a personal trainer, takes lessons, spends hours maintaining her position. So much of what we do in our sport and with horses is out of our control. One’s position is something we CAN control. I can’t fathom good horsepeople being dismissive of striving for excellence in one’s position, if they truly understand position’s relationship with both safety and effective communication.

Correct position minimizes mistakes. It keeps the rider from falling back and catching the horse in the mouth or crushing the horse’s back or keeps a leg from inadvertently abusing the horse’s side. In the best-case scenario, it gives the horse the ability to jump its best without impingement from the rider. In the worst-case scenario, it puts the rider in a place to be most effective when something goes wrong. A perfectly balanced and positioned rider is much more effective at helping a horse out of a stumble or misstep on landing than one that is incorrect. Correct position should never be confused with stiffness. Correct means supple, balanced, and empathetic. Poor position causes stiffness and imbalance.

Classic position minimizes falls and injuries. Classic position ensures clear communication. Classic position must be MASTERED before any “artistic license” with position can and should be employed.

Straying from the classical position, thinking of Beezie taking the famous flyer to the last fence of the jump off at the National Horse Show with Cortes years ago, would be an example of good use of artistic license. That was a calculated risk with full mastery of her position and complete confidence in the training of the horse underneath her.

Without mastery of the proper position, and all her tools, and training, the same decision would amount to reckless endangerment of the horse.

While perfection is impossible, we are striving for it because it’s our responsibility to the horse, to do our part to help keep them safe in this sport. One must first be safe to achieve the ethical partnership between horse and rider for the betterment of both.

-John Madden

Please don’t allow any more to suffer 🐶🐈💔😢

Building confidence for our racehorse babies 🏇💫♥️

Be a big fish. 💯

Set goals so big they scare you.
Outwork everyone in your lane.
Stay disciplined when others get distracted.
And never settle for an average life just because it’s comfortable.

Greatness isn’t given — it’s earned through obsession, sacrifice, and consistency.

Top 1% mindset. 🔥