At 5:30 this morning, Dobi lost his fight with a strangulating lipoma.

There are no words that I can write to explain how much he meant to me, and will always mean. We were supposed to have so many more years together, but his body betrayed him in the most evil way possible. 23 years old was not old enough.

Dobi, you made my life infinitely better, and I’m so sorry that you didn’t get the death you deserved. You should have gone at a grand old age, with the sun on your back surrounded by your friends after a long and happy retirement. Not in a hospital room in agony.

Always and forever my best and greatest friend.

Dobi (Sole Invader) 1st January 2003 - 15th October 2026

I'm in my chief year of plastic surgery residency and staring down the end of six years at my current barn. We will be heading to Texas for fellowship then hopefully back to the northeast. I've been leasing the best, weirdest, most special, sensitive boy for almost three years and he is absolutely my heart. So, safe to say my husband won Christmas ❤️ 🥺

Happy holidays to all! 🎄❤️

Got it at auction for only $20! Can you believe it?

Never really been around horses before but my girlfriend is a showjumper and I’ve been steadily learning to make her life easier at shows, and I tacked up Tiny all by myself today! Proud of myself

The love of my life 🥹

My best friend and I spent our entire childhood plotting out our equestrian center, cutting out pictures of buckets and saddles to put into folders, and drew out stall name cards.

She got into a terrible car accident when I was pregnant with my oldest and I lost her. A decade has passed and I still wonder how she would like being an aunt, or what would have happened with our dream equestrian center.

I spoke fondly of our love of horses but never really pushed my oldest into it. She randomly asked to try a lesson out… she was hooked.

A year and a half into riding and her spark never faded. My husband and I swore she wasn’t getting her own horse but after a long year battling unexpected deaths in our family and some scary health battles, we said eff it. Life is too short.

We had the PPE today and he passed with flying colors! This ol mustang is officially part of the crew!

One of these days I’ll saddle him up myself and take him for a ride, but until then I can’t get enough of watching him and my daughter bond ❤️

I was browsing Craigslist as one does.. this made me giggle.

Seriously though I’ve never met another horse that does this… The best is when she goes full downward dog while I’m sitting on her

You ever meet a horse and immediately think, “Oh no… I’m so screwed.” I’m officially done for.

This is Rorschach (Rory), my new Spotted Draft gelding. He’s four (turning five in July), 17.2h, and has the sweetest temperament. I’m pinching myself because tomorrow this beautiful boy starts his journey from South Carolina to Oregon to come home and be with me.

Drafts and draft x’s have always had a special place in my heart. I love their quiet, gentle, and sensitive nature. Like whales on land. The moment I met Rory a month ago, he embodied all of that (and yes, he absolutely knew what he was doing with that kiss).

Waiting on shipping has been absolute agony, but I finally got confirmation that he’s being picked up tomorrow.

The dream is lots of cuddles, trail rides, fantasy cosplays, low-level eventing, and hopefully sharing his magic with a lot of people.

I still can’t believe he’s almost home!

Love love love this! Kudos to Gregory Cottard!!!

CeCe started out her life owned by a fairly well known LLC from my area and was a very successful 1.40m show jumper until she sustained “some type of injury” and then spent several years afterwards being passed around and around to different barns and programs until she was eventually donated to my college as a team horse for our IHSA team. I’ve always had a thing for spicy mares so she very quickly became one of my favorite horses and ultimately I was one of only a few girls on my team that ever rode her and until I graduated the only person who ever jumped her. At school she was an anxiety ball very obviously due to her needs not being met 🫠 she’s a 16’2 warmblood that lived in an 8x8 stall with maybe 2hrs of turnout a week who was forbidden, for whatever dumb reasons, from being lunged and they wondered why she was so insane 😅 But long story short I graduated college and then 2 years later I went back to the same school for my masters. Still being fairly close with the coach and barn manager I worked it out that I could school any of my old favs that needed it whenever I had time between classes. The very first horse I asked about was CeCe and I’ll never forget how excited the barn manager got when I said her name. I later found out the reason she was so excited is because she had been sitting in her stall for several months because no one wanted to ride her 🥲 something had happened several months earlier involving her being ridden in a lesson and being crashed through a jump that resulted in her flat out refusing to jump anymore. I’m talking refusing to being hand walked over a ground pole when I first started working with her 🙃 I also learned that due the insane rule that she was not allowed to be lunged, in order to make her “safer” to be ridden (prior to whatever accident she got into) they’d just give her some acepromazine before all of her lessons 😅 Now being a horse at a hunter / jumper barn that refused to jump and also being way too much horse for riders not at jumping level, instead of putting any time and effort into her, she just sat in a stall. I grew up riding equitation but my trainer was classically dressage trained so I basically spent my junior years riding dressage in a hunt seat saddle and developed a LOVE for the discipline. So, given the circumstances I thought “okay amazing she can be a dressage horse” and for months going forward that’s what we did. We got complement after complement from random people watching us school and it even got to the point the coach wanted to start using her in team flat lessons again and things were looking great for her until the ground froze 🙃 My school has an indoor arena but my coach is very strict about what horses can and cannot be ridden in it due to “being too dangerous” so as a result CeCe was not allowed in the indoor 🫠 My schools team also has a care horse system meaning every single girl on the team is responsible for taking care of one of the horses, and this is a high end show barn so I’m taking like body clipping and pulling manes on top of other general maintenance needs, and being at this time I was getting hammered with exams and projects I just didn’t visit the barn for 2 months thinking CeCe was being taken care of. BOY was I wrong 🙃 2 months later and she was such a hot mess it makes me so sad thinking back to it. She’s a spicy mare on a good day so I expected her to be a fire breathing dragon after sitting for so long in the winter, but instead the first time I took her out of her stall she was so insanely stocked up in all 4 from standing in her tiny stall with manure up to her knees she practically fell on her face walking out of her stall 🙃 her mane was a matted mess and you couldn’t even tell she was a flea bitten gray with the manure caked into her fur. I FLIPPED on the barn manager for letting this horse down. I knew her care person, someone who claimed she loved this horse, and could not believe she would let this horse down. Especially I could not believe the coach would let this happen to one of her horses. I had to start her up from the ground from that point because she was so weak. 1 week of hand walking which then turned into several months of only WT because she was way too weak in the hind end to canter. For months and months we worked to get her to the level she was before those 2 months and by the time my finals were coming around in the spring we were finally back to our technical dressage schools. It was then that the barn manager just nonchalantly walked up to me and said “you know me and [the coach] have been talking, if you want CeCe you can just take her”. My jaw hit the floor when she told me this, but honestly in retrospect she was probably just tired of me constantly nagging her about how this horse was being treated 🫠 It was a struggle to get things together but thanks to several friends and giving the coach $1 in exchange for her papers, a month later CeCe got loaded up and moved to her new home. It’s been a year and a half now since I took her and even though I took her with the expectations of absolutely nothing and to just have fun, this horse has had a complete transformation. I moved her from a tiny stall and minimal turnout to a barn with in/out stalls so she practically has 24/7 turnout, starting her on arthritis medication, and changing her feed to be primarily hay and just a ration balancer (compared to the 2 flakes of hay a day and a fuck ton of senior feed she was getting at my school 🥴). First we worked on her confidence issues with jumping from the ground up and within the first month she went from refusing to be hand walked over a ground pole to free jumping with absolutely no fuss 🥹 then we began the same process from the beginning but while being ridden and another month later she was jumping under saddle no fuss. From then on it’s been my mission to just do whatever with her show off how wasted she was being at my school all the time she was there. Once she had her confidence back our next focus was to strip away any unnecessary equipment. She always went in heavy bits at school and all while there I rode her in a kimberwick and there were moments even I had issues keeping her slow and collected during rides. She was so dead in the mouth that we again took a major step back and once again started from the ground up with basic aids. I also made it a point to train her with positive reinforcement instead of the usual negative reinforcement of horse training and in all honestly having a horse who severely suffered from learned helplessness all of a sudden actually want to play around has been one of the greatest things I’ve gotten to whiteness in my life. Within an hour the horse who used to take off with everyone could stop on a dime with just leg and seat aids. From then on we learned how to steer with just my leg and seat and then started incorporating ground poles and then slowly and steadily started jumping that way 💕 If you would have told me that in a years time I could reliably hop on this horse bareback and bridle-less after a week off from work in the cold I’d probably laugh but that is the kind of horse she is now 🦄 We primarily just have fun as we’re both severely washed up from the show ring and mainly just go on trail rides with light jumping and dressage schools between 💕 She’s the horse I’ve always dreamed of having and I can just hope I’m the person she’s always wanted 💕

He’s out 24/7 on 72 acres and did so well in a stall for 3 days. We got him at an auction in Bowie, TX (NOT a meat pen situation! Just a feedlot horse) I had to re back him because he couldn’t be mounted//knew literally nothing. We were up against $35k+ horses and I am just so proud of him. Most of our stuff is borrowed, we don’t have an arena, we ride in a pasture, and I am just so lucky to have him!

WooooOOoOOoOOooo!! Happy Spooktober!!

Bless my hubby for making me a "fence backpack" to wear with my outfit. Ladies, get you a man that supports your dreams!

Source: https://www.bokt.nl/forums/viewtopic.php?f=53&t=1882318

The horse is Roy, a 2004 Friesian/Norwegian Fjord cross gelding who was rescued in the Netherlands.