Content provided by Julie Bennett, Baylor University WACO, TX — For the second straight season, the Georgia Bulldogs claimed the overall team title on Saturday at the Varsity Equestrian National Championships (VENC), held at the Heart O’ Texas Fair and Rodeo Complex in Waco, TX. The win marked Georgia’s fourth VENC national championship. In addition, the Bulldogs took home the Hunter Seat team championship, their fourth and the first since 2004, while Texas A&M claimed its...

Content provided by Julie Bennett, Baylor University WACO, Texas— For the third straight season, Baylor and Waco will host the Varsity Equestrian National Championships (VENC) at the Heart of Texas Fair and Rodeo Complex. The eighth annual championships are on Thursday, April 16 and continue through Saturday, April 18. The event is open to the public and no admission will be charged. Varsity equestrian is divided into two areas: hunter seat and western. The University of Georgia claimed the...

The University of Minnesota is performing a study on tying up in Morgan horses. One cause for tying up in horses of all breeds is type 1 Polysaccharide Storage Myopathy (PSSM), for which there is now a genetic test that uses blood or hair roots. (For more information about the test, go to www.cvm.umn.edu/umec/lab/Advances_in_PSSM.html .) However, there are horses that appear to have a type 2 form of PSSM, which, at present, can only be diagnosed by muscle biopsy. The University of Minnesota is...

Lexington, KY – As announced by the International Equestrian Federation (FEI) earlier this week, German Olympian Ludger Beerbaum filed an appeal on February 3 with the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) against the decision taken by the FEI Judicial Committee. The FEI Judicial Committee disqualified Beerbaum and his horse, Goldfever 3, from the Athens Olympic Games Show Jumping competitions—competitions in which the pair helped lead the German team to a Gold medal victory. As...

The seventh in a series of guest blog posts from Michelle Binder Before we learn to read we must learn the ABC’s. William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle (1593-1676) suggested an analogy between the education of a child and horse trainers who made unrealistic demands on young horses. Centuries ago he asked, ‘I would fain ask such stupid people, whether, by beating a boy, they could teach him to read, without first showing him his alphabet?’1 Systematic progressive training is not...

Fairfield, CT — In poker it’s called re-shuffling the deck, and when the Intercollegiate Horse Show Association (IHSA) announced at the start of the 2010 semester that it had realigned its nine Zones to eight - changing the geography of its competitive regions and impacting coaching strategies - it promised to make the road to the 2011 IHSA National Championships, May 5-8, at the Kentucky Horse Park in Lexington, an interesting one. With Regional and Zone Championships, and Western...

The 2010 FTI Winter Equestrian Festival (WEF) came to an end on Sunday, April 4, and Equestrian Sport Productions (ESP) is proud to congratulate all of the Circuit Champions for the 2010 season. ESP is also thrilled with the many accomplishments that were made throughout the 2010 season and look forward to continued improvements during the summer months to make the 2011 Winter Equestrian Festival an unparalleled equestrian destination. Throughout the 12 weeks of competition, almost $6 million...

The 2010 Kentucky International Equine Summit, a biennial event to be held on Monday and Tuesday, April 26 and 27, in Lexington, KY, and sponsored by the University of Louisville Equine Industry Program in cooperation with the University of Kentucky Equine Initiative, will feature more than 70 speakers and panelists dealing with a range of future challenges facing segments of the international and domestic horse industry. Dr. Veronique Julliand of AgroSup, Dijon, France, responsible for a...

As the Arabian Horse Association’s (AHA) Youth Nationals Arabian and Half-Arabian Championship Horse Show approaches, AHA continues to celebrate its 2008 Youth of the Year, Kim Luebcke of Peoria, IL. Luebcke, a college freshman at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, past Region 11 Youth Director and past Arabian Horse Youth Association (AHYA) President, maintains her role of Youth of the Year with grace and gratitude. Each year the Youth of the Year subcommittee works to find an Arabian...

Western horses jog. English horses trot. Dressage horses trot. Everyone knows that. What does that mean for the western dressage horse? The western jog was a gait that could be ridden for long distances over the range or on the trail that horses could sustain without exhaustion and which could be sat comfortably. The trot is a gait that covers more ground at a reasonable tempo. To deal with the dynamics of the gait and to unload the horses back, some riders learned to post. Western riders bred...