Basics on Yada

So Yada is a registered Thoroughbred dark bay mare. She's super sweet and like a giant puppy dog! She loves her face rubbed and hugged and she's just the sweetest thing ever. Super willing to learn and please even though she's big! She was born March 20, 2009 and she stands at 15.3hh and possibly growing a couple more inches. She's an off the track Thoroughbred (OTTB). Poor Yada has to deal with the stigma attached to the OTTBs because usually Thoroughbreds tend to be crazy, fast, and everything else but she is the exact opposite. She has the potential to be fast since she was trained to race but she never runs off with me and has never tried. Her version of "spooking" is a slow trot. I've been in love with her since the day I got her!

However, things didn't start off that easy. I bought her through Bits & Bytes Farm (http://www.bitsandbytesfarm.com/). All I have learned through buying a horse through Elizabeth (one of the ladies who runs the farm) is that I will never do it again and I will never suggest their horses to anyone. I wanted one horse, Hobo, but he went back to the track so I had to start from square one again. When Jill Schnedler found out about Yada, she knew it would be a match. At least she got that right, Yada and I are a fantastic team! Everything ran smoothly with Yada. I purchased her and all was fine and dandy. I scheduled everything with the shipper, Tony Lapore, and all was good! That is, until Tony picked her up and Yada had a runny nose with nasty green boogers. No one told him she was sick and it could have been strangles!! If you don't know what strangles is, it's an air-born bacteria in horses that is highly contagious. All it takes is touching another horse's nose and BAM! He's got it. I called up the owner of Yada in Kentucky and she said she had given Yada 2 days of antibiotics. Wait, you knew she was sick before you shipped her? That changes things. It's illegal to ship a sick horse across state lines.

Meanwhile, Elizabeth got mad and tried to make Jill turn against me and convince Tony to drop Yada off at another barn along the way and then she emailed me trying to refund my money and force me to sell Yada back to her. NOT gonna happen. She was mine. Whatever I say, goes. So she arrived after 2 days in the trailer and 2 days of snot coming out of her nose. We had to keep her on full quarantine to not contaminate the other horses and she had to get 2 penicillin shots twice a day for 14 days. That poor horse. Barely 3 years old and she has to endure 56 needles in 14 days. She's such a sweetheart, she hardly flinched when she got stuck with the needles. I love her. I felt horrible but it was for her health and the health of the 17 other horses in the barn.

I emailed Elizabeth a couple of times and called her out on everything including the fact that she didn't send Yada with the x-rays of the cyst in her right stifle that were promised and I didn't even have a health certificate! It's illegal to ship a horse across state lines without a health certificate! We had a vet check which turned into a "flexion test". A flexion test doesn't have anything to do with health. A flexion test is for her legs and joints. She was probably sick at the time and couldn't pass a health check so they skipped it and called it good. Bitches.

Well, I have her now and we've been doing quite well! Working on mastering the canter, since race horses don't learn to canter, and working on making her bend and round her back and neck and just general things like that. Pretty soon, she'll be doing leg yields and all kinds of fancy dressage work!  Funny thing is, since race horses don't get fed treats at the track, Yada doesn't like many treats and she doesn't like apples. Her treat of choice is peppermints. Horses LOVE peppermints!

This is Yada the day she arrived! =D