Author: Tim Farley

Stay fit, stay strong – all winter long!

tie dyebrush

If you’ve ever been to a Horse Tales “Second Touch” you know that we all learn a bit about grooming, tack, feed and keeping horses healthy.

ferrier1clippers

Here’s some more simple tips about care for your horse and other critters.
Take care of yourself – it’s cold outside. Warm up, cool down and enjoy the ride!
Be sure to leave your comments on the forum, facebook or here on the blog page.

Routine Health Care Of Horses

As loving owners, our horses mean the world to us, but without the right education looking after them properly isn’t an easy task! Here are a few things every owner should be aware of.

1) Regular Veterinary Check-Ups

It’s a good idea to schedule regular veterinary check-ups to ensure your horses stay fit and healthy, and to get much needed medicine in the event of illness. Most general health inspections should begin with nutrition. Many problems can be traced to a horse’s digestive system, which was made to process large amounts of grass, fiber, and water. A simple diet is best, and horses should get plenty of grass, high quality hay and water when they need it.

2) Food

Make sure your horse has plenty of grass and hay to graze on. Malnutrition can lead to several problems including ulcers, which are common in leaner sport horses. It is generally agreed that horses should eat between 2 and 4 percent of their body weight in hay and feed. It’s advisable to monitor their weight regularly to make sure it remains within healthy limits.

3) Vaccination & Deworming

Horses should be vaccinated and dewormed at regular intervals to prevent deadly viruses and parasite infections. The vaccinations needed can vary depending on the horse’s lifestyle. Deworming is particularly important due to how common parasite infections are, and because they can result in weight loss, colic and other dangerous symptoms.

4) Social Life, Excercise & General Wellbeing

Horses need to be social and around others or they could develop emotional and mental problems. They need regular mental stimulation and should receive adequate exercise to ensure they grow up as healthy as possible. Carefully monitor your horse’s sleeping patterns to make sure they aren’t out of the ordinary as strange sleeping patterns can be a symptom of illness or anxiety.

Unless it is particularly wet and windy outside, horses stand the cold better than hot weather. If they cannot sweat, their bodies may have trouble getting rid of excess heat.

5) Medicines

It’s a good idea to stock up on safe, versatile medicines such as Benadryl (containing diphenhydramine only). Purchasing antihistamines for horses can come in handy to counteract blood pressure problems and allergic reactions that would otherwise harm your animal, but should only be administered when you have approval from a veterinary professional. The right types of antihistamines do not block active histamines, and instead compete with them for the receptor to keep your horses healthy. As an added bonus, you can also safely use antihistamines on household pets, meaning you can keep Fido’s summer-time allergies under control too!

“Homecoming of Horses” Sunday Fun!

This Sunday, December 14, 2014 – A GREAT way to spend the day…
see you there?!! Stop at the shop on your way!al marah

 

Public Invited to Al-Marah Arabians “Homecoming of Horses”
WHAT: Welcoming ceremony and equine events to celebrate the arrival of the very best of

Al-Marah Arabians famous horses to their new Clermont home

WHEN: Sunday, December 14

TIME:  11:00 am – 4:00 pm

WHERE: Al-Marah Arabians, 11105 Autumn Lane in Clermont

BACKGROUND: Al-Marah Arabians invites the public to its Homecoming of Horses event to see the arrival of the last and very best of the farm’s famous Arabian horses as they arrive from Tucson. The day-long event is FREE and open to the public.

Highlights of the event include:

  • Riding demonstrations featuring horses that have won more than 40 National Championships
  • Tours of the 78-acre farm
  • Meet and greet with Mark Miller and the Al-Marah trainers
  • Riding demo by Greta Wrigley, trainer and winner of multiple national championships
  • Horse sales
  • Entertainment
  • Food

The highlight of the event will be the arrival of the broodmares at 2:00 pm as they take their first steps on the lush green pastures of their new home.

The Al-Marah Arabians are the oldest, privately-owned, continuously-bred band of horses in the world. Their ancestors date back to 1815 when they were first rounded up from the Egyptian desert.

Now owned by Mark Miller, who owned the Arabian Nights attraction, the horses are bred to exacting standards for beauty, athleticism, agility and a warrior-spirit; with dispositions that make them perfect companions and show horses.

For more information on Al-Marah Arabians, please visit

Happy Thanksgiving!!

TCM is broadcasting the “Black Stallion” a on Sunday. When you are tired of football get some popcorn and curl up on the couch and order your Christmas presents from the Trading Post while you watch :-)

Here’s the story;

The Black Stallion

Sunday November, 30 2014 at 08:00 PM
Saturday December, 27 2014 at 08:00 PM

by Emily L. Rice
One of the most critically acclaimed films from 1979, The Black Stallion, was based on the classic children’s tale written by Walter Farley in 1941. Despite the book’s popularity and that of its sixteen sequels, it was never adapted for the screen until Francis Ford Coppola purchased the rights. He planned to release the film as the first film in a series of classical children’s films. The second film in the series, The Secret Garden, was released in 1993. Coppola called on his former UCLA classmate, Carroll Ballard to direct the first installment, making The Black Stallion Ballard’s feature film debut. His first movie was a documentary entitled Harvest (1967) which was nominated for an Academy Award ®.

The Black Stallion is an exotic and often magical tale of a young boy and his horse. When the film opens, the boy and his father are traveling by ship when a disaster occurs. A fire breaks out and the boy finds himself adrift in the rough seas with an Arabian horse he saw on board. Both the boy and the stallion are washed ashore a deserted island where they overcome an initial mistrust to form a strong bond. Soon the two are rescued and return to the U.S. But the horse runs away and the boy eventually traces the animal to a farm owned by an ex-jockey. In time, the boy learns from the former pro how to be a first rate rider and trains the stallion for a championship race.

In his film debut, Kelly Reno plays the young, aspiring jockey; he had never acted before in any medium, and he was not even a fan of film or television. “Oh, if there’s a good movie, the family’ll take a bag of popcorn and go.” When asked what he considered a “good movie,” he responded, “I guess Star Wars (1977) — I’ve seen it twice. As for TV, I don’t watch it much, except for Soap,” he explained in the September 30, 1979 issue of The New York Times. But when Reno heard from a friend that a movie company was coming to Colorado to look for boys who could ride horses, he persuaded his parents to drive him to Denver for an audition. According to producer Tom Sternberg, “We’d considered all sorts of professional child actors. Then we began to search for boys who may not have acted, but who might be right for the role. We eventually interviewed several hundred from around the country and tested 100.” And the saddle-trained Reno was one of the lucky ones who earned a screen test in L.A..

The $4.5 million film took two years to make and involved five months of shooting in Canada, Rome, and Sardinia. For Reno, whose only trips outside Colorado were to North Dakota and L.A. for the screen test, the film became quite an adventure. His parents chaperoned him while on location, but he still admitted he got homesick. “In Rome, I’d have paid $10,000 for a McDonald’s hamburger – you never know how much you want that if after a week all you get is spaghetti. And I had me a little wine, but after a week, I started drinking cokes again.”

During the first week of shooting, Reno enjoyed the work, but he kept glancing at the camera in the middle of scenes. He recalled that the director, Carroll Ballard, “would tell me, ‘This is the way it is…do it.’ If I didn’t get it done, we’d just have to do it all over again. Lines weren’t a problem. I had a lot of them, but they weren’t in the whole, long scenes. And I could put in other words if the meaning was the same – that was all right with Carroll.” Reno also did all his own stunt work. He had to ride bareback and on a racing saddle, take falls from a galloping horse, and swim. The only time a stunt double was used was for racetrack sequences, which required his character to race a thoroughbred at top speed. “I was too small to hold him back,” says Reno.

The most demanding scene Reno recalled was the shipwreck sequence during a turbulent storm. For this scene, Ballard used the huge water tank at Cinecitta Studios in Rome. “It was all done at night,” says Reno. “And they had wind and rain and fire and smoke. I spent a lot of time in the tank, not being able to touch the bottom, while they made these waves that came far over my head.” Ballard also used a completely realistic model ship to burn and sink headfirst while the boy and the horse struggled in the foreground.

With scenes such as the shipwreck, the horse in this film, Cass-Ole, had to perform as few other horses ever have. Cass-Ole’s trainer was one of Hollywood’s greatest animal trainers, Corky Randall. He trained “Trigger” for Roy Rogers, “Silver” for the Lone Ranger, and all the horses in the chariot-race scene in Ben-Hur (1959).

Mickey Rooney plays the horse trainer in the film, a nostalgic reminder to audiences of his role as a former jockey in National Velvet (1944). Rooney also played a jockey in both Down the Stretch (1936) and Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry (1937). He went on to receive an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in the film. Rooney recalls how he first heard about the film, “Francis Ford Coppola got on the horn to tell me he’d purchased the rights to a children’s classic called The Black Stallion. He had a part in it for me, a former jockey called out of retirement by a little boy with a beautiful black Arabian horse and a dream about winning a race. Did I think I could play a former jockey? ‘Gee,’ I said, ‘I don’t know. I never played a jockey before.’

The Black Stallion became a hit at the box-office and received great critical praise. In addition to Rooney’s nomination, the film also received an Academy nomination for Best Editing and the Oscar for Best Film Editing. A sequel, The Black Stallion Returns, was later released in 1983.

http://www.tcm.com/this-month/article/59910|0/The-Black-Stallion.html

Producer: Francis Ford Coppola, Fred Roos, Tom Sternberg
Director: Carroll Ballard
Screenplay: Melissa Mathison, Jeanne Rosenberg, William D. Wittliff, Walter Farley (novel)
Cinematography: Caleb Deschanel
Film Editing: Robert Dalva
Art Direction: Aurelio Crugnola, Earl G. Preston
Music: Carmine Coppola
Cast: Kelly Reno (Alec Ramsey), Mickey Rooney (Henry Dailey), Teri Garr (Alec’s Mother), Clarence Muse (Snoe), Hoyt Axton (Alec’s Father), Michael Higgins (Neville).
C-118m. Letterboxed. Closed captioning.

35th Anniversary Interview with Jeanne Rosenberg


Here’s a special treat for you, an interview with Jeanne Rosenberg, the screenwriter on the movie of “The Black Stallion” (1979)
She was there in the early days and we all had a very strange trip … at the track, on the Drake and back home again. Thanks to our friends at the Horse Channel and Horse Illustrated. Check out the November magazine for two more articles on “The Black Stallion”!HI nov

Don’t forget to pick up a little piece of history for yourself @ the Gift Shop!

 
The Black Stallion Film’s 35-year Anniversary
Screenwriter Jeanne Rosenberg recalls her unlikely path to the job.
By Elizabeth Kaye McCall | September 2014

Never doubt the impact of a college course on life. Los Angeles screenwriter Jeanne Rosenberg can vouch for it. “I had written a script analysis of my favorite childhood book, The Black Stallion, when I was in film school,” says Rosenberg about the door that opened her screenwriting career. “After I graduated, I found out that they were making it into a movie and Carroll Ballard was directing it. I wrote him a letter. I had done a script analysis. He called and said, ‘I really like what you wrote. We have to get together.’ Time passed, we didn’t get together. I called again. ‘Oh, they’re in Canada in pre-production.’ I called him again. He apologized for not getting back to me.”
Crazy about horses from her earliest girlhood memories in Illinois, Rosenberg grabbed the reins of her own destiny. “I said, ‘Oh, I’m coming your way. Do you mind? Maybe I’ll just stop in.’ I was flying from Los Angeles to the Midwest and they were in Toronto.” She arrived in the midst of chaos. “People were tearing their hair out because Carroll wouldn’t commit to anything,” she recalls. “We were supposed to meet for coffee one morning. He was late. I was making some notes on a napkin. He showed up, grabbed the napkin out of my hand and kept my notes. I went home and got another call. ‘Carroll would like you to come back. We need help on the script.”

Rosenberg’s initiative paid off. “It was total chaos when I arrived in the pre-production phase. Melissa Mathison [who later wrote “ET”] got off another plane and we met and became this writing team as we were about to shoot,” she describes. “Carroll hadn’t committed to a screenplay! All the actors were there. Everyone was. The art department didn’t know where to go to dress the set. They didn’t even know the locations. Do we need a farm house? Do we need a race track? What do we need? Carroll liked to keep everything open and see what developed. To have an entire film crew that had to be told [what to do] at every moment and to get that information from a guy who doesn’t like to make decisions is tough,” Rosenberg laughs. “He was driving everyone crazy, of course.”

A graduate of USC Film School [now USC School of Cinematic Arts], Rosenberg planned on a documentary film career. “I remember being forced to take a writing class and thinking, ‘This is ridiculous. There’s no way I’m writing.’ And, here I am,” adds the real-life horsewoman and reining competitor, whose scores of film credits include family favorites like “White Fang,” “Bambi II,” and “The Young Black Stallion.”

The date “The Black Stallion” started shooting in Toronto is etched on Rosenberg’s mind. It was 7/7/77. “We shot the second part of the movie first,” she notes. Meanwhile, preparations were underway to move the crew overseas to film the first half of the movie. “Carroll kept refusing to let us write the island sequence,” says Rosenberg. “Of course, we did it anyway. He has an amazing eye and is quite a storyteller. But he was really more used to being a one-man band, making all of the decisions on the fly.”

Now the mother of two grown children, Rosenberg writes from an office with a view of her American Quarter Horses. She revisited the production that launched her career this summer, when film critic Stephen Farber held a 35th anniversary screening of “The Black Stallion” in Los Angeles.

From a personal standpoint, Rosenberg shares that “The Black Stallion’s” magic remains. “It was fun to see again,” she says. If any scenes can be favorites, these made Rosenberg’s list: “The shipwreck sequence is amazing and scary. The whole island scene was everyone’s favorite. When the boy wakes up on the beach and is staring straight at a cobra ready to strike, and The Black comes and saves him—that’s a wonderful scene. Of course, the boy climbing on The Black for the first time is brilliant. But it all goes back to Walter Farley’s novel,” adds Rosenberg. “He wrote such a wonderful, descriptive story.”

Listen to this!!

Who’s afraid of a talking horse? Let’s go shopping!

Now, We’re Talking!

With his book out in print, RAJALIKA gets a “close-up” Tues., Oct. 28 on Rick Lamb’s The Horse Show, 4:00 pm Eastern on RFD-TV in a special on … what else?.. Talking Horses!

(Oct. 27, 2014) — He calls himself “the talking horse of a new generation,” but watch Rick Lamb’s The Horse Show on RFD-TV, on Tuesday, Oct. 28, 2014, at 4:00 pm Eastern and you decide. When the show gets to the part where RAJALIKA, a real-life Arabian stallion who inspired a new “talking horse” book, gives a hint of his vocal repertoire–which his 19-year-old illustrator Dani Bowman mimics in a spot on-rendition–you will be well-versed in facts and trivia of Francis the Talking Mule to Mister Ed, thanks to Lamb’s delightful segment that includes excerpts of a never-before aired Alan Young (Wilbur) interview, and more.

“Rick put together a masterful tribute to the legacy of talking horses,” says Los Angeles-based author Elizabeth Kaye McCall, who just released RAJALIKA SPEAK in print on Amazon, the tale of a bad-boy horse turned good, who found redemption by learning to talk. McCall got some chat time on camera herself and made sure Lamb got acquainted Bowman too. “Rick and Dani hit it off,” notes McCall of the young adult animator with autism, who created 33 illustrations for her book, which published first as an eBook. “Dani’s amazing. She founded her company Powerlight Studios at age 11 and was just honored at London’s fashion industry event Wear it for Autism. My real-life ‘talking horse,’ a straight Egyptian Arabian, was the link that connected us for RAJALIKA SPEAK.”

So.. is RAJALIKA next in line for the legacy? Tune in to Rick Lamb’s The Horse Show Oct 28, on RFD-TV (4 pm Eastern) and see what you think. Or, buy the book and decide. FYI–this “new talking horse” needs no halter. What’s that??? Watch Rick’s show and find out.

WATCH:  Rick Lamb  The Horse Show, Tuesday, Oct. 28, 2014, RFD-TV, 4:00 pm Eastern.
RAJALIKA SPEAK © 2014
by Elizabeth Kaye McCall, illustrated by Dani Bowman
56 pages 33 color illustrations
Now in print on Amazon $12.99
eBook available on Kindle, Nook & iBooks $9.99