Learnin'

Well, summer has officially ended and the school year has begun.

I always look forward to school for the first few days until the sheer amount of time I spend on it starts to get to me.

Anyways, there are three areas in horse care that fascinate me (besides training of course). They are nutrition, rehabilitation and breeding. This term should be good for at least two of those areas.

Reproduction: I'm excited for this term because I'm taking an applied reproduction class. Of course it's not specifically about horses, we use dairy and beef cattle for our labs, so of course the whole process of AI is completely different, but I'm excited that it's so hands-on and I hope I'll enjoy it. I took the precursor to this class last year, Domestic Animal Reproduction, and I learned a lot but that had to be one of the hardest classes I have taken and supposedly it's the one Animal Science class that you take as an undergrad that is similar to what you'll take in vet school. This class isn't supposed to be as hard because there's not as much info, you just have to be able to put the material into practice which should definitely be interesting... I'm also taking an Animal Genetics class which I hope will be good too. Of course first we'll have to get past the whole review of mitosis/meiosis, but since genetics play a large part in horse breeding, I'll be interested to see what we learn about and hopefully we'll cover topics of coloring as well because that fascinates me (if you haven't been to The Equine Tapestry blog yet and you're interested in color, it's such an interesting site!)

Love learning about horses, even dorky ones like Jetta :)

Nutrition: I'm not taking a class at school for nutrition this term, I took the intro one last summer and am taking the next in the series next term. But, I am going to be taking an outside class on nutrition, specifically forages and pasture management which I'm super excited about. Luckily it's only on Wednesday nights so I don't think it will be too hard to balance with all of my "real" school work!

Hopefully next term I'll get to take an actual Equine class, though that's not as important to me as some other classes, just because I don't think much of the one and only equine professor...

In the training area, hopefully this will be a good year too. The dressage team is hopefully going to be a lot more active. We are really trying to start an IDA team so we'll see if that ever gets off the ground. We have all sorts of clinics planned for us to ride in and audit so hopefully Jetta and I see some good improvement this year!