By: Lori Ford
Contributions from the forum of Americanpasofinos.com

In December 2001, I moved back to Florida from Texas, bringing my aged 19 year old Arabian mare with me. Not wanting to ride alone, I encouraged my mother to purchase another horse for us to ride together on her ranch. She told me that if she did, she was getting something gaited, preferably a Paso Fino. Mom had never ridden one, but had seen one being ridden, and was enamored already.

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By: Lisa Clement

I had just returned from a horse-buying trip to Oklahoma and Texas finding nothing to please me. I spotted an ad run in a local Southern California horse-trading magazine and made a call to see the horse. Sometimes you can travel a long way only to find what you want is right in your own backyard.

By: Eliza Dandridge

I acquired him like I acquired my other horse. I was going to work with him, but I fell in love. With Sierra, it was just lust. She was a big beautiful mare. She should have been a, then, thirteen year old girl’s perfect first horse, had it not been for her horrible attitude under saddle. I was bucked off of her more times than I had ever been bucked off of any horse in my ten years of riding. But with Bear, it was love. From the first time I saw him, to today when I went out to the stable and rode him and fed him. True love never comes easy though. You always have to give up something, in my case; it involved a lot of pain.

By: C.M. Jones

I think she was about thirteen when she started to dry her wings
Trying out new ways of thinking while she tried to plan her dreams
She lived in the city she was just another kid.

Her friends trying to make her do things she often wondered why she did Her home was an apartment up about four flights of stairs
And from the condition of the building it sure showed nobody cared
Well as fate would have it she found herself alone.

But she had herself an uncle who offered her a home.

By: Nicole Wiitala

If you close your eyes and concentrate, maybe you can envision it in your mind as easily as I can.  Wherever you are right now, whether it’s sitting on your couch in front of the TV or on your bed under a reading lamp, whether you’re nestled comfortably between to branches high in a tree or sitting on a lounge chair next to the ocean.. forget that place for just a moment. 

By: Hannah Driskell

I have a story that you might be able to use for the new book called
Chicken Soup For The Horse Lovers Soul. It is about my 7 year old arabian
gelding that had a terrible accident last spring. This is how it goes.
Since I was 2 years old my dream was to ride horses. That dream came
true on my sixth birthday. I took my first lesson and loved it. I have been
riding ever since. I have now been riding for almost 7 years. Last winter I
outgrew my pony I have had for three years.

By: Leah Stitchick

There is nothing like fair week. It’s fun, exciting, crazy, hot, and hectic all in one day. You wake up at 4:30 in the morning, do what you have to do at home, then you go to the fairgrounds and feed your horse. While your horse is eating, you have to feed yourself a doughnut that someone brought and a Sunny D. Then when you’re done, you saddle your horse and practice and warm him up for the day ahead of both of you. Then you put him back in the stall until two hours before your first class. So you get him ready and handsome, then you get yourself all dolled up. And all you can smell is Pepi coming out of all the barns. But this one week, there is nothing else like it.

By: Tanya Boyd

It was the height of foaling season at Hilltop Farm in Colora, Maryland, with five mares already foaled out and six more mares to foal. Early one morning Emily, one of the embryo transfer recipient mares, showed signs of labor. Each year Hilltop leases a number of “grade” mares to use as recipients for embryos conceived by mares who are actively in training and can not take a year off to have a foal. The “donor” mares are inseminated as if they were to carry the foal themselves.

By: Rachel Kilgore

I’ll start off by telling you that my friend Sarah and I are horse-crazy. We think its fun to go to the ranch and muck out stalls and fill water tubs all day long. I’d been loving horses since I was two, and working and saving for one since I was seven. So you can imagine my glee when Sarah called to tell me that her parents had bought a horse.

By: Jamie Zimmerman

I have always had a love for horses. Ever since I was a little girl and I knew what a horse was, I have wanted to learn everything that I possibly could about them. When I was younger, I spent my days flipping through books and magazines about horses. I loved reading about these awesome creatures; I couldn’t get enough of them! It was then that I decided that I wanted a horse of my very own. I asked my mom, but the answer was always no. It seemed to me that my parents were giving me silly excuses on why I couldn’t have a horse. They would tell me that we didn’t have the room, or that we didn’t have enough money.