riental

In Amanda's seemingly neverending search for The Next Perfect Horse (after Lady), we stumbled into a jumper named Oriental K who was at a barn where a trainer that had helped us out before (finding us a horse for the Children's Medal Final in 2005) was working. She was available under a very attractive lease and she and Amanda seemed to hit it off.

Things worked out very well as you can see from videos taken the day we signed the lease. The clips are not the best quality, as they were taken with a cell phone (hey, it works for CNN!) -- Video One Video Two, and they continued that way for a while -- 2005 results (including a spectacular equitation win out of 43 horses!) and 2006 results. One of the nice grandmothers at our barn got some shots of us at our schooling show October 29^th of 2005 -- check them out.

Unfortunately, circumstances conspired against us with our first barn going through a strangles quarantine which cost us a couple of months of showing and a necessitated a change of barns; then an injury to her leg (according to the vet's note "large divot missing on [inside of] stifle") while playing in the isolation paddock of the new barn that took a long time to heal; and it was all culminated by "female issues" that were difficult to get under control (we didn't realize how difficult her first cycle was, and didn't start the Regumate soon enough to bring her mood under control). Ultimately, we decided that is was best for Oriental to go back to her original support network so we ended our lease the spring of 2006. Upon a period of retrospection, we realized that we had not fully appreciated how much work and effort we needed to put into a true jumper, and how unprepared we and our trainer were. We wish Oriental nothing but the best of luck in the future.