Showing posts with label Kip Tulin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kip Tulin. Show all posts

Monday, January 6, 2020

Looking Back on 2019

by Mary Gallagher

Advanced Hoof Beats riders heading for class.
Looking back on 2019. It sure was a rich year of learning, and I am thankful to our horses and to allof you for giving so much of yourselves as we grow in horsemanship together here at Freedom Farm. Writing this year-end note is always an exercise in acknowledgement and gratitude to the wonderful people who make Freedom Farm a great place to be. This year I found myself thinking about the different people and experiences that enriched us all:

We met new teachers and engaged in new ideas—especially through our first Advanced Prep for Performance 5-day class. It was a great week that generated new ideas and relationships while covering a number of horsemanship topics, from safety to teamwork, hoof care to body work, and much more. Several visiting instructors are continuing to be resources, including...

Wednesday, January 9, 2019

Welcome to the New Year

By Mary Gallagher

Sugar and friends
Saying 'so long' to 2018.  If ever there was a year of challenges—extreme ups and downs, deep happiness as well as real sadness—2018 was that year. As a result, this year's letter is a bit longer...

For me, with every challenge there followed reflection on why something had happened, and on whether it could have been different. And after sad events, thankfully, came healing and growth. At times the difficulties truly seemed like bullets striking home, one after another. On reflection, though, each painful 'bullet' brought with it the opportunity to heal old wounds and resolve old memories of similar experiences, as if the present situation had brought with it a kind of cleansing rain.

Thankfully, because of all those challenges and the process of getting through them, we leave 2018 enriched, with many growth opportunities ahead, and so much to remember. I have promised myself, as I write this, to try to do justice to the memories as well as the opportunities, but I hope the reader will be kind if I have missed anything, as it's especially daunting to wrap my arms around all of it!

Wednesday, January 3, 2018

Grateful to Serve in 2017, Welcome 2018!

A Message from Mary Gallagher

I always look forward to writing this New Years message as a way to process the year just past. I am inevitably amazed (and a bit overwhelmed) at just how MUCH a year can hold at Freedom Farm! And as always, I feel so grateful for this ongoing opportunity—also known as “my life”— to serve others through horsemanship—watching, advising, trusting and supporting our students, clients, boarders, and community.

So please bear with me as I try to put into words something of what 2017 has meant to me. What a year!

Monday, April 4, 2016

A Horse, a Human, and a Microbe walk into a Barn…..

by Kip Tulin

Note: There are quite a few 50-cent words in here which you may feel free to skip past in search of Dr. Tulin's point about feed and supplementation. Science geeks, enjoy! -MG

humans, horses, dog, and gazillions of microbes...
….and while hanging out around the treat bin, they decide to find out if they have anything at all in common. Horse and human, sure. But a microbe?? Turns out all three (human, horse, microbe) have more in common than you might think: they—and I might as well say ‘we’— all have DNA made up of the same four ‘letters’ (called nucleotides) and they all use groups of three of these letters (triplets) to code for the the same twenty ‘building blocks’ (amino acids). It is truly amazing to think that all of the immensely diverse living things on earth, whether single celled, plant, insect, or animal use the same basic code of life.

Sunday, January 3, 2016

Healing by Secondary Intention: Bob's Story


by Kip Tulin M.D.

Bob's wound, Day One
In early December (a month before this writing) Bob, an older gelding in the Farm school program, sustained a deep laceration to the right side of his face, cause unknown. (Mary Gallagher discovered his plight in the course of a morning feeding and checked around the pen, with no luck.) As you can see from the photo, the cut went from just below his eye and way down the cheek, gaping open almost an inch. Mary examined the wound carefully, noting some places where the wound went all the way through; she could hear a sucking sound as Bob breathed.

Obviously such a deep cut needed to be stitched, right?

Thursday, March 5, 2015

How Horses Shake Their (Dusty) Booties

By Kip Tulin MD

Did you ever see a dog shake water off of his fur after getting wet? How about a horse shaking the dust off after a good roll? I have watched Freedom Farm's horses do so in the arena and wondered, how well does it work?

Tuesday, March 3, 2015

Vitamin D for Horse and Rider

By Kip Tulin, M.D.


With the days getting short and sunshine a bit more scarce, it's a good time to think about Vitamin D, our friend in good health. In preparing a talk on the subject for the monthly Working on Wellness Forum in Sequim, I have been reviewing current research and meeting with a few surprises along the way. It seems that most of us, because of lifestyle, latitude and diet  are not getting enough vitamin D, even if we pay attention to that sort of thing. On a recent afternoon at Freedom Farm I also started to wonder about horses and dogs and vitamin D, so I did a bit more research and thought I'd share.

Monday, March 2, 2015

A Tenderfoot Hubby's Experience at Beach Camp

By Kip Tulin (husband of Magnum's owner, Mary)
 
When Mary and I moved to Sequim in 2010, one of the thoughts that did not enter my mind was, "Gee, now I can be around horses!"  I guess the universe had different plans in mind. Mary started riding at Freedom Farm last November and I would accompany her from time to time to watch what she was doing. My prior experience with horses was long enough ago that the rental horse I got at Rocking Horse Stables, Burbank, CA, was an eohippus....but still a bargain at two dollars an hour. What a revelation to hang around at Freedom Farm!
 

The Sunny Side of Parasites

by Kip Tulin, M.D.

We tend to think of a parasite as:

a) a disgusting wormy-squiggly thing that inhabits our bodies and gives nothing in return, or

b) our 24 year-old nephew who is still couch surfing in our living room and continually raiding our refrigerator.

For (a) at least, the relationship might be more complicated than we think.  I'd like to take a running start at this explanation, from about 500 million years ago. Paleoparasitologists have found fossil evidence of parasites dating back to the lower Cambrian era. This means that both the host and the parasite have spent a long time climbing the evolutionary ladder together and have developed a remarkable balance. Twenty-five percent of the world's human population have parasites. In more primitive settings the percentage approaches one hundred. And, it turns out, even parasites have parasites.