The primary things I feel CBD helps are Maintaining Physical and Mental Well Being & Issues associated with Normal Daily Exercise and Activity.

I think in almost every case I refer to Maintaining Physical and Mental Well Being, it exists in nearly every horse at some level. It can be a reaction to your stress and can cause physical and mental symptoms.

When we are training a horse of any age, we want their brains to FOCUS on the work we are teaching or practicing – if we can help them Maintain Physical and Mental Well Being they can concentrate more!

DISTRACTIONS are another reason some horses have trouble focusing.

Anything that requires more time to get the horse to focus means putting more miles on their legs.  More miles mean longer rides, getting them tired to get in their heads almost always leads to un-intended injury.

It is so important to know that CBD works in a more subtle way.  Most medications that horses get for these situations will change the horse physically and mentally, and they will also be more apparent when they kick in.  We are not looking to drug our horses; we just want to ease their mind or give them relieve from inflammation.

If you have an athlete the last thing you want is to impact their physical ability; they need to feel their body, their feet so it is counter to the goal to administer medications that would impact any of that.

I want to share some real examples with my own personal horses with real situations where I used CBD.

FIRST EXAMPLE:

I have a Three-Year-Old Colt, in training for Reining.  At my ranch we are in the middle of breeding season, with babies on the ground and mares being bred can cause a young stallions mind to “wander”.  In order to get him to pay attention the first thing needed was for him to be tired.

To get him tired there are different ways people might approach this; going on the walker before a ride, getting extra riding before you can start training, lunging before riding are all basic options but it always comes with “more miles”.  More miles enhance the risk of injury because his muscles are going to be fatigued.  MUSCLE FATIGUE causes them to feel weaker and tired which decreases your muscles‘ ability to perform over time.  None of us set out to create an un-needed injury yet we have this challenge.

We started him on CBD every morning and immediately noticed a change.  This change was simple to see and did not interfere with his natural athletic ability; because CBD does nothing to interfere with the horse’s physical body, it just helps mentally.  If I had to explain how it worked – the simple answer is removed his distractions and allowed him to just be his best self.  He comes out ready to work, eliminating all the extra work he needed before.  He can FOCUS on his training.

SECOND EXAMPLE:

My longtime show horse Rolex (12-year-old Gelding) gets very anxious when he travels or adjusts to a new situation.  He feels claustrophobic in a closed stall and it can take 2-3 days of constant pacing before he gives it up.  Usually during that time, he needs a lot of extra work to speed along this process, I had heard in the past he needed some type of medication.  Clearly there is an issue here that did not have a good solution in my opinion, efforts were made to the best way to solve the problem but each of them can have a negative result.

Now that I have found CBD it is my go-to solution for anything related to Stress and Anxiety.  I start to give it to him the day before he is getting hauled anywhere new and continue it for the first couple days he is in the new environment.  The pacing completely disappeared, and he adjusts very nicely allowing all other parts of preparing him for a competition to become NORMAL.  Because some associations consider CBD a banned substance, I always make sure to get him off at least 3 days prior to any competition but just as soon as he is done, I make sure to resume so his return trip home is easy.  This is the only time Rolex uses CBD and it’s been a game changer for us.

THIRD EXAMPLE:

My 25-year-old retired horse Eddy who lives outside on the ranch.  He has an incredibly happy life with the job of teaching yearlings “the ropes: and this has given him a purpose for years.  He is arthritic and occasionally it flares up in one area or another causing him to become stressed.  I can see the stress in his eyes and that is when I bring him inside for some extra TLC.  Recently this happened, the first thing I did was to put him on CBD for 5 days and within the first dosage he noticeably appeared more comfortable, visibly in his eyes you could see the worry disappear.  As soon as he can be relaxed in his eyes, I know that he is more relaxed where he has inflammation as well – so the CBD is essentially helped to KALM both at the same time!