I have known Karen White for 4 years now and she has had my QH mare Zippy (Hawkwood Zippin Starr) in training for 3 years. Those 3 years have been an amazing journey for me as I actually learned to train my horse myself under Karen’s tutelage, and I wouldn’t have it any other way now.

My horsemanship skills have improved greatly and with it my confidence to ride a horse as complex as my girl Zippy.

I have had Zippy since she was a yearling, and ever since I had her started, she has been a handful. Her issues started early on, and some of her first tactics to show her displeasure were to shutdown and refuse to move her feet. She would also turn around and try to bite my feet or legs. Riding her became a battle of wills to see who tired first of me “kicking” her to move her feet and her just standing there, with her ears back as she switched off totally. Just getting one step out of her was a cause for celebration.

Then the worst possible thing that could happen did happen. Zippy had sand colic and the conventional treatment of a few litres of oil just wouldn’t dislodge all that sand so she had colic surgery. Such was her behaviour just before the surgery that I put her “attitude” down to the sand that was building up in her colon.

That actually wasn’t the case, and after she recovered from the surgery and was given a clean bill of health, the attitude continued and progressed to bucking and rearing when I was lunging her. About this time, my mother passed away and my finances took a turn for the worse so I had to take a break from beating my head against a brick wall.

That break turned out to be 18 months while I did my research on who could help – enter Karen White and Mohegan. During Zippy’s extended holiday, she came to believe that her job was to be a lady of leisure, so when she moved to Mohegan and Karen started to work with her, she started rearing with Karen riding her. This behaviour continued until Karen started to peel away the layers to Zippy’s complex nature that we started to see her kinder, sweeter nature coming through. She was misunderstood and angry is not too strong a word to describe how she felt all the time. There were physical, as well emotional and hormonal factors at work, and now we are down to the last bits of the puzzle to bring it all together.

None of this would have happened without Karen White and her team at Mohegan. She has been my mentor and trainer as well as Zippy’s and we will continue to work with her for a couple of years more.