by Fran Jurga | 13 November 2009 | The Jurga Report at Equisearch.com

All across the USA, you can hear the clippers buzzing. You can also hear horse heads hitting stable rafters, hooves scrambling, and various unprintable expletives as horse owners and grooms undertake the task of making emerging winter coats disappear or at least be manageable for horses that have to stay in training, go out hunting, or be shown during winter weather.

I’ve been gathering resources on this subject and will be sharing them with you this month. But what better way to start than with the expertise of British event rider and Olympian Mary King and her expert groom, Jodie Summersin a three-part video series? Mary differentiates, in the final segment, between how she clips her own event horses compared to how she would do a horses for hacking and how she’d do a trace clip.

So here you go: three short videos that together are about 20 minutes long. Bookmark this page to come back later and watch, or share and email this blog post’s address for your friends at the barn or students.

Thanks very much to my friends at Horse and Hound in England for producing these little videos. They were apparently done a year ago. The model horse you see, Kings Temptress, is a Mary King homebred and finished 18th at Burghley**** this year.

The menu for the three videos is 1) getting started; 2) clipping a nervous horse and other challenges; 3) advanced tips and specialized clips.

Watch for more posts on clipping on this blog, coming soon!