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Latest News
I have put this site back online in December 2009 after almost two years being
offline. Some of the articles still need some updating of the links that are
linked to related website Stablemade that is also back online but has now
different navigation structure. Thank you for your patience.
Latest Additions:
I have finished the second photo album named "The Old Kladruby" stud
farm, and now you can compare how it once was with how it appears today.
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Website Additions
New and Upcoming
January 11th, 2010.
Several
new articles added to the site about "Horse's instinctive learning nature", and
others addressing the various misunderstanding and confusions in the equine
world.
Click here to see new additions!
Coming soon!
Articles
about the "Riding Aids
Amplifications & Tools - Use & Abuse".
"The misuse, overuse and
abuse of nosebands and related contraptions."
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Related Websites
My Other Publications
You can find more of my equine articles and publication on my other website
Stanlemade.com, as well as,
articles published in a form of
QAs, a part of
Stablemade.com, where you can ask question not only regarding this site, but
also regarding the use of horses, as well as, the care for them. Only brief,
relevant and to the point question will be answered. All provocative, personal,
insulting and test question will be ignored! The equine FAQs also includes
equine and veterinary
glossary.
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Writing about myself is
not something I like to do, as I find it fairly vain and useless to
write about where I was, what I have done, who I worked for, and such
and so forth. Though I will provide more of this personal
information at the end of this article, and in the near future on my
personal website, I still find the concept of writing about my life
sort of silly, vain and useless.
It would be fair to say that my writings
fairly represent not only my experiences but also my personality,
and if one cannot see it then writing about me would be quite
useless to such reader. Most importantly, one should be aware that I
am writing from my experiences, from my life, and no articles
written by me represent my thoughts or opinions, let alone something
I've heard somewhere, but rather disclose the truths that I have
seen and lived.
I am well aware that most people in this world and around horses
are blind, cannot see or understand the things around them because
of their inability to see things as they are, which of course
distorts their judgment and sound reasoning, and so they have to
look for some proof or credentials in order to validate what they
are reading. In short, to the fools it is more important who the
writer is than what is written, and such people could not possible
understand anything that is written here anyway. The same people
also tend to believe everything that famous people with presumed
credibility have to say or write, hence fools, obviously. And so,
the presenting of my life history, expertise and experiences as some
evidence of credibility and validity of my writings is plain and
simple in vain and of no use to any perceptive and intelligent human
being.
It is therefore better if I rather write about my writings, and
that not only for the sake of better understanding of them, but also
as a reflection of myself, which should be fairly sufficient in
describing myself.
First thing one should be aware of is that I am not a writer,
which is obvious to anyone with the basic knowledge of the English
language, nor do I have any formal education in the English
language. And so, for this reason the articles are not written or
presented well to some folks that cannot get past that, and
devaluate and discredit my writings on account of that. Furthermore
I present my writings, or at least have the intentions to, in a form
of artistic style (writing), which is all about stimulating the
reader not only to self-examination of his or her deeds, but also to
become more aware of the realities in the horse world, and life in
general.
In no way my articles should incite or give
advice on how to do things or behave, but rather for one to seek the
answer to his question from his own life and the life around him, as
truth is, as I keep saying and the birds keep singing, self-evident!
If you cannot see it then you are blind, it is simple as that and
the only advice I have is: "Seek God's help", because it is only he
who gives site to the blind.
In conclusion and in the summation of this page here are some
personal, or one could rather say technical and fairly irrelevant,
data of my life.
I was born in 1946 in the city of
Prague, formal Czechoslovakia. I
had very colorful and exciting childhood, with a lot of travels and
new places to live and see. I've spent about half of my early
childhood days with my parents in the city, and the other half with
my grandmother in the country. It was very interesting part of my
life, especially living and observing the contrasting lives of the
mostly sophisticated and culturally rich people of Prague to the
simple people in the country, where people at that time lived the
same way for hundreds of years, no electricity, no radios or phones
let alone TV. All work done with
horses or other animals, still some straw roofs and dirt floors in some houses,
and the evenings filled with the magic of fire places and candle
lights.
I have also spent couple of years in orphanages (so-called children
homes) because of my mother being ill at those times, and so I have
learned to adopt and adjust to various living environments already
in my early age, which proved to be very useful in my life's travels
through several different countries and hundreds of places.
In 1960 I have announced to my father (person of intellect and
college graduate) that I want to work with horses and want to go to
horse school. To his dismay, he refused and I had to attend another
year (9th grade) of school, hoping that I may change my mind. Till
this day I have no clue why I wanted to work with horses at that
particular time, because I had no previous experience with them nor
did I have any desire to work with them what so ever. I guess it
must have been some movie I've watched or just my destiny, if you
will.
Never the less, year later I still did not
come up with a new profession, despite the fact that I had my way
paved through high school and college (majoring in arts) to becoming
an actor, which was highly recommended by the school and desired by
my mother (though my dad and brother found it to be a silly
profession, or better said not a profession), but I found it silly
as well and uninteresting and would not change my mind.
And so, to the pity and dismay of my parents and my brother, in
1961 I have entered the 2 years live-in school for professional
riders and breeders of horses (that is the genuine title) located
till this day in the
National Stud
Kladruby Nad Labem (find my name at the school website page in the
1961-63 year as Ludvik Stanek). It
is not something I brag about, and most people that know me have no
clue that I actually have a formal education in this profession, not
to mention that here in the states it is not recognized as genuine
profession, as my x-mother in law often stated: "Why don't you get a
real job.
These days the school itself has deteriorated to unrecognizable level, since
it was overrun by silly and sentimental "horse-loving" women that
changed not only the principles of horsemanship acquired from
thousands of years of human experience with horses, but also
everything that the men built in several hundreds of years, being
today the oldest stud farm in operation in Europe, now turned into a
circus show. It was at one time strictly a school for boys run in a
form of military fashion and discipline; it was during my first year
in that school that they have accepted girls.
Now the school is almost exclusively a school for girls, as most
boys find very little interest in the things that the today's world
of horses has to offer. And there, where the boys wish to
participate, like horse racing and such, education like this is
hardly needed since no employers ask for it. In short, the school,
as well as the stud farm, corrupted as hell, while primarily living
from the show off elements. It became a tourist attraction, just
like the Vienna school. The word discipline, resented by most modern
and progressive women and girls, became a historical word of the
past, no longer used or taught, as everything in this sentimental
horse world today is primarily about feelings and opinions, and
mostly how it all looks (or "How do I look?").
After leaving the school I have traveled a
lot, worked and ridden in various equine industries, also worked few
years with circus horses, also racehorses, steeplechase horses,
dressage horses (nothing like today), jumpers, starting young
horses, taking part in reproduction, breeding, foaling and
upbringing of youngsters, larger farm management (mostly
thoroughbreds), and such and so forth. For the last 15 years I've
been working primarily as a farrier, which by the way gave me a
brand new perspective on life of horses, which is what to some
extend motivated me to write these articles, because without
becoming a farrier, and without traveling the country to different
farms and folks, I would not have become aware of most of the horrors
that people do with horses.
Most of my life I have spent among credible and decent horsemen,
and was completely isolated from the amateur and show world of
horses, until I became a farrier and was awaken to the present
horrors committed by humanity to horses, and to one another, most
unintended in relevance to the former, caused by ignorance and lack
of education and oversupply of misinformation, the latter often
presented by the so-called professionals and credible veterinarians
or horse people. Please note I am not using the word "horsemen", in
the last sentence, for obvious reasons.
Well, this is my story, though for what good it will serve I could
not imagine, nor I really care. This is primarily put here for
reasons to dispute claims in forums and other sites, that I do not
have the courage to sign my articles and tell folks who I am and who
writes all this.
You will find that many people will try to discredit my writing by
all means necessary, especially in the modern and progressive female
form by attacking my person, which to me is completely irrelevant
and I could not care less what people, or anyone for that matter,
think of me or my writings. They are here, if you do not like them
don't read them, it is simple as that. If you have opinions about my
articles, well, you know what you can do with it. Remember I did not
invite you, did not ask you to come, since I do not send any promo
emails nor do any promotions of my sites what so ever.
There were a few people that missed my websites when they were
offline and asked me to put them back, and so I did. I get nothing
for doing this, nor any self-gratification or satisfaction, let
alone some silly feeling of accomplishment of doing some good in
this world. If someone would ask me why I am doing this, in clean
conscience, I would have to reply by: "I do not know". In my past
experiences with my websites it became fairly apparent that just
about all readers, whether they like the articles or not, simple had
no clue or understanding of any of it, and so, I feel like a fool
putting them back up since the vanity of it is obviously
self-evident from where I stand, and only God knows why I am doing
it. It took a lot of work, just in case you have not noticed all
that is offered by both of my sites. Please show some respect for
that, if for nothing else.
If you have any questions, please visit my FAQs
page, and if you do not find satisfactory answers on that page
you will learn there how to go from there to direct contact.
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Some Pictures
I have hardly any pictures from my life, since it is something I never
collected, and almost none from the life with horses, since I actually worked
with them and not played with them, and so obviously there was no one to take
any pictures. In any case to satisfy the curiosity of some folks I am putting up some
photos of me from my younger days, as well as, more
recent ones of an old man. I have some pictures from the rodeos, but that is not
something I would be proud of or boast about, not that
I would be proud of anything I've done, and boasting I do only about God. I also had
some pictures from the horse racing days, the win pictures that is, but they
vanished during my divorce, not that I miss them.
This is I, standing in the front of the door of the
castle that used to be the Kladruby school building during my apprentice days. Now it is preserved
as a castle for tourists (see album photos). If you look at the picture of
the carriage above carefully, you will see a guy in a white tee-shirt next
to a green bush, and behind that bush there is the door where I am standing
in this picture. I was not yet 16.
This picture is from Germany where I've worked for almost three years,
and two years of it as a "futermeister" for the leading trainer of 35 years
Charlie Seiffert, god bless his soul, he was over 70 when I left in 1971,
but an upright and strong man. Talking about a discipline then, well, another
long forgotten time and place.
This picture above is on my naturalization certificate from around 1975,
when officially becoming an US citizen. I was at those days training
racehorses (also owned some) on the east coat, predominantly in Garden State Racetrack before
it burned down, Monmouth Park, Atlantic City, Liberty Bell Park, and then
Keystone Racetrack, also Delaware Park and other smaller tracks.
Here is something more recent (5 years ago or so), as some guy took picture of me while I was
sitting in the truck taking a break between shoeing horses for the local
mounted police. Please note, it is not my intent to repulse anyone, nor I
gladly display publically pictures of myself, but I do this lest some fools
discredit my writings on account calling me a coward, as they did in the
past, for not presenting my face or person to back up my writings.
This above is also a recent, about 3 or 4 years old.
No one in my life kissed or licked my head except a horse, I suppose it must
be the salt form the sweat on my, now hairless, head.
I worked with them when on top of them, when next to them, and finally
when under them, all three aspects exposing the different natures of horses and their book
of life, as well as the people around them in different places and times.
This is how one receives a genuine education from
which he can truly learn, and not by study, reading or watching some movies
or tapes, let alone some silly riding lessons, but by living the life that is real and true. A life not driven to
fame, or the desire for success or riches, since through any of these one loses the
perceptions of realities and learns nothing of value.
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