Of the wide variety of elective courses offered at Auburn, there is one in the College of Animal Sciences that is almost too popular.
Horse training and management gives students a chance to work one-on-one for a semester with their own adopted foal.
“It’s my favorite class I’ve taken at (Auburn),” said Emily Halaszynski, senior in animal sciences. “I’ve been around horses my whole life, and even I learned a lot.”
For the upcoming fall semester, the class will be taught by Courtney McNamee, extension equine specialist who has been the GTA for the course the past two years.
“The class is open to anyone, but many of the students taking this class want to be vets,” McNamee said. “It gives them experience and makes them comfortable around a larger animal.”
Horse training and management requires a prerequisite of introduction to animal sciences, and the class itself consists of lecture once per week and lab twice per week where pairs of students are each given a 4- to 6-month-old foal.
It didn’t take long for Halaszynski to bond with her foal, Sampson, and she said she enjoyed lab the most because she was able to see his progression.
“Basically, the first day, all the students walk out to the corrals where they have all the foals and everyone points and says, ‘I want that one,’” Halaszynski said.
Throughout the course, students learn training and grooming methods, first aid, how to desensitize a horse and to lunge on a lunge line.
“Sometimes we got to play games with our foals like red-light, green-light,” Halaszynski said. “Not to brag, but Sampson and I pretty much won all of them.”
At the end of the semester, the foals bred in the vet school are auctioned off to the highest bidder. Jessica Geddes Wortman, previous member of the horse training and management class who graduated in 2014, ended up buying one of the foals from her class.
“His name is Konnor,” Wortman said. “I knew he was a great horse, attributed to the fact that he had a great upbringing. Luckily, my dad helped me pay for him, and I’ve had him for three years now.”
Wortman is the barn manager of Red Horse Ridge, a dressage barn in Huntsville where she is able to keep Konnor.
“I just started riding him at the beginning of this year,” Wortman said. “He’s 16.3 hands and still has lots of growing to do.”
Unless a student is lucky enough to purchase one of the foals they work with, the last day of class is often filled with lots of heartbreak.
“I was definitely disappointed to see it end because it was a really good experience, and I had bonded with Sampson,” Halaszynski said. “But another thing that was cool about the class was that you get to see beginner horse people and experienced horse people either struggling together or succeeding together.”
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