Lady "C", Center Stage

By Suzanne De Laurentis
©Voice, June 2007

Sheryl and Lady "C" take a bow.  (©Houston Livestock and Rodeo)

Setting The Stage

As the horses started to descend into the tunnel that led to the darkened Houston’s massive Reliant Stadium, their eyes were wide. The circle of light from the spotlight was just ahead of them on the dark floor and the air was electric with applause and anticipation. Lady “C” was about to make her concert debut and my gelding, Monet was right beside her but out of the spotlight to lend her moral support. Monet stepped out into the dark and Lady “C” mustered her nerve and went with him. Lady “C” carried her human mom, rock star, Sheryl Crow and this was their first concert appearance together. Lady is a Tobiano Tennessee Walking Horse mare who has been Sheryl’s companion for several years.

It is a lot to ask of a young horse to walk out into the dark amidst an array of spotlights, a pyro show, loud speakers and music with almost 50,000 cheering folks in the stands. Lady is a very calm and willing horse with a level head but even the most rock steady horse could decide at the last minute that the spotlight wasn’t for her. However Lady “C” rose to the occasion and took Sheryl around the arena to greet fans and delivered her to the stage with a deep Bow to the fans.

Sheryl Crow Imagines a Horse

Sheryl rode horses as a young girl and they have always been in her dreams. When she recorded her popular cover of “The First Cut is the Deepest” she rode a magnificent paint horse in the desert, which rekindled her love of and desire to own horses.

Throughout her career Sheryl imagined a time when she might be able to include horses in her hectic schedule. In 2005, she purchased Lady “C”, her first Tennessee Walking Horse and her childhood dreams began to come true. Lady quickly captured Sheryl’s heart and she scheduled all the free time she could around communing with and riding the young mare, and the two developed a very strong bond.

Sheryl is a person who believes in being the best that one can be, so Lady “C” was Sheryl’s first horse to complete Equine Agility Training at Imagine A Horse. Lady’s exceptional intelligence and desire to please prompted Sheryl to begin a quest to inspire, encourage and educate children with the help of the mare.

Equine Agility Training

The Spanish Walk is developed from the leg stretch. (©Chris Hudson)

Dog Agility is modeled on equestrian stadium jumpers’ competitions, and has its own scoring, obstacles and performance requirements. Agility as an entertainment for spectators is the most rapidly growing dog sport in Europe and America. At Imagine A Horse we developed Equine Agility training methods to promote and maximize the development of each horse’s physical, mental and emotional capacity. To this end, Equine Agility uses exercises and challenges including Tricks and High School moves. Personal best performance and meaningful companionship is the goal, not the clock and not the winning of ribbons or even financial reward.

Many horses suffer through daily routines that are thoroughly boring and do little to expand the horse/human relationship. Equine Agility Training helps to alleviate boredom and is efficient in developing a horse’s concentration and attention span. Most horses that go through Agility Training display a high sense of satisfaction when performing the learned behaviors and poses. The work/play of Agility Training is based upon the wide range of physical stretches and poses that a horse does on his own. We shape and mold the behavior, and add cues. Each developed or taught move is a basis or building block for other more complex moves that follow. For instance the natural progression of teaching a horse the Jambette or leg extension is to mold it into the Spanish Walk. The Obeisance is the foundational move for the Bow and the Kneel. The moves can be asked for singularly, or in a progression or Behavior Chain. Lady “C” is capable of performing Behavior Chains consisting of over 10 single moves. Talk about developed attention span!  

As in Dog Agility, Equine Agility requires the use of props such as pedestals of various designs, large balls, and even beanbags. What would agility be without the use of props or obstacles? Think of Agility props as man-made obstacles. A horse may have difficulty understanding esoteric requests, such as traveling in circles with no apparent end-point, he can easily distinguish success when obstacles are used in a pattern. Maneuvering obstacles and working in patterns is easy for most horses to comprehend because of their highly developed memory for trails. Virtually all species of animals that are trained by man except the horse, are trained using a mark, target, or home base. The animal goes to his mark or target between commands and waits for the next cue or instruction. The horse, being a species that runs as its major mode of self-preservation, is seemingly the species that can benefit most from target or mark training. When he has a place to go to and stay, such as a pedestal, his sense of boldness is greatly enhanced. Pedestal training simply gives a horse a place.



Lady “C” has been featured in The Gaited Horse Magazine (US), The Horse Gazette (US), Equine Lifestyles (Canada) and Johba Life (Japan) and was Sheryl’s co-star in Trail Mix, featured on Animal Planet. Lady was a Guest Celebrity Horse at the 2007 Equine Affaire and the flag horse for Pfizer Fantasia. Lady “C” is also an equine artist and her very first painting, “Sand and “C” sold for $2,500. She was featured on CNN and may be the only equine ever to have graced the pages of the Rolling Stone. (©Allen Pogue)

The Tennessee Walking Horse is bred for versatility, intelligence and has a propensity for agreeable behavior--the traits that enabled Lady “C” to excel at Agility. The young mare has a bright future. When she is the only one in the ring, or shall we say spotlight, performance and reliability will really count.

–Suzanne De Laurentis,
Imagine A Horse ã 2007

Sue De Laurentis and Allen Pogue live in Dripping Springs, TX where they own and operate Red Horse Ranch. They founded Imagine A Horse in response to the many requests they received to share their Trick Training and Equine Agility methods with horse enthusiasts all around the globe. You may contact them at 512-264-0442 or their web sites at www.imagineahorse.com <http://www.imagineahorse.com>  and www.redhorseranch.net <http://www.redhorseranch.net>