No, not the song by America.

(& for the musicians at Pete’s Piano Bar, yeah you know who you are…

A Horse with No Name is NOT a Neil Young song……just sayin’!)

When I’m not doing eventing badly, I’m working as a veterinarian. I spend all day with people’s lovely pets who have names like Prince, Princess, Bella, Buddy, and Cleopatra.

How exactly do you live up to a name like Princess anyway?

Invariably, every Prince we see looks like this…………..

and every Princess, looks like this……………….

and there’s always ANOTHER Boxer named Tyson…………. so clever…….

Back to horses. One of my very first training clients (in college when I was “breaking” horses for a living to pay for vet school) brought me a horse named Prince.

Who did this……………

And this………….

Oh and this……………….

My first Horse-Shoe shaped bruise was from this lovely creature.

So when it comes to the name Prince. My skin crawls. ……………

Needless to say, I just can’t have a horse with this name.

Last year, I was strongly arm-twisted persuaded to take on a Warmblood as a project. They are good friends, they needed some help, and they thought I could do something with this horse.

I guess they had never read my blog……………..

The horse came with a registered name no one can pronounce. Something like grphthenshoven or graphthofthin or grofthenshafthen………….you get the point……….
Where DO they come up with these names?

But his barn name……………you guessed it……………PRINCE.

Let me just start by saying that this horse was NO prince. He was rotten, disobedient, barn sour, argumentative, not to mention recently gelded & less than pleased about it…………….

I couldn’t possibly bring myself to call this ornery beast “Prince”.

In the theme I had going at the time….. I had recently purchased a race horse, whom I lovingly called “The Race Horse”, so I started calling this one, “The Warmblood”.

Clever.

I know.

So in correspondence I began referring to The Warmblood as anything except the name he came with………….things like The Green Bean, The New Guy, The-Horse-Formerly-Known-As-Prince……………..

I tried to change his name a couple of times. I kind of liked Jester (that he is.)

And I eventually christened him with the show name Tequila Persuasion (there is an entire blog about WHY.) See “How I was outsmarted by a Warmblood” for all the details.

I thought briefly I would call him Tequila, but whenever I tried to do that I received glazed looks from all my friends and barn helpers, and they would say, “You mean Prince?”

Now, when someone asks me what his name is I shrug & say, “He doesn’t have one.”

Though he is certainly getting more “Prince-like” now…………………..

What do you think I should call him??