Kill Pen to Endurance Trail FOSH member and endurance competitor Brenna Sullivan, a gaited endurance rider in Northern California, hit the jackpot when she bailed a 7-year-old Tennessee Walking Horse (TWH) from a kill pen in 2020. Brenna was kind enough to answer some questions and tell their story. Do you know how your horse came to the kill pen? Luckily, Banner came through the auction and kill pen with her papers. Because of this, we were able to track down her last registered owner who was gracious enough to share some of her history. Banner was bred for Big Lick and put in training as a young mare. She was up on pads for about seven months. Apparently, when the padded market declined, she was pulled from training and they attempted to breed her. When she didn’t take, she was put out to pasture and eventually run through a sale. She ended up in the Sexton kill pen in Tennessee and was seen on Facebook by a man down in San Diego who bailed her out the day before her ship date.
He got her back to health and worked on restarting her for a couple months. She was very reactive and had some anxiety that resulted in dangerous behavior under saddle. But he did a wonderful job in patiently working through her issues enough to be able to ride her again. I got her from him as a project in December of 2020. I started by ponying Banner out on the trail for the first couple weeks and just letting her decompress. Eventually I started riding her, and she took to the trail like she’d done it all her life. Are people surprised to discover that you are riding a gaited horse? At least in endurance, there are more people riding gaited horses than there used to be. As more people do incredible things with their gaited horses, I think there is an increasing interest from many who would traditionally ride Arabs. The take-away is that the right gaited horse can absolutely do endurance riding at any distance: 25s, 50s and 100s. They are just as capable over
24 • The Sound Advocate • Issue 1, 2021
