Kathy Calabro and

One woman’s story about her unexpected journey

I’ve ridden horses since I was 10 years old. When Joe and I got married in 1997, we bought two horses and soon moved to an 11-acre ranch in Brooksville, Florida. Over the years, I’ve shown in hunters, jumpers, eventing, western pleasure and trail, and I was involved in Pony Club with our daughter. Joe was never interested in showing, but he joined the sheriff’s civilian mounted unit and worked on obstacles, formations and crowd control.

In 2016, we sold the farm and moved to Hernando Beach, where we could more easily enjoy our other major pastime, scuba diving and spearfishing. We sold all the horses except for my Paint mare, Jules, the granddaughter of the mare Joe bought in 1992.

When our daughter left for college in 2021, Joe thought back to the trail rides and equestrian vacations we used to take before she was born. He decided it was time to get back into riding, but he wanted the smooth ride of a gaited horse.

He found Rosie, a young Rocky Mountain Horse cross, through an ad on Facebook and drove up to Georgia to try her out. We knew very little about her and very little about gaited horses.

At the time, I was showing my mare in jumpers and dressage, but the day Joe brought Rosie home, Jules was lame. Not long after, Joe was injured and needed rotator cuff surgery so I became Rosie’s trainer.

I read books and watched videos to learn about Rosie’s gaits. Joe found the videos that Ivy Starnes had posted, and we both liked her approach