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I start colts for a living. Flies were undoing half my work every day, until I figured out why no spray ever fixed it. I've been training horses for a long time. Starting colts, putting the first rides on green ones, fixing the horses other people gave up on. It's what I do every single day. And for years, there was one thing that could wreck a good session no matter how well I rode. Not a spooky horse. Not a hot one. Flies. Let me tell you what that looks like when it's your job. I'd have a young horse coming along nice. Soft, listening, starting to trust me. Then the flies would move in. He'd start stomping. Swishing. Flinging his head. Kicking out at his own belly. And every bit of the focus I'd spent an hour building would just fall apart. You can't teach a horse to stand quiet and pay attention when he's getting eaten alive. It's not fair to him, and it's a waste of the ride. The bad part is what it does to the training itself. A colt that learns to fling his head and dance around because of flies doesn't just do it during fly season. He remembers it. That habit sticks. So I wasn't just losing a session. I was letting flies build bad habits into horses I was getting paid to make better. And it made me look bad, too. Owner comes to check on their horse's progress, and he's stomping and swishing and won't stand tied. Doesn't matter how good the groundwork is underneath that. What they see is a horse that won't be still. So I did what everybody does. I bought fly spray. Lots of it. I've run through every brand on the shelf. The yellow one, the blue one, the expensive stuff. I'd soak a horse down before I ever threw a leg over, and within the hour those flies were right back on him like I'd sprayed him with water. I bought fly sheets and masks for the ones that'd tolerate them. I even mixed my own out of vinegar and oils, chasing something that'd hold. Nothing held. Not through a full session. And when you're horseback five, six hours a day, "wears off in an hour" might as well be useless. After enough years of it, I just figured that was the cost of doing business in the summer. Flies win, you work around 'em, you move on. Then I hauled a couple of young horses to a show to get 'em some miles, and I got to talking with an old horseman there. Thirty-some years starting colts, the real deal. His horse was tied to the trailer next to mine, and I noticed it the way one horseman notices another's stock. That gelding was standing there in the heat, quiet as could be, not stomping, not a fly working on him. In the middle of the day. I asked him straight what he was using. Because I'll take a good idea wherever I can get one. And he told me something I hadn't heard in all my years of doing this. He said his vet was the one who tipped him off. He'd had her out for something, got to griping about the flies, and she told him she'd been reading up on certain plant oils, and there was real research showing they help keep biting bugs off a horse. She was clear it wasn't a medicine and it didn't replace good fly control, but she said as a side help, it was worth looking into. So he did. And here's the part that got me thinking. He said flies don't find your horse by luck. They find him by scent. A horse throws off a smell, it drifts on the air, and the fly reads it and follows it straight in. That's how a fly picks one horse out of a whole pen. Then he laid it out plain. Every spray I'd ever bought was built to kill or run off the fly after it landed. Not one of 'em touched the scent that was pulling the flies in to start with. I'd been going at the fly the whole time. Nobody ever told me the real trick was hiding the horse. I've started hundreds of colts and I'd never once heard it put that way. Now, I'm not one to take things on faith. My first thought was, plant oils, right. Sounds like something that smells nice and does nothing. I'd already been down that road with my homemade stuff and it was a bust. He grinned like he knew exactly what I was thinking and said, "Don't take my word for it. Go home and look it up." So I did. And it checked out. There's a real body of research on these oils and how they keep biting bugs away. But I learned the one thing that finally explained why my own mixes always failed. It's not about just using "plant oils." Any old bottle of citronella won't get it done. It's the right combination of the specific oils, together, in the right amounts. One oil alone does a little. The right blend, working together, is what actually hides the horse. I'd just been dumping one thing in a bottle and hoping. That was my whole problem. So I went hunting for something that used the right combination, not just a splash of citronella for the label. And I kept landing on the same name. Renoura. It had the exact oils I'd been reading about. Citronella, litsea cubeba, clove, thyme, and more, all together in one spray. Not one thing doing a little. All of 'em, doing the job right. For once, I wasn't buying on a promise. I was buying on something I'd checked myself. I ordered it, and when it came in I put it to the test the only way I know how. On a working string, in the heat, all day. First young horse I sprayed down and took to the round pen, I kept waiting for him to start stomping and checking out on me. He didn't. He stood. He worked. We got through the whole session and he stayed with me the entire time, because he wasn't fighting bugs the whole ride. By the end of that first week, the horses were standing tied without dancing. By the second, the ones that'd rubbed themselves raw were healing up instead of tearing it open again every afternoon. But the real proof was in the work. I got clean, focused sessions again. Colts staying soft and listening instead of blowing up over a horsefly. Owners coming out and seeing their horse stand quiet and pay attention, the way a horse in training ought to. I stopped losing the back half of every ride to flies. I stopped building bad habits I'd only have to fix later. That's money. That's my reputation. That's the difference between a horse leaving here better than he came and a horse leaving here with a summer's worth of flinch built into him. I've got a full string out there right now, deep in fly season, standing easy in the heat. And when I go to work 'em this afternoon, they're gonna give me the whole ride. Not just the part before the flies show up. If you make your living horseback and you've watched flies undo good work all summer, I'm not gonna tell you what to do. I'm just gonna tell you what that old horseman told me. Don't take my word for it. Look up how flies really find your horse. Look up the oils. I'll leave a link below, if you want to see what I found.