My name is Trisha Grant, aged 30 years. I passed my BHS Stage 1, NVQ Level 1 and 2 whilst working at Smeltings Farm, Sheffield, from 1996-1998. I passed my BHS Riding & Road Safety exam at Millhouses Equestrian Centre, Sheffield, in approx 1995, which has since closed down.

I had a 12.2hh dapple grey pony, Wizard aka Wiz, on loan from December 1997 for a year when I bought him and moved him the 100+ miles to County Durham. In 2002, I moved to Cumbria in order to find work and after a few incidents, Wiz stayed in the North East. I had to sell Wiz the following year to the riding school that he was on livery at. A lot of horse owners will understand the time and money factor behind my decision. Wiz is still just fine, terrorizing the inmates of the school and enjoying himself.

I remember looking for the HorseAndOwnerReunited website and finding that it was unavailable for some time. I managed to get in touch with the lady that had ran the site and the cost of the site was too much to keep running so she had to close it down.

So, in October 2004, I started Tracing Equines up to replace the H&OR website.

Over the past 3 years, Tracing Equines has had many colour changes (yes I wonder who can remember the yellow phase!), seen forums come and go, adverts come and go and we are pleased to say that we have had a handful of Success Stories as well.

Going into 2008, Tracing Equines hopes to increase the amount of users of the website and the number of Success Stories listed. We have increased the number of categories up to 10 so that the adverts can be placed in a better suited and more specialised one. People can join the website and submit their adverts now insteading of having to email them in.

In addition to Tracing Equines, I have been running a website called Equine Help.

How Equine Help started

I set up a MSN group called Tackroom Gossip on 29-11-02 to provide the members of the old (HMS) BHS forum somewhere to chat and be able to talk to each other. This group became popular and the TackroomGossip.co.uk website was launched. Unfortunately this got lost in the middle of a server / hosting change over. I did gain control of it after a short time but since it had not been actually used for much, I decided to let it go.

All was not lost as, in March 2003, I then set up TackroomGossip.org.uk, this domain name refreshes to Equine Help for the time being. TackroomGossip.org.uk grew ever more popular with the demise of the (HMS) BHS forum and the joining of more new members. A 2nd MSN group was set up called In The Tackroom. At its height, TG was earning over 2 million hits a month and had over 1,000 members on the forum.

In September 2005, I was asked to help regain a forum called Dog Rescue Online. This was a worthy cause and after the admin rights had been restored to me and the person requesting them, I set up DogRescueOnline.org.uk in order to promote more dog rescue centres and to move the forum over to a proper domain name and give it more recognition. The domain name currently in the process of becoming dead and will soon be available to other people.

Around about May 2006, there was a massive spate of IPB forums getting hacked badly and infected with malicious coding and virus'. My webhosts, quite rightly, pulled both TG and DRO forums offline and they were deleted. I was so glad that I had actually made a list of people who had joined and their email address' as a back up in case I needed to get in touch with them if the forum went down for any reason.

I decided that one big website was better than trying to run 2 websites and would benefit the DRO members by way of being part of a bigger website so AnimalsOnline.org.uk (domain name refreshes to EH) was created in May 2006. This decision did not go down well with some people, but they weren't the ones paying for the websites or doing any of the work on them. The AO message board was set up on Proboards as I was not prepared to use IPB again knowing they could be hacked again in such severity.

November 2006 came and it was clear that AnimalsOnline was not working so Equine Help was created to replace the much popular TackroomGossip. Equine Help has much the same information on it that TG did but it has a clearer structure to it and has more News articles that people have sent it. I have chosen to use YaBB for EH's message board. I hope that one day Equine Help will become as popular as TG, its a slow process that took TG 3 years to complete so here's to the future.

Unfortunately due to financial restraints, the Equine Help website had to close down. All of the information from Equine Help is on Tracing Equines. This means that Tracing Equines will grow bigger and have more articles and information online as well as house the Horsewatch and old Equine Help forum.