According to Aunt Les, New Options started by accident. She originally just wanted a horse. Aunt Les will tell you that instead of blood, she has tiny horses running through her veins. When she was a child, she would go up to the stables and pay the people to let her clean the stalls just so she could be near the horses. As she got older, Aunt Les learned to work with other people’s horses and began to take on the attitude that she knew everything. Aunt Les finally got the first horse of her own, Ackshun Aravist, and very quickly discovered that she did not know everything, and in fact knew nothing. Ackshun taught her so much: he taught her that you have to be nice and that you have to teach horses to understand what it is you want. You can’t just beat it into them. You have to learn to communicate. You have to open your heart, you have to open your mind, and you have to learn to look at things from their perspective.