manners

If you full-board your horse, do you expect the barn staff to install manners in him or her, or do you believe it is your responsibility to make sure your horse respects his or her handler on the ground?

Similarly, if you work at a barn with full-boarded horses whose owners may not be around much, how would you handle a very VERY rude horse? Would you take extra time to work with the horse, or just deal with its nonsense every day? Would you contact the owner and ask them to do something about it?

I'm talking about blatantly rude, disrespectful, and potentially dangerous behaviours. Spooking into the handler, disregarding the handler's personal bubble completely, refusing to move forward, pushing the handler around with the shoulder, yanking the handler around, etc.

(we got a new boarder. the horse is quite rude. I'm not impressed.)

Merry Christmas!

early morning crazies!

She was getting a bit warm, so I took her blanket off.
Isn't this December? In New England? It felt like Spring!

Oh here comes Tony, the 17hh Shetland Pony.
Well, he thinks so, anyway.

Sheepish?

Tony ran around me in circles, taunting her! HE IS SO NAUGHTY!

Mom, seriously, you turn me out with this fool on purpose?

I bet he would taste really good.

Is this their inconspicuous look?!
"It wasn't me!"
"Or me!"

Then at the last second she sticks her tongue out at me...

And they're off again, leaping about their field.

Lucy and the invisible aliens

I fell off today...TWICE!

Round 1:

Trotting along, L spooks at something, ducks her shoulder/spins/bolts, I go off the side, land hard on my lower back and then slam my head very hard against the ground.

I was mad and very sore (and more mad because I had to buy a new helmet! GRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!) but I got up, dusted myself off, and got back on.

Round 2:

Had successfully w/t/c around the whole ring, Lucy was looking at things that had been there all summer like they were green, slimy, and arriving by space ship. She was being kind of lala in general. I thought I was being so clever, and I tried to get her mind off of the invisible aliens by saying, dear horse, meet my inside leg! BAM. Then coming around the halfway point of the ring, something caught her attention and we went from going nicely forward to going backward! and sideways! and up, down, and around! It was like an amusement park ride, except I wasn't amused! Her spooking caused the horses in the turnouts to spook, which got her more upset, and though I thought I had managed to sit all of it, she threw those last two maneuvers in there (got me unbalanced enough where I lost my stirrup, and then jumped to the side and deposited me neatly to her left). I landed on my feet this time and was unhurt but I was so mad that she dumped me twice, and I of course had a bleeping audience who saw the whole thing (both episodes) and their faces were like :0!!!!!!! that I had a minor breakdown.

Yup, I sat in the dirt and cried about it. Kenny ran over (for the second time) and said, where are you hurt?! and I replied through my tears, "I'm not even hurt, I'm just really really mad!".

Lucy was hanging out by the gate like, "um, is it dinner time yet?".

I got up, got as much of the sand/dirt out of my pants as I could*, collected my beast, and took her into the indoor. I lunged her for about 10-15 minutes and then got back on (for the THIRD time) and rode for another 15 minutes. She wasn't bad in the indoor but she wasn't great.

Overall, a crappy day.

Kenny is a total superstar and caught the entire second round on camera!

running sideways.

jumping invisible 3' fences

the getaway.

*Can I just say, if it's not bad enough to get tossed twice in one day, did I really need to have to literally sweep the sand out of my riding pants and underwear? If that's not adding insult to injury, I don't know what is.

fun ride

I replicated the "s" line of jumps that I worked on earlier in the week tonight, but made the second jump a bit bigger:





As you can see, she was awesome!

Lucy and the Fuzzball

Early November marked two years since I bought Lucy, and in all that time, I've never turned her out with another horse. I know horses are sociable animals but every time I considered turning her out with another horse, I remembered the times she got her back legs stuck in the fence at Frank's barn as she was trying to kick the gelding next to her in the face. Or how when she says "hello" to another horse, she goes up to them, takes two big sniffs, and then pins her ears, emits a high-pitched "EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!" and strikes out with a front foot.

These behaviours led me to believe that maybe she was better off as a lone ranger, safely confined to her own enclosed space, and that would be all fine and dandy if I hadn't moved her to a new barn exclusively to put her in a bigger paddock. You see, only groups of horses can go into the big paddock at my barn. If Lulu wanted a bigger space, she was going to have to learn how to play nice.

Earlier in the week, we put her out with the smallest equine on the farm: Tony the Shetland Pony. He may be small in stature, but he is mighty at heart. I thought he'd probably be perfect for Lucy because he isn't going to fight back if she tries to push him around, but he isn't going to take a beating, either. He is smart and cunning and it turned out they actually liked each other.

She tolerates him until he gets too close to "her" hay if she is eating it. We put out several piles of hay for the two of them, and the piles are far enough apart that they can both eat separately and not be in each others' faces. As you can see, she does occasionally share with him, though about three seconds after this photo was taken, she pinned her ears and drove him off. He wasn't fazed, though; he just trotted ten steps over to the next pile of hay.

I am really happy because this paddock is about five or six times the size of her old paddock, so there is lots of space to run and play. I caught the two of them playing one night. To a non-horsey person, it would have seemed that Lucy was about to kill Tony, but she was just kicking up her heels (and not getting anywhere near kicking Tony) and he was loving it. At one point she was in one corner of the field after romping over there from the opposite end, where Tony was still standing. They had a bit of a stare-down and then Tony suddenly dug his heels in and whisked himself over to Lucy as fast as his short pony legs could carry him. He was totally instigating the play! It was adorable.

how about a positive post?

Enough with the woe-is-me-I-just-got-run-over-by-a-horse nonsense.

I gave myself the weekend to heal from my various cuts and bruises related to getting trampled by a horse last Thursday. Today I saw that the worst bruise had turned from blue to green to a delightful shade of puke yellow and thought, "that's good enough; it's time to ride!" Lucy had been out of work since Thursday, so I was slightly apprehensive about what she'd have in store for me. To be safe, I lunged her before getting on. Ohhh boy did she have a lot to say! Buck, romp, leap, rinse, repeat. When she started breathing evenly and stretching down at the trot, I asked her to woah and I got on.

She was LOVELY.

So lovely, in fact, that to finish up the ride, we went through a reasonably tight bending line of a crossrail to a vertical, both of which were on opposing diagonal lines in the middle of the ring (like an "S"). I trotted in, looked left and opened my inside (left) rein, cantered off the first jump, used my outside leg to get her straight toward the second jump, had four fairly effortless and floaty canter strides to the second jump, and over the second jump I looked right and opened my right rein/redirected the bend, executed a nice automatic release and she easily landed on her right lead and softly cantered away.

BUTTER, people. It was like butter.

The best part was that we had an audience. A girl from the local high school had contacted me through the farm website to see if she could shadow me. I was supposed to teach a lesson this evening so I offered to let her come to the barn, learn what I need to do to take care of my horse, and then watch me teach the lesson. She was very excited to be there and she asked lots of intelligent questions and listened to my responses (and even took notes!). She has to write a paper about what she learned so I tried to beef my responses up with some intelligent banter. Horse management is so complex and I wanted to give her the most complete answers to her questions, but I felt a bit bad about rambling on and on (or so it seemed) because of course each answer required background information, and that background information required its own background information. Oh well, I don't think she'll have any problem coming up with a two page paper.

My student ended up rescheduling her lesson but I enjoyed my evening immensely regardless.

I will leave you with a fun photo of Kenny and Lucy that I took early last week:

my cowboy and my wanna-be western trail horse.

when life hits you from behind, literally

I went to the barn this morning as usual, to turn the horses out and clean Lucy's stall. It rained for 48 hours straight so the horses were all inside Tuesday and Wednesday. The wind was quite strong today but the sun was out, so I decided to turn them all out.

As I always do, I started taking them out in pairs. The first pair to go was Dreamer and a boarder's horse, A. A is either very sensible or a total idiot. He is a sensitive flower of a horse and I think he woke up on the wrong side of his stall this morning. I had him in my left hand and Dreamer in my right hand. I walked them both down to the end of the barn and opened the door to go outside. I stepped foot out the door and Dreamer followed normally, but A got spooked by a tarp that was blowing in the wind to the left. He ran forward and sideways and knocked me to the ground, and then proceeded to literally run over me. I hit the ground so hard that my hat and glasses flew off my head. A stepped on my leg and kicked me in the back on his way through my personal bubble, and both horses got loose. I screamed for help and luckily, someone else was there this morning. He ran over and made sure I was ok and caught the horses, who had run about ten feet and then they immediately started contentedly eating grass...I guess that tarp isn't so scary when grass is in the picture.

I was so shaken and honestly a bit in shock. I thought at first I had been kicked in the head but now I think I just hit the ground without catching my fall because I was trying to hold onto the stupid horses. I have bruises all over my body, and I ripped my expensive dress pants that I was supposed to wear to a big seminar at work today. I had to go home and change before going to work. I cut my knee and the inside of my left thigh clearly has a horse hoof-shaped bruise brewing. I feel a bit concussed but I went to work and had a productive day.

Oh I almost forgot, when I gathered myself and finished putting the rest of the horses out, another horse (who has a history of being an idiot, so I took him out by himself this morning) spooked into me and stepped on my foot.

This is really, really not my week!!

thanking my lucky stars

I had a very bad surprise at the barn yesterday morning and I am still perplexed over the whole thing. When I arrived at the barn in the morning, I walked down the barn aisle to start bringing the horses out (I always start with Lucy, of course!) and about halfway there, I realized her stall door was wide open.

Like, WIDE OPEN.

To make matters worse, I didn't see the horse in her stall at first. I started running and she heard me barreling down the barn aisle and stuck her head out like, "oh, hi mom!". I stood there and took it all in: the horse still standing politely in her stall waiting to be turned out, the door completely open, the chest guard not up at all, and all of the other horses getting very impatient about going outside.

My barn is right off of a highway that is two lanes and has heavy traffic, especially in the mornings. I really cannot believe my very curious and very cheeky mare didn't waltz herself right out of her stall, down the aisle, out into the driveway, down to the highway, in front of an 18 wheeler, or maybe back in the 60 acres of property that the barn has where hunters like to trespass and shoot big brown things (deer? horse? really, what's the difference?!).

Nope, she stood there and munched her breakfast hay quietly and then happily went outside when I put her halter on and took her out.

My barn owner feeds breakfast in the mornings and she didn't think she had left her door open, but the other possibility is even scarier: that someone deliberately went in and opened her door. I am not sure which option to hope for...I just hope it was a freak thing and it will never happen again. I certainly can't be locking her stall in case she needs to get out quickly (like in the case of a barn fire, god forbid).

I'm alive!

Just very, very busy.

Lu got a week off for Thanksgiving and the resulting turkey coma I was in for a few days following the festivities, but I think it did her some good to just chill out and stuff her face. I mean, I was doing the same thing, so it was only fair ;)

This is a video from yesterday, when I took Cairo out with us for a trail ride:



Here are some videos from today:





As you can tell,

-she doesn't appreciate knocking down poles
-she thinks the tarp is VERY SCARY when the wind blows it around a bit
-happy/mad/happy/quiet/RACEHORSE!/quiet/that's a nice tarp/THAT TARP IS GOING TO EAT ME!: completely a normal progression of thoughts for Lucy.