The Day the Barn Stood Still

It was one of my worst days as a young horsewoman.
Not to be confused with the concussion, the broken elbow, the dizzy nauseous sting from being kicked in the aforementioned broken elbow, or the day we put the one of the quietest geldings I've known in the ground. Nor with the moments I've hated the sport, the times spend crying over misunderstood theories, or the night I decided never to ride again. (obviously, that lasted a looong time.)

We feed by running the horses up in their groups, leaving their stalls open. Most dodge into their own; the young and the new are less predictable. On this particular day, I was not feeding. It was a Friday, and our weekend feeder had come in. Because I have the social life of a 70 year old hermit, I was still at the farm, taking up space. Plus Horse had been rather questionable about feeding, and I felt the need to supervise..

In addition to having stalls, we have three feeding stalls. I would say there are the size of a straight-load trailer stall. One is open; the other two house our show equipment (tents, tables, scoreboards, so forth.) They are dark and cob-webbed and cramped.

In other words, they are EXACTLY what any normal horse would avoid.

Horse is not normal. I have lost all hope in her basic sanity.

Horse climbed over the tents and tables, wedging herself into the show equipment stall. Upon completing this task, she discovered not an ounce of grain. We watched her take a bold step back.. And bump into the foray of tents.

Realizing she was stuck, Horse's anxiety skyrocketed. She began rocking back and forth, bumping the front of the stall only to sling back to the tents. I have used the same technique to get my truck unstuck, but (shocker, I know) that was not comforting. We made an attempt to calm her down and move the tents, but the notion the tents were moving only seemed to agitate her more.

Anyone with horses knows: When things go bad, they go bad fast.

She began banging on either side of the stall, and with no way to move the tents or reach her head (we would have had to climb in where she was pawing and stepping), the feeder and I stepped back.

Then she began to rear and twist. I covered my face. I think I may have let out a strangled scream as I listened to four years of my life crash into the sides of the stall. I had the briefest sick thought that she was going to tear down the wall of the stall to get out.

Instead when I looked up, there was Horse -- free and limping. Somehow, she had reared and turned around in the tiny stall. She had very minor slices, nothing like the door incident.

I gave her a week off, but she was still stiff and sore. I rode her once, and she balked more than her typical minor hissy fits. Something was wrong.

I cried after I called my mom to come pick her up. I'll admit it, I hate that one afternoon can change your goals. That fifteen minutes might be the end of everything.

Mom came and picked her up, bringing me Barbie (who you all will hear tons about soon!). Horse's future is in a pasture for a while, until I get home to take her to the vet.

-- Girl

Read more...

sore.

To be brief,

I am sore when I wake up.
I am sore while the ponies eat.
I am sore while I eat.
I am sore when I tack up.
I am sore as I untack.
I am sore standing on the mounting block.
I am sore walking and trotting and cantering my precise circles and eloquent patterns.
I am sore when my horses are naughty.
I am sore when my horses are amazing.

Last horse of the day, I peel myself from my saddle, tan breeches black from the leather. I grunt as I walk bow-legged to our crossties. I moan as I pull off the bridle and saddle, tear off my boots.

Boss Mare walks to her stool and perches.

"When will I not be sore?"
"When you stop riding."

She smiles because we both know that will never happen.

Read more...

Horse's Suicide Attempts, take one, two, and three.

To prepare you for the upcoming post of Horse's fourth suicide attempt (by far her most creative), I'm going to step back in time a little bit.

Let me start by saying I don't know why these animals find me or are born into my ownership, but everything I own is just this way of sane. Quirky, odd, strange. They have different ways of looking at the world from others, and maybe that's what attracts me to them. (Or maybe, just maybe, I'm tilted in the same way.. But I'm sure that's not true because every teenaged girl wants to live in a camper without hot water, right? Yes??)

Anyway, Horse is no different. Granted, her psychosis is slightly different from my other two brats lovelies (Pony and Barbie). Horse lacks the basic desire to stay out of small spaces or keep her mouth to herself. She also solves every equation by jumping or rearing (see post on turn-on-the-forehand....). She is insanely curious about EVERYTHING, to a fault, and has a fondness for watching small furry animals run from her.

She also likes putting herself in dangerous situations. Keep reading...

SUICIDE ATTEMPT ONE, six months old.
We, like most barns, do 24/7 turnout. So in each paddock, we have giant water tanks. Typical, normal. Horse found them fascinating. So fascinating, in fact, that one day she fell into one. I am not totally sure how she did it, but it has become family lore. My dad had been walking out of the barn when he saw her donkey-like ears protruding over the lip of the tank. He screamed for my mom and rushed to rescue the drowning baby Horse.

She wasn't scared or even really drowning though. He said she looked up at him like, oh hey, I'm in a water tank. He tipped it over, and she scrambled out.

SUICIDE ATTEMPT TWO, age three.
Some stall fronts have a "V" cutout so you can feed grain, and the barn where she got started had these.

Horse jumped out of it or tried to. She got hung right behind her girth. The cowboy said it was the scariest thing he'd ever seen in thirty years of horses: My baby, hanging half-way in her stall with so much pressure on her ribs she was having trouble breathing. He had crawled under her front legs and pushed her back into the stall.

It took a month before the swelling went down. She had been there four days and had only been walking. We did not send her away again.

SUICIDE ATTEMPT 3, age four.
The hardest rain storm of the year. I caught her and stuffed her in a stall. Her body was quivering all over. I remember it vividly.

The wind caught the top of her Dutch door and flung it open, but it wasn't until the rain picked up even more that she freaked. She'd never been inside in a storm and was not fond of stalls anyway. I remember screaming as she bumped into the bottom half of the door, screaming and sloshing into the rain to shut the top half.

I was too late. I was, however, in time to see everything that follows. The angle she jumped from was so off she caught the bottom door with her hind leg, swinging it under the middle of her chest. She slammed, full weight, against the door. It broke off its hinges, and she stumbled in the muck beyond the door. Limping, pronounced.

She had just healed from that when we both came to live at More Inside Leg.
You would think that she would have learned.

-- Girl

Read more...

The Price We Pay

In a recent conversation, the following statement was made about our indoor arena:

"Looking at the money, I just don't see how she'll ever be able to justify building it."

Yeah, indoors can be extremely pricey.

But I have a question: Honestly, how many of our horse habits (looking from a money perspective) are justifiable?

Mine certainly isn't.
My saddles cost $4000; my tall boots are well over $200. Breeches and riding tights combined? I have about 7 or 8 pairs, the cheapest I got on sale from Dover for about $20. On top of that, I have gone through a decade's worth of helmets. Add in enough bridles for a small cavalry, girths, saddle pads, riser pads, stirrup pads, bits, bell boots, gallop boots, bucking straps....

And that's just the beginning. Then you have the farrier every six weeks, vet bills, medicines, lessons, trailers, trucks, BIGGER trailers, BIGGER trucks, everything but the kitchen sink and reliable human band aids to go in the trailer, hay bags, shipping wraps..

Not to mention Horse, a medley of prenatal and post-birth costs.

Can I justify any of that?
I certainly am not rich. (I live in a camper that doesn't even have an indoor bathroom, for crying out loud.)
I do come from a well-off family, but my mother also has a deep horse addiction.
2 addicts, one household.. Does not a rich family make.

The answer: I cannot.
I cannot reasonably justify spending hundreds of thousands of dollars.

But during long bareback trail rides, breathing the stride after a perfect oxer, teaching little kids diagonals, dancing somewhere down the centerline, I get all the justification I need.

Until next time,
Girl

Read more...