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After a year, I lead a horse ten steps
Earlier this week, one of the stall cleaners asked if I could move a horse. It’s a common request–the younger stall cleaners are supposed to ask someone experienced to put the horses in cross ties. Without thinking, I agreed. Then I asked who she needed me to move. She told me.
“Oh,” I said. Just “Oh.”
I’ve been back working and riding at the barn for a year now. During that time, the barn owners have been very good at re-teaching me about ground work–not in a concentrated lesson, so much, but in bits and pieces. I’ve learned a lot by observing how they handle the more excitable horses, and they will often talk to me about any unusual situations that come up. Between observing their body posture/tone of voice, and their explanations of what happened and why, I’ve learned a lot about ground work this past year.
My confidence in handling horses has also increased–I found that it wasn’t the individual horses that intimidated me, it was not knowing how to react in certain situations. Once I learned how to react, I felt more confident. I never thought much about the fact that we have to learn ground work just as we have to learn how to ride, but we do.
Nevertheless, the one horse I haven’t handled in the barn this year is the stallion.
The stallion, of course, is the horse the stall cleaner wanted me to move.
The stallion has never done anything to make me think I couldn’t handle him. He’s well behaved, and I watch the barn owners handling him all the time. I handle far more excitable horses every day I’m out there. And as with everything else, over the past year the barn owners have been great about talking to me about the stallion–his progress, why they handle him in certain ways, what they do if he starts to misbehave, etc.
If I’m confident about bringing in the young TB even when he’s determined to show me just how high he can buck, you’d think I’d be confident about the stallion, too.
Unfortunately, stallions, like heights, intimidate me by their very existence. They don’t have to do anything; the fact of their existence is enough to make me turn chicken and molt feathers. Actually, I should be honest: I’m not afraid of heights. I’ll go up on the roof any day for you, and I’ll stay on the roof all day. It’s the coming down that scares me. If you send me up on the roof, you better have a cheering squad, an hour of spare time, and a fireman to get me down.
For the past year, if anything came up with the stallion, I just found one of the barn owners. And they were perfectly happy with the situation; I’ve known that I could handle him, if I wanted to, but they didn’t expect me to.
I don’t know what was different this week. I watched the Fantastic Four over the weekend; maybe the super hero powers rubbed off on me. More likely, I looked at where the barn owner was teaching a lesson, at the stallion in his stall, and at the cross ties ten steps away and realized how utterly ridiculous it was for me to refuse to walk a perfectly well-behaved horse ten steps.
So I decided I would do it.
Even better: the cross ties were full, so I ended up holding the stallion in the barn aisle for the ten or fifteen minutes it took the girl to clean his stall. He was a perfect gentleman the entire time.
I realize it’s not a huge deal to walk a horse ten steps and then stand there, but I’m darn proud of me.
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On Oct 10, 2006, Amaranth said:
I can relate to this. I was intimidated by stallions, too—until I started working at a breeding barn with 12 standing at stud, 4 retired, and 2 young-uns. You get over it real quick—although I was never brave enough to handle them for teasing or breeding. Turning out was nerve racking enough!!