We all know that there’s a chance you can lose your life doing some of these things. But a person’s dying at one of my clinics, even if only due to sheer accident—the sort of thing that can happen to anybody, anywhere, anytime—could negate every bit of good I’ve ever done, no matter how many people I’ve helped or how many horses I’ve saved from the slaughterhouse. It doesn’t seem fair, but it could happen. I always live in fear of something like that, and I just have to leave it up to the good Lord to help my students and me through.
In a clinic in Boulder, Colorado, I had about twenty people in the colt class. All but one of them were doing their groundwork, helping their horses get comfortable and readying them to be approached and handled. The man who wasn’t doing the work owned a little paint colt that he’d tried to have started before. He had hired a local horse trainer who had failed. The colt was afraid of the trainer, and she was afraid of him.
Once Buck gets a saddle on a young clinic horse he goes through all the same actions he had previously done with the horse unsaddled. This is to reinforce that the horse has nothing to fear after the saddle is cinched up.
The clinic began with groundwork to establish the essential connections between horses and their owners. This owner, however, didn’t participate in this phase. When I asked him why he wasn’t working with his horse, he replied, “I’ve had enough of this bullshit. I’m ready to get on this colt and ride.”
I was more than a little shocked at the answer. “Well, sir,” I said, “these other people are trying to get their horses comfortable enough to where they can get on them. I can’t make you do this groundwork, but your horse is a little bothered. I’d think you’d want to be working at having a little better relationship with him than you do. But even if you don’t, you’ll have to be patient because we aren’t ready to get on the colts yet.”
People who overheard the man couldn’t believe that he wasn’t more interested in working with his colt, since he had paid good money to do just that.
An hour and a half later, students were getting on their horses for the first time in the round pen and getting along fine. The man in question was one of the last ones to get on. I held on to his lead rope from the back of my saddle horse, and I asked him to make sure his cinch was tight. He said it was. Because he was a big man, I then asked him to get on about halfway, nice and smooth, but he still wasn’t following my directions. He stepped up and got on almost halfway when the saddle slipped. It turned under the horse’s belly, and he had to step off.
The turning saddle had pinched the little paint’s withers. It scared him a little, but the horse recovered and still tried his best.
The man tightened his cinch, got his horse reorganized, and made another attempt to get on. He put his left foot in the stirrup, leaned over the back of his horse, grabbed him by the mane as I’d told him to do, and swung up. He had some trouble fishing around for his right stirrup, but he finally got his foot in.
Now he was sitting on his horse. At this point I asked him to do what I had asked the others to do: reach forward and rub his horse’s neck, the same way its mother had nuzzled or licked him when the little paint was a foal.
Once again the man didn’t follow directions. Instead of trying to soothe the horse, he reached up and slapped him on the neck in a very macho way. The sudden impact startled the horse, who moved his hindquarters six or eight feet to the left. The man’s balance was so poor, he fell off. There was a snapping sound, and the man grabbed his leg up high by the hip.
Everybody got off their horses and led them out of the corral. While we were waiting for the ambulance, the man kept saying, “I’m sure sorry. I messed up the clinic for everybody, and it’s not anybody’s fault. It’s my own fault. And I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right,” I told him. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll get you off to the hospital and get you fixed up.”
The ambulance came and took the man off to the hospital. I asked someone else to ride his horse, and before the clinic was over, the little paint was taking part in my advanced horsemanship class, loping around out in the pasture and getting along just fine.
I was really proud of the horse, and I thought his owner would be happy that he had continued. The man had broken his leg, and when I checked on him a few times in the hospital, I reported on his horse’s progress, wished him well, and told him I was sorry he’d had bad luck. And that, I thought, was the end of the story. I left town and went on to the next clinic.
About a year later, I was doing another clinic in the same arena when a kid in a T-shirt walked in. He didn’t look as if he fit in at a horsemanship clinic, and he didn’t. He was a process server. Right there in the middle of my clinic he served me with papers saying that my clinic’s sponsor and I were being sued for wanton and willful negligence. The little paint’s owner had accused us of having tried to get him hurt or killed, and that our intentions had been premeditated. He wanted a million dollars.
Nothing like that had ever happened to me. How could the man sue me for something I tried so hard to prevent? I was so upset that I just wanted to cry right then and there in front of everyone.
I had no insurance to cover such a matter, and I ended up spending thousands of dollars—that I didn’t have—for an attorney I shouldn’t have needed to defend myself from something over which I had no control.
The legal wrangling went on for the next couple of years. Over the course of the lawsuit, the million-dollar claim that the man had been after was reduced to ten thousand; his lawyer was looking for an out-of-court settlement to get his client something so the lawyer could make something for himself.
The night before we were to go to trial, my lawyer called. “If you give this man one of your custom-made saddles, he’ll drop the case.”
I was outraged. “You tell him that if he wants one dollar to settle out of court, he can go to hell.” I had my principles, even if I was going to spend the rest of my life paying for them. I knew that the horse hadn’t done anything wrong, and I hadn’t done anything wrong. The only thing that got that man was gravity.
I was staying with friends in Boulder during the lawsuit. As I was about to leave for court the next morning, I received a call from a funeral home in Arizona. My father had died. The funeral director had been trying to get ahold of me for several days. He wanted me to sign a release allowing my dad to be cremated. He also said that the memorial service was to be held that day.
I called Smokie with the news. He was living on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and even if he had wanted to attend the service, he couldn’t have gotten there in time.
That day marked the end of all my hard feelings and memories of torment. I would very much have liked to have been at his service to say good-bye, but I couldn’t go. I had to be in court.
While I was on the witness stand and the opposing lawyer was asking me questions, I broke down and began to cry. “What’s wrong?” the lawyer wanted to know. He couldn’t understand why his questions had provoked so much emotion.
“What’s wrong is that I’m sitting here in court defending myself from something that even you know that I had no control over. I’m sitting in this court, wasting my time, when I could be at my own father’s funeral.” I looked at the judge and then the jury. “Instead, all of you are getting my time today because if I didn’t show up for something like this, by default you’d give this sue-happy man and his lawyer everything I have ever worked for and everything I will ever work for. This is a choice I had to make today. It’s a hard day for me.”
The jury found on my behalf and awarded the man nothing. They agreed there was no fault on my part. The man had simply lost his balance and fallen off his horse.
Dad owned a little piece of property in Chino Valley, Arizona. He had some furniture that he’d made as a young man, as well as family pictures and a few of his great-grandfather’s guns that had been passed down through his family. None of it was worth a lot of money, but he’d intended to leave them to me.
A few days before he died, Lillian, the woman he had been living with, got him to change his will. I don’t know if they were married or not, but she was his companion and had been looking after him. As a result of Dad’s changing his will, all I inherited was a handful of pictures of my mother. Everything else was gone. Smokie and I never got any of it.
I didn’t hate my dad when he died. At some level, I loved him. I didn’t love him as I loved Forrest. Forrest was my teacher; he was the man who raised me and prepared me for life. My dad was the one who showed me the kind of man I have worked hard not to become. In that sense, you could say I learned a lot from him as well.
10
Horse Problems and People Problems
I OFTEN MEET HORSES in my clinics that are socially bankrupt. They are inept at being around other horses. This problem sometimes goes back to their separation from their mothers; humans may not have offered them a replacement that they needed to become secure within themselves.
Quite often, however, the environment is responsible, an owner who has a small piece of property or buys a house in a subdivision, then decides to get a horse or two. An environment like this is completely artificial compared to where God put horses in the first place. Even if the horse in such a situation gets to be around one parent or brother or sister, he doesn’t get to be around other horses in a herd environment.
Going to a clinic is the first time such sheltered animals are around other horses. They’re not at all equipped to fit into the equine society. They’ll either be scared to death and want to huddle in a corner or be aggressively warlike in their actions.
It’s all because the owner hasn’t allowed his horse to be in a natural environment when he’s not riding or working with him. The owner thinks he’s doing his horse a favor by putting him in a box stall lined with varnished oak, with polished brass door handles and pretty pictures on the stable wall. He thinks he’s really pampering his horse, when to the horse it’s no different than living in solitary confinement. In fact, prisoners are given more room and more exercise than these horses.
Owners who put their socially bankrupt horses into a clinic’s herd environment often feel resentment because their horses don’t fit in. This resentment is motivated by the horse’s discomfort, which creates in the owners a fear of getting bucked off or of the horse running or jumping out from under them. They’re afraid of getting kicked or of the horse kicking somebody else.
Such horses are lost, but they don’t have to be. Support from the rider, the kind of support that works with a horse’s mind and causes accurate movements that are stimulating to him, will make all the other social issues irrelevant. When you ask for these movements, when your idea becomes the horse’s idea, your mind and your horse’s mind can become one. You then build on the horse’s pride in such a way that he feels more secure within himself. The end result is a horse that will fit better in a social environment with other horses.
Someone who has a horse with social problems can’t just go out and buy a herd of horses, then throw him into it and think that everything is going to be fixed. The horse missed out on his formative years, and trying to re-create them won’t work.
A child psychologist could easily draw a parallel between such a horse and a kid who wasn’t raised right by his parents, one who missed out on formative experiences that should have occurred early on. A kid who’s thrust into an antisocial environment and who starts hanging around a bunch of gangster punks—the type of people who are drawn together because they’re social deviants—won’t develop socially acceptable behavior.
A horse with the same kind of social problem isn’t any different. As a rider, you must slowly and methodically show your horse what is appropriate. You also have to discourage what’s inappropriate, not by making the inappropriate impossible, but by making it difficult so that the horse himself chooses appropriate behavior. You can’t choose it for him; you can only make it difficult for him to make the wrong choices. If, however, you make it impossible for him to make the wrong choices, you’re making war.
Socially bankrupt horses are a lot like kids who come home from school with report cards that say, “Doesn’t play well with others.” There are many reasons for this sort of behavior.
A horse can be frightened of other horses. He’s been sheltered and thinks the whole world is out to get him. Because he’s afraid, another horse doesn’t have to be overtly aggressive toward him. A quick move by another horse or even a rider passing by can be enough to send the frightened horse into a fearful response. That can be unsafe for anybody sitting on him: he may jump out from underneath the rider or run away. Then, too, the rider may be just as scared. His response may be just as fearful as that of the horse: the rider might jerk on the reins or clamp down with his legs. That will terrify the horse even more, which just perpetuates the problem.
Using a flag usually teaches an insecure horse to be confident. A flag is a stainless-steel antenna with a strip of colored plastic tied to the end of it. At first it can be pretty scary, but if you get the horse used to it while you’re on foot, you can gradually get him to the point that you can ride while you carry it.
Buck uses the “flag” to get this horse used to outside sensations. The flag acts as an extension of his arm, and keeps him safe if the horse decides to kick or strike.
Carry the flag up, like a tennis racquet, because if you carry it down like a crop, the flag might disappear into your horse’s blind spot under his chin. Then he’ll become startled when you raise your hand and the flag reappears.
You wave the flag to encourage other animals to move away from you. Your horse will perceive that when you’re riding him and using that flag, he (actually you) is causing other horses that he thought were superior to move away. That will build his confidence fast. He may have spent his whole life yielding to other horses, but when he realizes that he can cause them to yield to him, you will see quite a change in how your horse feels about himself.
Kicking or biting are other inappropriate behaviors. They don’t always happen because a horse is aggressive; many times a horse kicks or bites because he’s frightened. Sometimes he just feels as if he’s been backed into a corner and has nowhere to go.
Imagine a situation where you’re buried up to your waist in sand and people are walking all around you. How insecure would you feel if you couldn’t move your feet and people were stepping on your fingers and pushing, running into, and kicking you? If you can’t move your feet to keep from getting hurt, how violent would you become from the waist up? By the same token, a horse whose feet aren’t freed up when he doesn’t feel comfortable moving them is likely to show a similar violent attitude toward other horses. Another horse or rider crowding his space makes him feel he needs to bite or kick. Such a horse is scared and bound up within himself because he can’t or won’t move his feet to get away from trouble.
Regarding a horse that is inclined to kick, after he’s already lashed out at someone, he should not be punished. It’s already too late. Nothing good will come of it, and besides, you shouldn’t be punishing him in the first place. Instead, a good horseman will observe what’s about to happen and act before the horse has acted aggressively. You should tip his head toward the person or horse he was about to kick and use your leg to ask him to move his hindquarters in another direction. Or you might ask him to speed up or slow down. You might simply pick up on both reins and ask him to “drop” (another term for “tuck”) his chin so he gives to the bridle.
Think of it as “changing the subject” or redirecting the horse’s mind. That takes timing and foresight. You have to plan ahead so that rather than seek revenge for the horse’s misbehavior, you see his aggressive behavior shaping up and can then redirect it. You change his mind before he’s acted and move him on to something else.
Whether riding a horse or working with a kid, there’s no crime in saying no. But always saying no will take away all the horse’s desire to try, and pretty soon the horse or the youngste
r will believe there’s nothing he can do right. But saying no and immediately redirecting with “but instead you may do this” will head off inappropriate behavior. That’s all I think about when I’m riding a young horse. Instead of punishing inappropriate behavior after the fact, I redirect him before it occurs. Redirection is where the “instead” part comes in. Redirecting a horse gives his mind something else to do and takes him down a different road from the one on which he was traveling.
You hear a lot of talk about mentoring these days. It doesn’t have to be just talk. If we get to troubled kids early enough, we can impress things upon them not by being mean and threatening, but by providing discipline and guidance.
The same thing is true for troubled horses. If you extend the parameters too far because of sympathy, the horse won’t have any boundaries, and you will end up spoiling him. An “abused horse” that has been “spoiled” with sympathy is one of the most difficult kinds to work with: when you try to correct him, you end up putting him back in the same frame of mind he was in when he was scared. You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t, because a spoiled horse may require you to be physically firm. Yet the physical firmness will bring out the fear and the terror that tells him he is in danger of losing his life. Finding the correct amount of firmness depends on the specific horse and the problem, but finding that balance is essential.
It’s your responsibility when you start working with a troubled horse to set specific behavioral boundaries. It is at this point in the horse’s life that we humans have an opportunity to show just how evolved we are. We can help the horse focus on constructive tasks that ease his fears and show him that he’s not alone in a world of predators. If we don’t, if we do nothing but sympathize, we’re allowing him to slip into another realm of trouble.
A horse that has made a positive change in his behavior needs an opportunity to “soak,” to concentrate on and digest what he has learned. He needs his quiet time. Given this opportunity, his response will be better the next time you work with him. Otherwise, to present a horse with a new problem to solve before he’s had time to soak up the old one forces him to disregard what’s he just learned in order to concentrate on what’s next. And if you throw too many tasks at a young horse too soon, you’ll destroy his willingness to try.
Faraway Horses Page 15