Whispering Back

by Adam Goodfellow

  She snorted and backed away, while I held on to the lead rope for all I was worth. At first she lifted me up and pulled me towards her, but when I held on she came forward as I had taught her, so I immediately released the pressure. I was still asking too much, so I got off the ramp and asked her to keep backing up and coming forward some more. As the space opened up between her and the ramp, she became calmer and more concerned about having to respond to me and come forward off the pressure, than she was of the idea of loading. I asked her to go on the ramp again.

  She couldn’t have made a better effort, for she leaped up and put both front feet squarely on the ramp, and stood, heaving, obviously expecting that I would insist that she continue to come forward and finish the job. Instead, I loosened the halter, rubbed her forehead and then asked her to step back off again. We walked around for a moment to give her time to think about it. The next time I asked she came a lot further up the ramp. I rewarded her again by asking her to step back off, and you could practically see the cogs turning in her head.

  The next time I approached, she did not hesitate and got all her feet on the ramp, so her head was in the doorway. I hesitated, unsure whether to ask her to come forward. If she pulled back and hit her head, protected by a poll guard as it was, she would frighten herself and confirm all her worst fears about me. Tentatively I put a tiny amount of tension on the line, then released it and moved to the side, making a big space for her to move into. She walked straight in. I felt a flood of relief, gratitude and joy as I stood and gently stroked her neck.

  She could hardly believe it when I immediately asked her to unload again, instead of the ramp being slammed shut as quickly as possible. She gave me her all after that, and within minutes was following me in with no lead rope on her at all. She seemed extremely pleased with herself, proud of overcoming her trauma, and it felt as if her whole attitude towards humans had changed too, no longer based on distrust and resentment. Within an hour the owner could load her with ease, put the partitions up, with or without other horses, close up the ramp and turn on the engine. I had spent over three hours preparing her and it had taken no more than four minutes to get her in.

  Loading jobs never seem to be as straightforward as you might expect, and I learn something new from every one. An interesting horse I trained was an extremely posh Andalusian, owned by the Duchess of Richmond and Gordon, who lives at Goodwood near the south coast. It was easy to find, since it was clearly marked on my road map, as well as at every junction for miles. But when I arrived, I began to regret not paying more attention to the directions she gave me for what to do after I reached the estate, for I promptly got lost somewhere between the golf course, the motor racing circuit, the enormous palace, the woods and several huge stable blocks. I eventually was sent about a mile up a road in the opposite direction, past another large stable yard, school and house, to a wonderful little mansion set in a picturesque rolling valley. This dip had saved the cedar trees in this area from the worst of the 1987 hurricane, which had destroyed 30,000 trees on the estate, and left many of the huge old cedars that dominate the grounds as shattered hulks, scarred by the loss of massive boughs and often with no tops left at all. I was filled with dread at the prospect of what a similar storm could do to Moor Wood. But it was still a magnificent setting and the Duchess, who was very friendly and asked me to call her Sue, had a horse to match. Wisps of creamy mane curled down his handsome face and neck, and he was in superb shape, gleaming with health.

  When I went to do join-up in her round pen, though, I immediately noticed that he didn’t think a great deal of humans. He kicked out several times to make sure I wasn’t going to get too close, and was difficult to join-up with. After I got follow-up, he broke away several times, and he did a great line in pretending I wasn’t there. I knew that the Duchess and her stable staff were very kind and took good care of him, but I had the feeling that whatever I managed to achieve that day, it might be a long time, if ever, before humans would appear to him as anything better than a necessary evil. The loading issue was only the most obvious manifestation of a deeper lack of trust. It was not as if he flinched or expected to be hit. But somehow, it seemed that perhaps his upbringing was not all it could have been. An example of this was his previous boxing experiences. The last time he’d been on a horsebox had been when he came to Goodwood from Leicester – a journey of eight hours. But he had been bred in Spain, and so it’s quite likely that his introduction to loading was being hustled onto a vehicle and subjected to a journey of many hundreds of miles by road and ferry. In his experience, going up the ramp did not just involve trusting people sufficiently to go into a very confined space. It also meant travelling for between eight and up to about forty hours. Why would any horse, having been through that, ever consent to go in a box again? Why would any human expect not to have created a bad loader by the end of a journey like that?

  I got him to load pretty easily but couldn’t bear to take the risk that he might not follow me in without the lead rope. Even though the nearest open road was miles away, the estate was so huge we would have been searching for weeks if he’d gone AWOL, and this horse was probably worth more than my insurance company. We took him for some short drives, stopping to reload him a number of times, in the hope that he would gain confidence when his average journey time went down so dramatically.

  I was exhausted but elated when I got back home and showed Nicole the cheque I had earned. I was particularly glad that it had been me who went, given the potential for disaster generated by Nicole’s subsequent question: ‘It says here the cheque’s from the Duchess of Richmond and Gordon. Who’s Gordon? Her husband? Doesn’t he even have his own cheque book?’

  I had met the Duke briefly in the corridor and been unable to think what I should call him, but at last I managed to stammer out, ‘Are you Sue’s husband?’, which was probably not quite the appropriate etiquette but at least would not have disgraced me quite as much as asking him whether he was Gordon!

  Funnily enough, although I have now succeeded in curing every other one of dozens of extremely bad loaders for other people, the last horse I could not load was our own Sensi. Looking back on it, it was probably a very good thing that I didn’t, as it quite possibly saved her life.

  This was about a year before I visited the Duchess, for I had just recently finished my ten-week course. It was about two months after Sensi had given birth to Karma, and Nicole had gone to Kent, with Julia, to do a riding clinic. Sensi decided to do her usual trick and protest against this great injustice by making the vet come and attend to yet another medical emergency.

  Now Sensi is well known to most of the vets in North Gloucestershire, and every other part of the country she has ever lived in. Although she has a very strong constitution, heals miraculously quickly and has hardly had a single day’s lameness in her whole life, she seems to have systematically worked her way through most of the veterinary textbooks. I can’t understand how her insurance company remains financially solvent, and would like to take this opportunity to apologise to any members who might have found their premiums going up in recent years.

  Just in the eleven months when she was pregnant with Karma, she had broken her nose by running through the metal gate in the middle of the night, had laminitis, and then cut a four-inch gash in a hind leg while climbing down the muck-heap in a midnight escape from the stable yard. This last injury, while not quite in the right place to cause permanent lameness, nevertheless meant spending the last three weeks of her pregnancy standing on three legs, which seriously compromised the straightness of her spine and pelvis, as well as badly damaging several ligaments, which were softening in preparation for the birth. But despite the seriousness of all these incidents, she was in a far worse condition when she went down with a severe colic that summer evening.

  It was about 10 p.m. when I went out to the field to get Sensi and Karma and bring them in for the night. I soon knew something was wrong. Sensi was sweating and agitated, turning a
nd nudging her flanks. I put her in the round pen and ran to get Sarah, for a second opinion. She quickly agreed with my diagnosis and went to call the vet.

  Sensi had lain down in the sand of the round pen, panting. She would groan periodically and roll on her back, a glazed expression coming over her eyes. I stroked her face, trying to calm her as a sudden rush of panic gripped me. She was dying. The thought of what this would do to Nicole, whose own father had died just two weeks before, was almost unbearable. After what seemed an eternity, the vet arrived. He administered a strong painkiller and anti-spasmodic drug, but it didn’t seem to work. Sarah told me I should stand back, for although I wanted so much to help, Sensi was now having convulsions. Her legs flailed wildly, her head writhed in the sand. The vet had called the nearest equine hospital capable of doing the major surgical procedure that was the only medical action that could be taken. The operating theatre was being prepared. It seemed a big gamble, being about forty minutes’ drive away. The first thing we needed to do was to get her standing. When there was a lull in her exertions, I pulled her lead rope with insistent urgency while everyone pushed her on and, on the second effort, she made it to her feet. Sarah very kindly went and got Peter and their trailer.

  It was not an ideal situation. It was very dark up by the round pen, being past midnight. There was one weak bulb at the front but other than that there was no light except the brake lights on the trailer, which was painted dark both inside and out. It could not have been much less inviting, and in addition to having Karma behind her, charging around the pen in a panic at seeing her mum being led away, Sensi was also heavily sedated. She breathed laboriously and swayed on her feet as I tried to get her moving backwards and forwards. But even a pressure halter was ineffective, due to the sedative, and Sensi remained inert. I could hardly get her moving when she was away from the trailer, and as soon as she resisted the pressure, locking her head and body against it with a stubborn determination that still glinted in her hazy, faraway eyes, I was unable to shift her no matter how hard I pulled.

  I tried to load her until my arms felt like they were about to fall off. The others also tried. Having waited patiently for a considerable time, holding back from giving me advice, they must have been itching to have a go. But they soon found that nothing would shift her. She would go to the edge of the doorway but no further. We continued for over an hour, and then the vet and I suddenly were struck by the same thought. Our eyes met. ‘Why are we bothering?’ we said to each other. ‘She doesn’t have colic any more.’

  Sensi had pulled it off again, in some style, keeping the four of us up half the night. She was fine. It seemed as though the struggle she had put up might have helped take her mind off the pain. Karma was even more relieved than I was, even though she was not aware that it would have meant weeks of us feeding her every few hours if Sensi hadn’t made it.

  In the end I never did teach Sensi to load. Instead I watched as my working pupil, a quiet strong man from Denmark called Brian Mortensen, did it for practice. She behaved exactly as one would expect, in fact she was not very hard at all, and within twenty minutes of him starting to work with her, she was loading without a lead rope, as if she had done so all her life. Even though I had cured many worse loaders by then, I was still surprised, like so many owners I have worked for. To see my own horse, such an established bad loader, whom I had never seen walk confidently up a ramp, going up inside my horsebox as if she had never done any differently, was simply unbelievable. I had a real insight into the feelings owners must often have when I work for them. It can be very hard to let go and accept that things have changed.

  SIXTEEN

  A noble visitor

  (Nicole)

  Joe didn’t sound promising when his owner, Sally, described him on the phone. His grandfather had won the Grand National, which meant that from the moment he was conceived, Joe was in danger of being regarded primarily as a form of investment rather than a sentient being. Now retired, he was twelve years old, a 16.2 hand high thoroughbred with a major napping problem and a phobia of pigs. As he lived on a pig farm, this fear was a big problem, and his napping was so bad that he couldn’t even be ridden the 100 yards or so to a neighbour’s outdoor arena so his owner, Sally, could school him. ‘He’s had quite a long time off,’ Sally said, ‘while my broken leg’s been recovering.’

  It’s never very comforting when owners refer to their broken limbs in connection with a horse. It reminds you what a risky business it all is. Of course, the difference between a nasty break and a few bruises can simply lie in the way you land. As they say, it’s not the falling that’s the problem, it’s the hitting the ground at the end of it.

  In this case, as it turned out, the owner had hit the ground having slipped while feeding her chickens!

  Sally wanted to do the best for her horse. She’d had his back checked, a new saddle fitted, and his teeth done. She’d had riding lessons. Confident that his problems weren’t physical, she’d ‘tried everything’ when riding him. By now I’d worked out what this was code for. ‘So what does he do when you hit him?’ I asked her, when we met.

  ‘Oh, that makes him far worse. He gets angry, rears, swishes his tail. And when I tried riding him in spurs, he just bucked me straight off. I didn’t try that again.’

  I tried to stop myself from grinning. Horses put up with a lot, but they all have their limits. Joe clearly didn’t consider having bits of metal stuck into his ribs acceptable.

  I stepped back and had a good look at him. He was in some ways a very beautiful horse, but he had an air of despair about him. He had an extraordinarily long, fine, elegant face, but his body looked like it had been through the wringer a few times. There were deep hollows along his back where years of ill-fitting saddles had dug into his flesh. He had thirteen lines of white hair seared into his skin on both front legs, a legacy of line firing, which used to be common practice in the treatment of tendon injuries. Hot irons or a blistering agent are applied to the tendons, in the expectation that the inflammation this causes will help the tendon to heal, by building up scar tissue. Although applied under anaesthetic, the treatment results in the horse being unable to move without pain for a considerable time. This is believed by some to be the only benefit of firing, as it means the horse has to be on box rest, and cannot be worked for a long time, even by the most over-zealous trainer. Even so, box rest is now considered of dubious benefit for most injuries.

  Not surprisingly, he hated vets. He could sniff one out at a hundred paces, and Sally’s had become adept at long-range diagnosis as soon as he realised the perils of close inspection. Scars rippled his hindquarters where he’d been hit by a bus when he’d panicked while being long-lined, and had broken through a fence onto a road. Overall, he had an ‘upside down’ look, where all the muscles along the top of his neck and back were virtually non-existent, and all the muscles on the underside of his body were bulging and tight from the effort of moving while resisting the discomfort of a rider on his back. No wonder he didn’t want to go anywhere.

  He shifted uncomfortably under my gaze, and I had the feeling that he knew he was in a mess, and that he knew it wasn’t fair to have had that inflicted on him. A horse of natural grace and splendour, it was degrading for him to look such a wreck. If I’ve ever seen disappointment in a horse, I saw it in Joe; he’d given everything that had ever been asked of him, but it hadn’t got him anywhere. Now he’d given up. He expected nothing of anyone, and it would be easier all round if no one expected anything of him.

  When I placed his new saddle on his back to check its fit, he stamped his foot and swished his tail. As I gently did the girth up, he not so gently tried to take a chunk out of me.

  ‘He’s always like that,’ Sally said.

  It was easy to see why: his saddle was so narrow it was pinching his withers.

  ‘I did wonder about that, but my master saddler said it was fine. But it didn’t seem right that he should have such a violent reaction to it. I wonde
red if perhaps it was remembered pain?’

  There’s some logic in this; if a horse is caused pain by, say, an ill-fitting saddle, they can have a negative association with any saddle, however comfortable it is. The reaction can fade over time, but you can still see some of the anticipation or the memory of the discomfort. However, Joe’s reaction was raw and current. He was telling Sally loudly and clearly that the saddle wasn’t right. Like so many people in her position, she had trusted the ‘experts’ rather than herself and her horse. Most owners could work out what their horses are telling them if they allow themselves to listen.

  It was particularly uncomfortable for him to be mounted, as the weight in the stirrup caused the saddle to dig into his back even more on the other side. He tried to communicate this by moving away from the mounting block unless he was held by someone on the ground. Once the rider was on board, he was gentlemanly enough not to try to dislodge them, but he was determined he wasn’t going to go anywhere. I was not about to make him.

  Joe came to Moor Wood for several weeks. Sensitive and intelligent, he went through the usual processes with a sort of disdainful good grace. Tarpaulin work was a little beneath him, and long-lining, after his horrific accident, clearly worried him, but introduced to it slowly, he overcame his fear. Sally and I led him up and down the steep Cotswold hills, and he gradually began to take an interest in his surroundings. His reluctance to go forward melted with the miles and soon we found our legs unable to match his enormous stride. Pennie Hooper, our massage therapist, began to smooth out the knots accumulated over years of tension, and he visibly softened. There was still a long way to go, but he was starting on the road to recovery.