Flying!

Oh hey, I haven't posted in half a week. If I don't write it down as soon as it happens, I forget to blog.

Thursday was an off day. Friday I had lunch with ~C down in south Reno, and it was a perfectly nice day - sunny, a few big pretty clouds, not too windy, about 60 degrees. So I headed north to ride Dixie, and either the wind came in with a vengeance or it was just locally windy up there. We boldly headed out together in 20 mph winds with gusts of about 35. Not as impressive as WHP's Wind but plenty windy for Miss Ox-Head. She was a total brat headed out, and I actually took pity on her when we got to the end of the road. We gracefully turned around and I gave the tiniest squeeze to indicate that she could walk home now, and that evil cow exploded and tried to bolt home. That just made me mad, so we careened through the sagebrush turning tight circles having a big fight. When she finally realized I was totally serious and I was not going to let her run home, she walked quite nicely back to the corner. Then we turned right instead of left, and I made her go up two hilltops. At a brisk walk, no less! Then she had to walk nicely back home. I think we turned for home three or four times before she quit trying to explode. Every time she'd start to tense up, ready to set her head and bolt home, I'd spin her around and we'd go further away. Finally, we turned for home and she kept her ears on me and her neck loose, and we walked very calmly home.

Saturday I had to go shopping so I didn't ride. I did stop at the REI garage sale, and I picked up a Garmin Forerunner 205 for $35. It needs a charging station, which I've ordered, but even so it was a steal! I may never know Dixie's heart rate, but I will soon know our distance, time, and MPH on our trips. That'll help a lot.

Sunday we all did a quick ride down to the Mines, and Dixie was quite well behaved. Better than some of the other horses, honestly. Then we humans headed over to the Clinton Anderson thingie, and S won the door prize! She now has one of each of his DVDs, and that man has put out like 30 DVDs. She is going to loan me the 6-disk gaited horse DVD, so we'll see what he has to say. Otherwise, he was really entertaining and I picked up a few new ways to think about things, but nothing earthshattering.

There's outliers like Nevzorov and those horse-tripping Mexican cowboys and Alexandra Kurland*, but most everybody else is saying the same thing in different ways. Pressure the horse til you get the desired behavior, then release instantly. Take breaks so the poor thing can calm down. Don't get tense. Clinton Anderson isn't saying anything new - he says the same stuff, in his own words, in an entertaining way. And that's good; the more different ways of pressure/release I see, the better I will get.

Today I did a double ride - Dixie and Cersei and I headed part way down the mines trail, then we cut over some hills, then we came back up the end of the mines trail. She got nervous and rushed when we cut across the hill, but we got calmed down again before we got back on the trail. Then, since she seemed so soft, I let her go home as fast as she wanted. We racked up part of the trail, trotted up another part, and cantered on the shoulder of the road. Her canter feels like flying! I hope I can start adding speed work back in - I hope she doesn't blow up on me and want to run everywhere now.

Anyway, we cantered up part of the road, then I had her slow to a walk part of the way, then I let her trot a hundred yards, then we walked back home through our sagebrush obstacle course. Doing all those unpredictable serpentines around the bushes in the lot next to S's is really helpful for both of us. I have to pay attention and ask nicely, and she usually chooses to listen and cooperate.

I timed things just right, and S had just gotten home when we got back. She saddled Summer and we headed out for another short ride, down the scenic trail. Dixie did quite well for her second trip out. The second trip was all slow, so she was dry and cool by the time we got back.

I think it's going to snow this week. Yuck.

*Yall do realize I'm not comparing Mexican horse-trippers to clicker trainers, right? Just that those three are the farthest extremes of working with horses - all pressure from one, and no pressure from the two?

Odds and ends

Hey this is my 300th post! I've missed the other big-number posts, so I'm rather impressed that I remembered one.

I actually took some pictures of Dixie's LF the other day. I am notoriously terrible about remembering to take pictures of her feet. They're a bit flared and a bit flat, but my god her frogs look amazing.

Side view:


Here's January '08 for comparison. You can still see a sharp line of flaring from the pads. She was wild as a march hare and very touchy about her feet, so I didn't get any solar shots - her frogs were about 1.5" wide and half-rotted with thrush. I don't mean "half rotted" metaphorically, either - one half of one of her frogs was completely gone, just a stinking black hole.



She's plenty stoic. She stumbled a lot, but she never limped.

Beautiful frogs today:


Pretty well balanced.


*****

Had a lovely ride in the canyon today. We picked the canyon because there's no wind down there - bad in summer, good in winter. Dixie followed some and led some. She was pretty nervous the whole time, just because canyons make horses nervous, but she held it together really well. When she'd gait too far ahead of the others, I'd turn her to face them and wait til she sighed and chewed before we forged off bravely again. The climb back out of the canyon tired her out in a good way. We came back not sweaty but definitely a bit tired. Tomorrow I plan to ride her alone, down the short loop around the adobe house. I'm going to ride her down that loop every chance I get, til she's so bored with it that nothing startles her anymore. Then we'll add a little more distance or another new scary loop.

*****

I don't know why I started thinking about this, but it's been stuck in my head for a couple of days. Have you ever noticed how good horsepeople rarely blame the horse? It's always "she spooked and spun around, but I fell off because I wasn't balanced." Or "he refused the jump but I didn't line him up right." Or "she kicked me but I shouldn't have been standing there."

I don't think that's entirely a good thing. That line of thinking is how people (usually women, statistically) end up victimized. It's a weird double standard, that women who ride are usually so strong and independent, yet we make excuses every time our horses hurt us.

I don't think we should blame or punish our horses for doing things that injure us (with occasional exceptions). I don't really know what to think about this realization. I think I will be more cognizant that I am only making excuses for my horse's bad behavior. I don't need to blame myself when things go wrong in my non-horsey life; it's ok if it's someone else's fault. I guess that's my only conclusion.

Wildlife and Cow Junk

Last post from the Como trip!

I know there's a lot of deer down there - I see their tracks in the dirt all the time. Deer tracks are blase to me now though. (Live deer still leave me breathless with their wildness and beauty.) No deer track pictures for yall.

I do like raccoons though. They're pretty cute. I hear they're annoying as hell if you live in the suburbs, or I suppose if you're in the country and you don't keep your stuff secured. But really now, coon tracks are nothing but cute out in the wild. Little bitty hands!



And the Mystery Burrow! I don't know what lives there. I have yet to see any tracks (other than cow and deer tracks) in the dirt near the burrow, but something keeps the grass beaten back near the hole.

The barbed wire and the creosote fence post in the picture give a pretty good sense of scale.



Here's a close-up of the burrow. Fox? Rabbit? It's too small for a coyote.



Cow Junk.
It's got "Old Scratch" barely visible on the nameplate on the cylinder. That gave me something to google, and I discovered it's a cattle oiler. Apparently one fills it up with insecticidal oil and the cows ... walk into or under it. I think the diagonal things are like backscratchers that dispense the oil. I'm not sure how you convince the cows to go near such a strange looking thing - just further proof that horses are not remotely like cows, I guess. I'm going to make some inquiries and if I figure out how this thing works, I'll update the post.

Anyway, the antique cow equipment!



The other thing I wanted to point out about this picture - and this is going to be a big long horsey observation / rant - this is a prosperous, well kept "hobby" farm in Mississippi. That's what fences LOOK like down here. There's scrap metal propped up against the fence, and there's a giant (broken? off-season? yard art?) cattle oiler sitting out in the open. That's all perfectly normal for me.

I read and love FHOTD. I totally agree with her about 80% of the time, and I think maybe there's some possible excuse for the horrible horses she showcases the other 20% of the time. I think she, like any other really popular author, has an agenda and it's noble and she's mostly right. I just think that just about any time you make a blanket statement, you're wrong for some small percentage of cases.

I don't mean that FHOTD should stop publicly humiliating people for keeping horses in junkyards, or breaking out yearlings, or (ESPECIALLY) running your old horses through an auction because you can't afford to feed them and can't bear to put them to sleep.

But what you see in the background of the Cow Thing is not officially approved horse-safe fencing. Except - it is reasonably safe. Yeah, it's crappy wire that could slice my beloved horses' tendons. But it's a HUGE FRIGGIN PASTURE, with a herd of adult horses who know each other. The smaller the pasture, the safer the fences need to be.

And besides, I'm pretty sure a horse bent on self-destruction (or maxing out his owner's credit cards) could hurt himself in a padded stall. You can't prevent all possible bad outcomes. Everybody has to do his or her own cost/benefit analysis on life, all the time.

This is rather jumbled up in my head, and I don't think it's coming out right. What I mean is that you, each individual person, has to find a balance between infinite safety and pointless cruelty.

On fear

I think the secret to getting over one's fear of horses is to just do it. I mean, seriously, it just boils down to doing it, whatever the super-scary "it" is, and not overthinking it and getting paralyzed by it.

I'm not paralyzed by fear, like so many of my friends are, but fuck yeah I think some aspects of riding are terrifying. And I did so many of my own personal scary things yesterday. I just refused to think of the consequences and tried to enjoy the ride, and yknow what - I actually did enjoy the ride.

A group of yahoos headed out on their own trail ride a few minutes before we did. I really didn't want to ride with them, but James said it was fine. If we met up with them, we'd just pass them and go our own way. So I set the tone for the day by just trusting him. Turned out they'd left the property by the time we did, so we just went our own way from the beginning.

1) Foolish behavior in the road: James took Surprise and I took a very grumpy Rascal on a long ride today. We started off on a bad note - Rascal started hunching up and crow-hopping in the median of the highway. We got off the road and he kept doing it, so we both got off and James adjusted his bridle up a notch. It was definitely weird; we hadn't changed anything about his tack. The bridle fix seemed to do the trick so we headed off.

2) Road riding, esp. with shoes: We gaited on across the field and across the other highway and went up old Millington to get to the trails the long way. I posted about this route before - here's the google map of where Old Millington takes a bend but if you go straight you end up on the trails. I just sat balanced and refused to think about how much I hate riding on asphalt, with stupid metal shoes, with cars, past Horse-Eating Monsters. Monsters? Yeah, there's a couple of deadly mailboxes, then a lumberyard you have to pass, then a bridge, then a railroad crossing. It's lovely.

3) Muddy rutted trails at top speed: But we finally made the trails! Yay! Except that we'd had a thunderstorm about an hour before we saddled up, so there was standing water in all the ruts. And dear god the ruts, you've never seen such ruts. James is completely insane and he lead the way at a full on running walk through this maze of kneedeep water-filled ruts in the forest. I briefly thought about all those fragile ligaments in a horse's leg and then I just sat back and concentrated on not getting whiplashed by branches.

It was awesome.

Ten minutes in, I realized that neither horse was slipping like I thought. Two minutes later, I noticed just how much poison ivy was all around me. Oh well, that's what Zanfel is for. (Yes, it really does work and it's really worth the money.)

We rode upriver and I caught a lil box turtle for Stephen (but he didn't text or call me back so I let it go at the barn.) Then we went downriver and we tried to go out under Hwy 51, our normal way back to the barn. But the entire area under the bridge is still flooded, and it's snake mating time. We sat on the horses on a little bluff and watched the water for a couple of minutes before we saw a cottonmouth quietly swimming. So we turned around and went back the way we'd come in - back past the Monsters, across the highway, back to the barn.

When we got back in the field, we saw the yahoos headed back in. We all converged for the last bit of roadwork to get back to the barn. The horses were tired, but Rascal was still being a total choad. He wanted to GO and pass the other horses, so I let him - but then he broke gait and started cantering, so I pulled him back to a walk, so he got mad and started doing his baby bucks again. Oddly, it didn't scare me. It made me mad, but not scared. We got back on the property safely and I took Rascal in the arena to have it out with him.

He'd been a pretty good natured fellow for the week I'd been riding him, but it was clearly because he was letting me be a passenger. When James went fast, we'd go fast; when James slowed down, we'd slow down. Rascal's behavior had very little to do with what I cued him to do - he was doing what he wanted, which was to stay near "his human." And that was (and still is) fine with me. I know I'm not his human! But damn, the horse must respond to my cues. I'm the brains of the trail-riding team and we're going to die if he won't listen.

So we went in the arena. And Rascal was tired, but damn him, we gaited. Then we went out of the arena and past a Monster, where he spooked sideways. So we gaited, circled around the trees, and kept going past the Monster (some contraption of nailed-together pallets that sits near the arena) until finally Rascal would gait calmly past it. Then we gaited past his barn (dammithorsedon'tslowdown) over to my truck (gooooood boy), stopped, and I had him stretch out. Then I got off, told him how wonderful he was, untacked him, fed him cookies, and washed him off.

The whole ride should've been a lot scarier than it actually was, if you know what I mean. I just sat my ass down in the saddle, as correctly as I know how, and rode the horse. I didn't think about how we were both going to die, how I was going to die, how the horse was going to get horribly injured, or how I was going to look like an ass. I just rode. It was wonderful. I'm trying to hang on to that "shut up and ride" attitude.

More weirdness.

So this morning I parked my truck, noted the ghetto sled w/Earnhardt plate, went in to class and posted the previous entry. After class I told my friend about the car. He's also about to graduate law school, and he's a Christian rocker / band manager. He's got ear spacers, and his main crisis right now is having to take them out and look "normal." Anyway, I described the ghetto sled and he said, mysteriously, "Nascar fans are everywhere."

Maybe he watches race cars go around in circles on TV. Who woulda thought.

Anyway (Yes, I say that all the time and I probably should've named the blog "Anyway..."), my friend was telling me a story about her horse from years ago. He was "being ridden into mud that came up to his belly and he got stuck. I'm not sure how they got him out, but he hasn't been a huge fan of mud since." That reminded me of another Weird Redneck Story.

Jessica (I'd call her J, but I've got too many other J's in my Redneck Chronicles already, and I'm not organized enough to think up individual nicknames and keep track of them) had seven horses. One of them was a *really* fucked up padded stud, Power.* I mean, she'd jacked with his feet so bad that he couldn't walk normally much less gait. His rear pasterns would buckle with every fourth stride. I'm serious, he was constantly stumbling on his back legs. Before I started boarding, in the summer of '06 or '07, she took Power on a trail ride. In his pads.

You can't take a padded horse trail riding. You just CANNOT. If your padded horse walks through the mud there is a very real chance that he'll get stuck, and if he gets stuck and tries to pull his legs out he might YANK THE HOOF CAPSULE OFF. Padded classes at local horse shows are cancelled if the arena's at all wet, because this has happened too often.

Jessica went trail riding on her padded stud anyway. Just to prove that he's tougher than we think (1st alternate runner-up name: "Tougher than we think"), Power did not pull his hooves off in the mud. He sank instead. Power sank up to his stomach in some mud near the soybean field. Jessica jumped off before she sank with him and waited for him to yank himself out of the mud, then got back on and rode home. She hasn't, afaik, taken Power on a trail ride since then. Of course, she hardly rides him because he's a real dick of a stallion and she can't really handle him, but that's par for the course.

*Jessica, as far as I know, never deliberately hurt her horses. He was one of those "clean" padded horses, not a sored one. But she always got the cheapest padded farrier she could find, and she hardly ever rode Power. When she did, it was a full on cheap english saddle, gojo-on-the-legs, chains-on-all-fours SHOW. The cheap farriers kept doing weird things to his hoof angles and he ended up really high-heeled in the rear. I think. It's pretty hard to look at a padded horse and evaluate the hoof angles; they're all such slipper-toed Frankensteins in the front that it's hard to look at the rear feet objectively. Anyway - either from the (atypical) chains on the back legs or from the weird angles on the back hooves, Power gaited worse than any TWH I've ever seen, and he stumbled all the time. When he wasn't stumbling, he was hollering at other horses or trying to rear. Poor crazy stud.

I know my attitude toward other peoples' horses seems cold. I had to accept, really early on, that I could not save all the horses I saw. It's a hard moral choice, and I still wither on the inside when I see "mistreated" horses, but I cannot save them. It's like... if you really loved cats and really thought declawing was inhumane, but your friends were all getting cats and kittens and having them declawed. Do you alienate everybody around you by ranting about how declawing is evil? You can't rescue all those cats. Your friends cut their cats' toes off, yet they're taking adequate care of the cats - aren't the friends' cats better off than the scrawny disease-ridden stray cats you see? Yeah, I know people who sore their gaited horses. I know people who "just" pad their gaited horses. But those horses are adequately provided for, and they're not sold to the killers for $200. I save what I can save (Silky, Quinn) and I try to lead by example, and that's all I can do.

PS My two cats have forty evil claws of doom.