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JULY 2006 • VOLUME 11 • ©HORSES For LIFE™ Magazine
For me, It all started about 10 years ago with a little yellow horse, a horse that had been mishandled if not to say abused for most of his life. His body was a mess, his mind was one continuous stream of defense based responses and to ride him was like riding 13 different horses, all agreeing on only one thing – attack was the best line of defense. And if that failed, evade, evade, evade…. Juno, as I came to call him, had been placed in my care, as far as I could tell, almost as a joke. His owner was fed up and had given up on him. Her trainers and riders showed him nothing but contempt, and he returned the favour in kind, tenfold. Biting, kicking, bolting, bucking…Well, I was new in town and looking for a ride, so I was willing and keen enough. I ignored the chuckles and long slanted looks and went to meet my new mount… Long story short, he and I got along just fine, somehow I connected with him right away and he never did hurt me like he had others. I never did get a buck out of him and if anything had a little trouble getting all 13 horses to agree to move forward at more than a jog – they seemed to prefer to go in all directions at once, and slowly, at that. Canter in either direction was a disunited mess, and using his topline was out of the question, according to all 13 committee members. A soft and elastic contact meant he didn’t throw his head for 3 strides, and a good ride was when we accomplished and maintained something more than a jog with relative ease. One by one I dismantled his manifold defenses, from the ground up. In the meantime, I found a job as assistant to a staunch ‘classical’ dressage trainer, and was relieved when eventually Junos’ owner allowed me to move him to my trainers facility. Not only would it be time saving, but I was convinced getting him out of the hostile environment could only further my cause. We commenced with lessons with my trainer. Holding to classical ideals, absolutely no gimmicks or gadgets were ever involved, no matter how tempting they might have been – he had already seen most every one of them anyway, as a large mass of scartissue and an obvious break at C-3 attested to. Canter remained a mess, it was cause for exhilaration if we got as little as 5 true strides before he broke to the piggly-wiggly. Trot was still an education in evasions and though contact improved as he learnt to trust my hands and the soft white rubber bit, connecting one end to the other seemed a very long, long way off. {/br}
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