Excellent. Glad to hear it.
While I agree with the above, I also think that dangerous is a relative description. Horse behavior that looks dangerous to some, is not always seen as dangerous by others – nor is it actually dangerous.
Using the horse in my posts as an example, his behavior didn’t frighten me at all, whereas it might have scared a lessor experienced person a lot. I saw his behavior as a curiosity – not dangerous – because I’ve spent the better part of my adult life with on-track and OTTB’s that exhibit all sorts of seemingly dangerous behaviors that in reality are par for the course. You just get so used to attending to and working around these behaviors that ‘being scared’ isn’t in your vocabulary. To a point…
I remember this one horse at the track that Howard Tesher trained. His name was Fireman. You couldn’t go into his stall without a pitchfork in your hand. This horse wanted to kill people. And Mike Sedlacek trained a horse that would lie in wait at the back of its stall and lunge out and viciously bite any passerbys. He got me once when I wasn’t paying attention, and I have a still have a scar on my shoulder from that horse. Could these two horses ever be rehabbed? Maybe not. But in the right hands it’s possible.
In my later years when I had my own TB training farm I often thought about Fireman and Mike’s vicious biter – wondered how they would have turned out if I had the chance to work with them in a farm setting in my round pen. Yes, I would have jumped at the chance to try.
Here’s a snippet of a 1983 interview with Mike Sedlacek. PTSD? – or just plain bad memories from a trauma:
[I]The chestnut gelding named Knucklehead Smith poked his head out of the stall to say hello yesterday morning, but when someone reached out to stroke his nose he drew back fearfully.
‘‘Aw come on, Knuck,’’ said Mike Sedlacek, who owns and trains him. ‘‘He’s like that. He’s sweet as they come, but he’s timid. He hasn’t been exposed to a lot of racing. He’s an aggressive runner but he’s kind of scared of everything except horses. Maybe it’s because he’s had such a funny life. I really don’t know.’’
There’s a lot about the personality of horses like Knucklehead Smith that even the best of trainers can never understand. Some of it stems from traumatic incidents that can never be undone…
There’s a colt named World Appeal who hesitates every time he hits a certain part of the backstretch where an alligator once crossed his path during a morning workout in Florida. There was Cassaleria, who lost an eye falling down in his stall and turned into a claustrophobic who needs an open-air stall. Johnlee N’ Harold was stranded on a small patch of high ground for two days when the farm he was born on was severely flooded. After that, he would panic every time it rained.[/I]
That’s a great update. Thanks!
