The Daily Dumb

[TheDBYC]

Scrolling through new posts on a FB board for riding instructors & came across a doozy with important words of wisdom including:

If you think tying a leg up on one is cruel… don’t send it to training here

If you think that lunging circles is going to ruin your unicorns hocks… don’t send it to training here

If you feel the need to tell me what I need to do to get sparkles going… don’t send it to training here

If you can’t handle the PROCESS it takes to get one to stand… don’t send it to training here

If you can’t handle me being rough on your kid because I would rather NOT see them hurt… don’t send them to train here. "

That last one is especially ironic given the pics of kids riding all over tarnation with nary a helmet in sight on the poster’s profile page.

Idk. I get that western riders often have different training needs & goals than english. At the same time, I’ve owned several horses standing 19+hh & weighing north of 2000 lbs & successfully taught all to stand by…oh, idk. Showing them how to stand quietly. They used to doze off.

I’ve also never had a horse, even pulling horses with a mess o lines & traces & biothane strap goods crossing between them multiple times, get tangled in a rope. The fear of which the author of the post uses as a justification for these snippets & the rest of the epic stupidity on parade here. Maybe I’ve been lucky. Or maybe…again, I don’t know…I’M CAREFUL ABOUT NOT LEAVING RANDOM ROPES AND OTHER SH-T LOOPING ALL OVER THE PLACE!!!

I read this post at 7:30am and immediately decided that was enough internet for one day, thank you.

[endlessclimb]

One of the new boarders, after my young mare kicked up at a fly on her belly.

“Oh, that’s a thoroughbred thing. All thoroughbreds kick.”

Say what?

[shiloh]

They might have saved everyone a lot of trouble and headaches if they simply said “Don’t send anything to train here.”

There. Fixed that.

[TheDBYC]

Too true! Lol. Really wanted to reply “Don’t worry. I ain’t coming by your little Adequan/IRAP injection proving grounds, lady.” But I was good & made myself get off FB.

She actually had a few reasonable points buried down in there, like not expecting a horse to be perfect without being willing to put in the work to be correct yourself. And I do get where working western sometimes requires certain ground manners instilled to a level & duration beyond that required in other disciplines. Yet, having owned several horses over the years that earned their own hay $$$ & had heavy duty crowd safe ground manners, I never found instilling those manners to be remotely the huge honking ordeal this person seems to make it into. It just took patience & a firm, friendly attitude. Or maybe it’s my black magick, horse mind-bending Reiki skillz

The other point I think she misses is that you also want them to be able to think things through independently – there’s no way to adequately desensitize a horse to every possible occurrence. Our old Percheron nearly gave me a heart attack once getting himself into a 1 in a million pickle:
We rented a property that had been a breeding farm & had a run in divided in half by steel tube panels that continued the division of the stud alley outside. Percheron got sick of the little OTTBs, somehow squeezed into the 2.5’-3’ chute formed by the board & batten wall & steel tube panels, and threaded his way to the end of the space – around two right angles for a distance of at least 50’.

Like any rational horse owner confronted with this “what the heck” situation, I freaked out. . But I had no one else to pick up my human children from preschool, so I jumped in the car & made the 20 minute trip over the mountain. On the way I frantically called everyone I could think of that might remotely be of aid, telling them to come over, there was no time to explain, b& I needed help tearing down the (expensive, very solidly built) board & batten wall of the shed to rescue sweet old Prince, dammit!

By the time I made it back home with the kids I had everyone from the vet, a neighbor, a construction worker friend, and possibly large animal technical rescue on standby. In the paddock stood an amazing sight, though! The old Percheron in all his farm chunk woolie grey Yeti-like glory, calmly munching on the round bale. I leapt from the car “OMG! YOU’RE OUT!! YOU’RE ALIVE!!!” Completely unimpressed, he sighed & continued to munch his hay as he regarded the arrival of his crazy human caretaker (me) & then the vet.

He was perfectly fine. Never even broke a sweat according to the vet. Near as we could tell, once he got bored he calmly & methodically backed himself out the 50’ navigating the two right angles handily. No one taught him how; who the heck would’ve ever foreseen this?? Being used to the confined space created by the carriage shafts skimming his sides no doubt helped. I’m fairly sure he’d never had to bend his body around a fixed right angle, though. He managed to extract himself by virtue of having been taught to use advanced problem solving skills independent of human aid. He actually seemed to think the whole thing was funny, the jerk!

[shiloh]

Sometimes you have to wonder who knows better - the horses or us, right?

[Postandrails]

Something kind of similar happened to me. At least similar enough that it reminded me of what happened. One day I found my labrador wedged between the garage wall and a solid fence. The gap was pretty narrow and got even narrower the further in he went. I don’t know how long he had been stuck there, and I’m pretty sure he would have figured things out when he got hungry enough. While trying to work out how to get him out I realised that I had already taught him to “get back”. This dog was so clingy that I used to often tell him to “get back”, ie give me some space.

I started just saying “back”, “get back” and lo and behold he started backing up. He looked mighty proud of himself when he got out.

There was also the day that builders managed to place new boards along the bottom of my house, with the dog trapped underneath the house. I pulled one board off and told him to lay down, which he promptly did, and I dragged him out by the back legs.

I miss that dog.

[endlessclimb]

I have cameras at my house. I lie to everyone and say it’s a security system but really I just want to check on my dog.

One day I couldn’t see her on the cameras for hours. I was so nervous on my way home from work, worried she had gotten out the gate somehow and wandered off. I’m backing up my driveway, and I hear her just WAILING. I open the gate… nothing. Where the eff is this dog?

She was stuck… behind the trash cans. Best guess is that she was chasing a ground squirrel or something and wedged herself back there. It was 90 degrees out, thank God she was OK. But what a moron…

[Bluey]

Yesterday we were hanging some gates around the cattle pens.
A friend keeps some practice roping steers here.
We look over and one steer has his head stuck thru the panels and can’t get it back.
He was not very cooperative but we got him loose.
Went back to our gates and some time later, there that same steer was, again hung on the panels:

[shiloh]

Because the first time was so much fun?

[RMJacobs]

I have to chime in on the stuck critters. I had a cat for 13 years. I never meant to keep him, took him only to keep someone from drowning him, but somehow I never even tried to find him another home.

I came home from work one day and there was a disembodied cat yelling somewhere. It was echoing through the ductwork of my townhouse (which should have been a hint). My husband says he searched for this cat everywhere and could not find him, thought he’d gotten out but then the yelling started. He checked under the front deck, in the garage, under the hood of the car that was parked in the garage, you name it, he checked it. He knew I’d be furious if he lost my cat.

He mentioned (rather off-handedly) that he’d had the air conditioning guy out that day. The inside unit was in an upstairs closet, and there was a space under the filter that was perfect for, say, a silly Persian cat. Sure enough, that’s where he was.

Rebecca

[JBCool]

I managed to fall off the horse trotting a beginner/warmup crossrail yesterday. Yep. Trotting jumps isn’t his favorite thing, but he’d already cantered it well and was just trotting to it so evenly that I kinda forgot to tell him to leave the ground, so he just-so-evenly trotted into it. Then stuck his head down to see how he was supposed to get over it. I was lying on his neck between his ears so I just “dismounted” while I had the option of landing on my feet.

[eightpondfarm]

stuck ewe…

Every day i have to check on the sheep… almost never a problem. Day-before-yesterday i heard a sheep…somewhere ‘off over there’. Well, good thing she was noisily calling me or i’d never have found her! Head stuck through the wovenwire. i first tried to pull her out but i couldn’t pull and turn her head at the same time…plus she was working against me, pushing into the fence as i was pulling (WHY do they always do that!!!) anyhow, i had some pruning shears with me and cut a wire and got her out. There’s always something…

[Alterration]

I had a goat with horns that was pretty good at getting herself out when she got stuck, until one day she stuck her head through the fence into the temp hay shed that we had and pissed off a nest of bald-faced hornets. The hornets were stinging her face, but her horns were preventing her from pulling back directly, and her normal routine of leaning into it to detangle her horns wasn’t working because she was panicking.

That was fun.

[skydy]

[endlessclimb]

Oh god that sounds horrid. And then trying to spray the wasps with her head right there sounds double horrid.

How did this one turn out?

[Alterration]

We managed to dodge stings and push her head back through the fence. Then a whole bunch of wasp spray. Her face was pretty swollen for the evening but she survived Alpine goats are tough!

[B_and_B]

Ah yes, cats and duct work! This house has in a part of it an ancient (1890’s) gravity hot air system, been out of service for a century. But the vertical shafts and the huge horizontal basement ducts are still mostly in place. One of the cats we had at the time got into the basement and fell into the horizontal ducts through a rusted section. Cue disembodied yowls throughout the house. Including through a vent we didn’t know about, under a rug! We eventually resorted to pulling down most of the basement structure and letting the cat figure its own way out. Which it did. Covered in rust, dust, and who knows what to the point that a black cat was sort of ginger in color.

[Vyce]

The first few weeks I leased my mare, I put her western saddlepad on backwards. (and I was so so careful with checking and dpuble and triple checking all her tack to make sure everything fit and was positioned just right). Only realized it when I got a few jokes about riding backwards or I need to flip my saddle around.

[Spudsmyguy]

Not my daily dumb but I see this time and again by people who should know better. Case in point, I was boarding a young horse this one summer and asked them to put on her fly mask when turning out. I come to the barn and no fly mask. When I asked, they said they couldn’t get it on her. Turns out they were approaching her from the front and putting it up over her head so of course she’s going to raise her head to avoid it. I went to her side and easily put it on and they were floored.

Recently, a woman was trying to bridle her horse, same situation, approaching the horse from the front and thinking the horse is going to lower it’s head. Horse was not having it. After trying several times with no success (duh), I asked if I could show her an easier way by doing it from the side. She never thought of that and was thankful to learn a new way.

I see people do this with halters, blankets, all manner of things and wonder why the horse won’t lower its head for them.

[eightpondfarm]

when i’m training a mustang into a halter i do two things first. Get them to put their nose through a loop on a bunch of different ropes and strings, then anywhere through an actual halter (don’t care what hole, just through the thing itself, somewhere). Meanwhile, i also practice placing all kinds of halters -with jangley buckles, rope halters, old bridles and dangley reins… over their poll. Then i teach them to nose-dive into a halter for a carrot. When it comes time to actually halter them they are literally falling head-first into it. My horses can be dressed from the front or either side.

edit: sorry for OT, i know it’s not Daily Dumb