At a clinic:
One teen to another:
“What breed is her horse?”
“It’s a Holstein”
Note: this was NOT a b/w horse
@sascha When I had my TB in a show barn all horses had blankets with hoods. We called them Pigs In Space*
*you gotta be Muppet Show-age to get the reference
@Bluey Trainer was on to something.
Friend’s DH had a pair of Belgians.
We watched them one day, noses down, walking slowly after a cat in their pasture. Cat was in no hurry.
Friend told me:
“They’re chasing the cat.”
Maybe in their little peabrains they were moving at the speed of light?
I thought of another. This one is funny. One day some years ago I had my Clydesdale and a friend’s Hackney pony tied to my trailer at a small show. A non-horse-person woman walked by with her kids and asked if they were a momma and her baby horse. My friend and I suppressed some giggles and explained that they were both boys and of different breeds. (In the woman’s defense they were both bay, with white stockings and blazes, and the pony was rather, um, stocky…) We then invited the woman and her kids over to pet them. My friend and I still laugh about my Clydesdale and his “son.”
@Laverne77 Same!
I had a Huge - 17’3 - buckskin WB gelding & his minion: 13H bay Hackney Pony gelding.
Regularly turned out in my pastures that face the road.
There’s a Mexican-owned barn not far from me that has a Friesian stallion & some PRE/Azteca mares they breed. I see the babies in the fields every Spring.
One of the guys who works there used to ride down the roads & pass my place.
I was outside on one occasion & he stopped to chat.
He asked me if the pony was the WB’s foal
Snobby woman at a boarding barn sent her friend out to ride her horse for her. She didn’t like any of us and only rode her horse at a straight run down the trail and back. She never cooled the horse properly. So, she sent some random friend of hers to ride for her while she was on vacation. The woman was struggling to put the bridle on. She had slipped it over the horse’s ears and was trying to pull the bit over the mare’s nose to put it in her mouth. I stopped and helped her. The mare was a saint through it all. The crazy owner yelled at me for ‘interfering with her horse’. She was really touchy about any of us touching her horse. Months later, the horse had laminitis and we called the owner. She was mad then, too. She called the vet out, but said we must have caused her horse to founder by ‘bothering her’. No, it certainly wasn’t the way she rode the poor mare over hard ground. Poor horse. Ignorance and more ignorance.
Oof yikes. We have some real morons at the moment, but nothing like that.
I did have a lady tell me (after she couldn’t get her horse in a trailer for over 2 hours, and refused to take the blanket off the drenched in sweat horse) that “she’d been in horses a long time, ya know”.
Yeah, lady. 25 miles wide, and about an inch deep, eh?
Hoo boy. In a bout of what I suppose was hormonally induced amnesia, I decided that pulling competitions would be much safer than riding while my kids were tiny. Enter one highly fractuous team of Belgian geldings, aged 5 & 6. I feel qualified to assure that trainer that an 18.2hh, 2000 lbs horse can pull off stupid tricks with the same lightening speed of a 11hh Shetland if he is fully committed to the project. You just don’t have to brace for the Shetland pulling the barn down around you.
When I arrived at the barn a couple of weeks ago there were three people trying to load a pony in the trailer doing all the usual things - offering food, begging and cajoling, and of course, none of it worked. I offered to help and told them I would be able to get their pony in (using a body rope) but they declined said they’re fine. They were still trying to load when I left 2 hours later. I never said a word.
Some years ago I had turned all the horses out together and they were running around having a grand old time chasing each other. A car pulls up on the street and the woman inside asked if the were “mating” (?) I said no, they’re just having fun. I still get a laugh out of that.
I’m a yoga teacher & Lyme patient & work with other riders coming back from injury, illness, etc. I belong to a few FB riders’ groups that are related to that. Got sassed by a “professional show jumper who has studied with all the top riders” this morning on one such FB group after I dared to tactfully correct the (flat out wrong) advice she was giving another poor, anxious, piled-on woman.
“You DON’T see the top riders doing X.” Spoiler alert #1: yes, they do X. A 5 second Google search on show jumping returns 50+ pages of photos of the top jumpers in the world doing X. Spoiler alert #2: this woman is not a professional show jumper. Except maybe by the same technicality I could call myself a professional dressage rider for having been paid $20 to ride a rehabbing PSG horse around at a walk when the trainer was too busy to do it.
I just replied ok with a smiley emoji because it isn’t worth an argument. Always baffles me why people will spout off wild claims on FB, of all places, where it is ridiculously easy for others to tell they’re lying. People are strange.
Trailer loading is my “thing”. I can get damn near any horse on a trailer. Seeing people beg and plead and cry and cajole drives me nuts.
One guy had been trying to load his horse for two DAYS. I got the horse on in less than 2 minutes.
One very nice girl was trying to load her OTTB to go home from a show for probably 4 hours. Someone was “helping her” and had a chain on the nose, on the gums, etc. The horse was becoming more and more violent. The “helper” finally quit. It took a little longer with that one because he was so traumatized (first thing I did was ask for a regular lead rope, get all those chains and crap off of him), but he was on the trailer in 30 minutes when I realized his muddy feet slipping on the mats were the reason he didn’t want to get on.
Another was a young hunt horse who wouldn’t get on this semi-sized box that loaded from the side. The hounds were already in there, but the young horse was going to be alone and he was not willing to do it. I loaded my mare and then loaded him, then took my mare out. Problem solved!
I’m not ooshy gooshy to horses when it comes to trailers and loading. I have no problem with shanks and/or a good spank on a horse who is being belligerent about it. I’m just clear, and know exactly when to release and let the idea “simmer” for a minute while their wheels turn. My horses load - first try, every time, every horse, no matter what.
Now that I’m done preening myself, back to the topic at hand. Trailer loading brings out the worst in horsemanship, I think. Flaunts the beginners and abusers alike.
Someone on Shite Eventers posted a still image progression of the Keystone Kops mayhem that ensued after the humans involved missed the seating the hook. The horses ended up in tandem glaring back at the humans & the guy with the whistle standing there jaw dropped & clearly contemplating his life choices up to this event.
I love em! Only downside is everything gets so $ for them. I’d have to learn to shoe if I got another pair. Just finding a farrier willing to work on them is a challenge!
If you lived near me -NW IN - I could point you in several directions.
Farriers for both Working Drafts & the Show Hitch.
But agreed, everything Supersized gets pricy!
Believe it or not, I ended up using the guy that shoed the caisson horses at Arlington the first couple times! Eventually found someone in PA that did a nice job & had better availabilty. But farriers that know how to/want to work on beast master horses are far & few here.
Amen!
Call me Dumb for not going ballistic on the “help”, but many (20+) years ago, when DH & I got our 1st trailer - 2H aluminium straightload with ramp - as soon as we had the hitch/brake controller installed on the tow vehicle, we eagerly tried loading my TB.
This horse had loaded easily for the whole 3yrs I owned him & probably before as he was OTTB - never raced, but ponied & traveled with trainer/owner.
On anything from an old 2H so tight the buttbar made an impression, to commercial 12H semis. We used him to get reluctant loaders on: load TB, load horse #2. EZPZ.
Except he was NOT getting on our new trailer.
Not violent, but a couple steps up the ramp, peer inside (very light), then back off the ramp & PLANT.
So we made it a weekly project.
After we rode we’d hitch the trailer & spend time loading. He’d get as far as 3/4 on, then NOPE.
Being at a boarding barn, the “help” was abundant.
“Blindfold him” - he can still back with the blindfold on
“Hit him with a broom” - no forward motion produced, but he can kick at that annoyance pretty accurately
“Run a longe line around his butt” - and he sat on it
Add the stress of a gathering crowd of “helpers” & you can imagine…
The crowning moment was when some obviously drunk guy pulled into the yard & offered his wisdom.
“Who knows this guy?” I asked - pretty near the end of my rope.
Answer: nobody
Total asshat volunteered.
That was my breaking point & I told everyone to Go AWAY!
Shoulda done that a lot sooner.
I still have PTSD in trailers thanks to one trailer loading episode. I was trying to help a friend get a young 2yo OTTB on the trailer (I was only 16 at the time). After about twenty minutes I had her on, with minimal fuss (and she was relaxed). I planned on backing her out and repeating, however, the “helpers” behind the trailer slammed the door shut on me with the filly, in one of those tiny 2 horse straight bumper pulls, with no escape door or no escape…except the back door which they had slammed shut and already latched shut. So when they slammed the back door shut, the filly jumped on me and started panicking. It felt like I was trapped in there yelling for 30 minutes, probably was only stuck in there a total of 2 or 3 minutes (seemed like an eternity with a rambunctious panicked 2yo TB all over me, but they couldn’t get the back door open because the filly kept setting back on it, and then leaping forward onto me. They finally got it open and we both tumbled out.
To this day I will not load a horse on a trailer without an escape door, or a way to go under a front bar and be somewhat physically separated. I’m now 36 and even after all of these years, I still have the same panic at times. Now if I have “helpers” I let them all know what the game plan is ahead of time (Do not shut the door until x, y, z, do not pick any slack up on the line until I tell you to, etc). I micromanage my trailer loading especially with people helping, because of that experience.
Some of the loading stories I could tell you I have seen through the years…some are doozies. One involved a horse who eventually was run down a concrete barn aisle, hit with an electric cattle prod, to “encourage him” to get on the trailer. Or the neighbors who decided to try and drag their mini donkeys on the trailer with their lawn tractor by the halter…the donkeys won that day (and thankfully were not injured in the process).
