I purchased a 7 year old gelding at an Amish sale from an Amish man, something I generally would never do, but I was afraid he was going to slaughter. He rode through the ring well, ridden by 7 year old boys and he never batted an eye. Very, very well broke horse. I thought he would make a good gentle trail horse. So, I road him, maybe once a month, for the first year, by ourselves through the fields. One day I was going to ride him, yet, I had a bad feeling about him. His demeanor seemed worried . As I approached him with my saddle he became white eyed and I could sense his tension. It took 3 times to get the saddle on him and by that time, I had decided I wasn’t going to ride him. Instead, I put my foot in the stirrup and put some weight down. He immediately spun, kicked and missed my head by inches. He ran for 20 minutes, striking, rearing, kicking and dragging my Tucker saddle, banging it on fence posts, trees, etc. He was so wild and white eyed, it was unsafe to stay in the pasture with him. After 20 minutes, I tried to walk up to him but he flung the saddle and almost got me caught up in the stirrups and straps as he fled away again. Finally, after an hour, I felt brave enough to enter the pasture and “cut” him out of the saddle which was a mess. He was still terrified like he was being killed. What on earth do you think went through his mind? That particular day I was wearing black pants, a black coat and black helmet. Do you think I reminded him of something bad from his past or do you think he was sold because he wasn’t a mentally stable/safe horse? For the previous 2 months prior to this event, I had noticed him gazing way across the field and snorting at something, then act like he wanted out of the pasture. His temperament went from sane and solid to downright unsafe.
Did you ever get him vet checked?
Here on COTH we get a number of interesting stories similar to this about horses that have dangerous personality changes that turn out to be things like EPM or brain tumors or other degenerative diseases. Things that cause intense sporadic back pain.
Or maybe you trapped a wasp under his saddle.
From your story you seem to be suggesting it was a past trauma panic attack but I’d lean more to something medical.
With low end auction horses there is always a chance too that they have some dangerous propensity or medical issue. Why was such a well broke horse going to slaughter? Maybe because he has random explosive moments due to neck arthritis? Etc.
Also in your story I’m unclear what happened to.thr saddle. Did it slip around to his belly when you tried to mount? Otherwise why was it dragging and needed to be cut off? A saddle properly girthed up isn’t going to come off a loose bucking horse?
Also you say you only rode him in a field once a month for a year. So twelve times over the course of a year. This really isn’t enough to establish a relationship with a horse. Perhaps he is like this 50 per cent of the time, and you just didn’t get to see it before.
We had one young gelding do that, to our surprise.
He came from someone we had bought and sold to horses for years, so know the horse was properly represented as a future nice, calm safe ranch horse.
They had him for some time, horse had been giving lessons to kids, trail ridden and was a solid, gentle, uncomplicated willing type, was not going to be a star at anything, but good workman kind of sweet horse.
Here he started as described, he was a nice horse and learning well for the first weeks, then slowly seemed to just become more jumpy, to the point he was getting dangerously “lose your mind” spooky.
Once I had fed their hay in the pens, he saw or heard something and sold out in a panic, almost blindly running over myself and the horse I was standing by.
We could see him standing at high alert in the pasture, when others were happily grazing, ignoring him.
We feed as they did, he got along great with our other five geldings at that time, two oldsters and the others younger.
He lived outdoors in his previous home pastures just fine, but they are full of trees and not open country.
Our horses live out 24/7 on pastures a mile long they roam all day and night and there is no trees, horses can see for miles, way out two miles away the expressway with traffic and noises far off.
We think that was the key, this horse came here, started seeing a far off world that was scary to him, wildlife far off he could not quite be sure were not monsters, that other horses were not alerting or paid attention when he did and maybe that scared him even more.
He became a nervous wreck, we consulted with the seller, they took him back and said he was wired when he came, they turned him out for a few days and when they started working back with him he was much calmer and over a few days more he was his own self and never again had a bad moment all the time they had him.
We will never know why he could not relax here, to the point of being continuously over the top anxious, but glad he reverted to his own self once in a different environment.
We had something similar happen decades ago, a sweet four year old that was chased by a mountain lion and ran thru fences and after that didn’t even want to leave the pens, so scared to be back out there where is dangerous to little sweet horses!
We don’t think this horse ever had such happen, he he just got worse in general.
Wish horses could tell us, not that they are having a problem with something, as they do now, but also why.
With your horse, OP, I would start by a vet exam to be sure there is not something physical going on, then have a good trainer handle and if safe ride him and give you their opinion.
Try to stay safe, when horses lose their self-preservation sense they become dangerous to themselves and all around them, as you are experiencing.
Yes, that’s exactly how he began presenting about 10 months after I bought him. High alert, while he was in the pasture and always staring at the same wooded area across the road and through the field. It was so strange. I gave him away and told the guy, he is dangerous and to not sell him for someone inexperienced. Some horses are just not right and I think he probably wasn’t stable.
A couple of things come to mind.
If you had him for 10 months before he started exhibiting the freaked out behavior, then whatever caused it was probably something that began while you owned him.
That could include a veterinary condition (like EPM, for example) that developed over the 10 months; it might include a sudden infestation of hornets in his pasture; it might include some wild animal taking up residence in the woods beyond his pasture; if you have electric fencing or heated water buckets, it might include some random electrical zaps he’d been receiving that made him wary of anything touching him, etc.
I don’t think I’d immediately jump to a bad past experience that he flashed back to when you wore a black coat, pants, and hat.
I hope that the guy to whom you gave the horse is okay, as well as the horse.
Yep.
Assuming that the horse had “flashbacks” because of an outfit after 10 months of ownership is a tad unrealistic. And heavy on the anthropomorphism.
I suspect that this portion of the story is not a “PTSD” or “prior trauma” response. The poor creature was probably terrified and a saddle that was banging on trees and posts, getting caught on stuff, etc just made his terror worse. Have you ever seen a horse get loose while lunging? The trailing lunge line often makes the runaway horse worse.
That said: you had this “very, very well broke horse” (your words in your original post) for a year. He goes from fine to “white eyed” when you approached with a saddle. I would take a close look at your practices. Does your saddle fit? Do you tighten the girth too quickly? Does he have pain somewhere? Are you asking more from him than he is fit or capable to do? What is your feed program like? Is it suitable for this type of horse?
I wish you the best of luck.
Agree with the comments.
Could be the horse had some unsafe traits, which is why it was (perhaps medicated) and run through the auction. You really hadn’t worked with the horse much, all things considered, to determine its real character.
It could also have something medically wrong that had been brewing for some time. EPM, neurological issues, a brain tumor (yes, that happens) or vision changes are some possibilities. For instance, horses do get cataracts, sometimes at a fairly early age, and behavioral changes like staring at something that’s not really there can be the first clue.
I do wish you’d had the horse examined by a vet before passing him along to someone else, though. That would’ve been fair to both the horse and the man. Just sayin’.
10 months would be a looooong stretch for drugs wearing off but if only ridden once a month? Any prior training might.
Who did you sell him to? I cannot imagine anything good will happen to this horse. I also doubt he will ever be seen by a vet. He is likely already in the hands of a kill buyer. I guess you’ll never know why he acted that way.
In my part of the world, locoweed would be a consideration in situations like this, not the saddle part obviously but the horse’s increasingly disrupted behavior. Would be worth checking the plants in the pasture.
Oh, definitely, agree. Any drugs would’ve worn off ages ago. I guess I was thinking of pharmaceutical enhancements ensuring that the horse behaved through the auction. Then, with a lack of consistent riding, any tune-up or schooling the horse had to address behavioral issues might have worn off as well.
Something was clearly amiss. I hope the man who has him now treats the horse fairly and addresses any further issues properly.
For what it is worth, the third owner of my gelding (I tracked and contacted all his previous owners back to his breeder) put him into an auction (ranch horse --not the kind where horses go to kill buyers) because he was “hard to handle.” In protracted back and forth messaging, she told me the horse was a gift from her boyfriend (owner number 2) but they broke up when she got pregnant (she married the baby’s father) and “just didn’t have time to ride” for about a year. When she did ride the horse, she found him “hard to handle.” So she sent him to the sale --a broker picked him up (owner number 4) kept him a couple of months then sold him at a bigger auction to another broker (owner number 5) who kept him and worked with him doing cows, roping, cutting, etc and made a great video of him --he was then sold to ME at another auction. I ride him 5-6 days a week --nothing long, just a little mounted archery, check our fences, ride through the woods and look at the deer and turkeys. I would not describe him as “hard to handle” --just the opposite. He’s a great horse --BUT I ride him a LOT more than owner number 3 . . .
Are the Amish known to drug at their auctions?
It may be as simple as this horse going from one completely different life and management style to another. He was likely working a lot more regularly when owned by the Amish family, then suddenly he only gets one ride per month, if that. Some horses just need to stay in work to be manageable. Who knows what differences in feed, turnout, environment etc. which could also contribute.
The Amish don’t keep horses that aren’t useful - so most likely this one was working 6 days a week. And not lightly, either.
Or they sold him because he was too unpredictable, losing it at some times.
The saddle incident once he was in flight was maybe not what caused it, but that he was in flight before it happened and caused it may have been happening before, where he checked out mentally.
We had one feral horse that was overreactive like that, but not out of the blue, he just was like that all the time, bronky and rank and didn’t like anything in the world, not other horses or just anything, all was stressful for him.
We finally quit trying to gentle and ride him and tried to made a cart horse of him on a wild guess.
Surprising us all, he was confident and quiet in harness, even in heavy traffic.
Horses, go figure them! 
OP, I’m glad you weren’t hurt. It sounds like it was both scary and frustrating.
My driving pony, Salt, was a terrible riding pony. He spent his days dreaming up ways to frustrate and hurt my daughter. He never hurt her (not for lack of trying), but she though maybe it was a pain issue. She stopped riding him right around the time i knew I would have to retire my Hackney pony, Crackers, from driving fairly soon. So for grins and giggles, we tried training Salt to drive. It was a family effort, with me as the trainer and DH and DD as assistants. He took to it very easily, and may have driven in the past. He was a rescue, and we had no history on him. Anyway, he and I put a lot of miles on going around the neighorhood. He was nearly unflappable. It was so different from his actions under saddle.
Rebecca
You know, this makes alot of sense. The Amish do not keep horses around for pleasure riding, they use them as family transportation hitched to a buggy. OP may have bought a horse technically broke to ride but used primarily as a buggy horse and/or for light farm labor in harness. Only riding him once a month for a year then what sounds like a bad experience with a saddle sounds like a fresh, clueless horse, not an abusive past.
