ALERT! For all you non-horse people, skip this post as it won't make sense.
I just got back from a horse show today. If you're a horse person and not the kind that ALWAYS gets the best placings, you know that a show is where you take your best, most talented horses, your prettiest tack, and your fanciest clothes to a different place, then take forever making your horse look perfect so he can enter the ring and forget what he's supposed to do. Then you watch as some random person (who you're SURE must secretly be a professional/robot/superhuman) take home the blue ribbon that you spent so much time preparing to get. I shall now tell one of my... interesting show stories.
I ride a horse named Jack. He's a pretty cool horse-all black, muscular, not the tallest but makes up for it in every other category. His only problem is that he's a little too fast... or at least that's how he is at home. (We've actually had practices that would have impressed the judges at Nationals.) However, the show is a new place with different sights to see, and Jack tends to get confused by such terrifying things as lights, music, railing, and the rider who he's ridden with countless times. Our first class was on Thursday, and it was, in simple terms, a disaster. Jack hadn't been out of his stall since he got there on Tuesday, and he attempted to canter at every chance he got and avoided the rail as if it had spikes and lasers that would kill him if he got too close. Regardless, we ended up in 4th place out of seven. After the class, I told Jack to calm down over and over and over, trying to get it into his head. And it worked... too well. In our second class on Friday (April Fool's Day), we entered the ring nicely enough, at an unusually slow trot (though I didn't complain). The class was going well, and I thought we might do better. The weapons had been detached from the railing, and Jack was holding the trot very well. All that changed when we were asked to canter. I touched him with my heel, which is usually enough to send him flying. But not then. He hesitated for a second, then took off on the WRONG LEAD. It should be noted that he was almost completely sideways when this happened. I slowed back to a trot and nudged him again, but by now he was too confused to step off. It took another lap to get him into it again, and what did he do then? He took off. On. The. Wrong. Lead. Frustrated, I went back to a trot and asked again. However, he was now even more confused and kept trotting even with me kicking incessantly at his side. At the other side of the ring, we were asked to extend, and I wasn't even cantering yet. By the time he was speeding up again, the announcer told us to walk. One horse wouldn't stop and had to leave the ring, then we reversed and began the same thing again. And the most annoying thing of all? This time, he was perfect. It's almost like he was messing with me. Yep-my horse was playing a joke. At the end of the class, we got the last place ribbon that I had expected, and Jack went treatless that night.
The moral? Horses have times when they're just as hard-headed as us humans. Also, never ride on April Fool's Day and expect good results.
-Xenon
No comments:
Post a Comment