Pale Horses

J is on serious probation. Yesterday, he took a kick at DH. DH is fine, but not amused. I was not amused when I received the following text message at the office yesterday: Am ok. J very bad horse.

If he’s the first one home, DH has kindly taken to letting the horses out onto pasture in the evening. A couple of weeks ago, DH, I and the horses had some lessons with the crop to enforce boundaries while the gate is being opened. Everyone had kept a nice respectful distance since then so I thought we were in good shape. Yeah, not so much.

J is not a beginner’s horse. He will seek out the first sign of pecking order weakness and use it to his advantage. It is an unforgiving personality trait that until now I’d thought was only an issue under saddle. He has only ever been handled by experienced horse people but I never in a million years would have guessed that he would actually try anything like this.

I marched out to the paddock last night muttering something about a come to Jesus meeting. DH followed concerned that J would try the same with me. Oh, he won’t pull that crap with me, I responded. How can you be so sure? DH asked seeing visions of me trampled beneath gleeful bay hooves.

In my muttering, I tried to explain that this manipulative buffalo of a warmblood horse would never try that with me because he knows that his world would come to a screeching, noisy, painful halt the second he let the thought of me and kick enter into the same hemisphere of his walnut shell brain. This would be swiftly followed by a blurry vision of a pale horse, its rider Thanatos and the Hell that follows behind.

How do we convince animals that are 10 times our size that we have this kind of power? How do they know the difference in body language? What gives us away?

All went fine when I went to let the horses out. I took the dressage whip but fixed J in his beady little eyes before I went to the gate. He knew the gig was up and behaved like a gentleman. He and the pony, Banderas, made a couple of meager attempts to approach before I’d cleared the way. He quickly decided that he was a very patient pony and didn’t need to come anywhere close to the gate while I was there. DH meanwhile was twitching outside the paddock asking why in the world they didn’t do that for him.

So, now I am left with a quandary. We either need to ensure that DH isn’t involved in the horses at all, J in particular or I need to help train him, a newbie, safely in the Way of the Pony.

I have some ideas for supervised ground exercises with J in halter to help him learn that he needs to listen to DH, but am looking for some good beginner’s books that would enforce authority and explain horse communication. I have a hard time dissembling my horse sense into something that I can verbalize. Anyone have any recommended reading for DH?

I’m not a huge Parelli fan, but open to thoughts there if people think the exercises might be useful for an inexperienced handler. The Lyons book I have assumes a bit too much horse sense; the Cherry Hill Understanding Your Horse is a good start but looking for some additional ideas.

P.S. Turns out that the pale horse in the Book of Revelations actually was referred to as a green horse in the original Greek. Somehow a sage green sickly horse doesn’t quite have the same ring.

Tags: bad behavior, horse, pale horse, pony, rushing the gate, Thanatos