Schooled in the Ways of the Barn

If you’ve ever been part of a large barn where everyone boards their horses, you know about this topic. Boarders’ barns are like school, where everyone has a reputation that follows them around like white on rice. I’m not talking about people’s reputations here, I’m talking about the reputation of horses. I’ve been a teacher so I know a little about this. When a kid in school gets a reputation with teachers, it follows the kid through all his or her school years. No matter what they tell you, teachers talk about kids, and all it takes is one teacher deciding that a kid is trouble, and no matter what, that kid will be trouble forever in school.

Albert the horse got branded as trouble pretty quickly. He started his career at the barn as a “schoolie,” a horse in the teacher’s herd that everyone takes riding lessons on. My husband Scott rode him on a few trail rides when he was a schoolie. It didn’t take long for Albert to diplay his insecurities. It started as a bad attitude and blossomed into bucking children off in lessons. But we saw something different in Albert. It’s a talented horse that can take the stress of different, inexperienced riders day after day. Albert wasn’t one of them. The more riders he had the more insecure he got until finally, he would just explode. So, when he went up for sale, we bought him, thinking that one rider would work for Albert.

Albert’s first trip to South Dakota for a week of riding and camping didn’t go so well either. Scott never had trouble riding him, but Albert’s insecurities didn’t go away, they just switched to a new source: other horses. First ride up the trail Albert kicked three or four other horses; one well-placed kick resulted in another horse with a bloody hoof mark on her chest. This wasn’t aggression, it was fear and insecurity. You could see it on Albert’s face. He was so confused and upset about his place in the herd he lashed out. But Scott got pretty good at changing Albert’s mind about kicking other horses. A leather bat that makes a big noise when you use it was applied to Albert’s neck every time he thought about kicking another horse. Albert is smart, it didn’t take him long to understand that thinking about kicking meant the bat. So he stopped thinking about it.

Scott and Albert in South Dakota. Notice the bat in Scott's right hand.

I am going to digress into a little horse training talk. I’m a teacher, remember, and anything about learning fascinates me. If Albert got the bat every time he kicked it would be too late. He’d already experienced the insecurity, it escalated into fear, he’s examined his options and KICK! The trick is to catch him as he’s experiencing the insecurity, before he’s started examining his options. Every tap of the bat changes his attention from all the other horses to his rider. The bat isn’t punishment, it realigns his thinking to pay attention to his rider instead of worrying about the other horses. As soon as Scott was able to catch Albert thinking about his insecurity, and change his mind, the kicking stopped. Now Scott rarely has to use the bat - he reconditioned Albert’s mind so Albert no longer worries about other horses.

This doesn’t work so well with people. Albert hasn’t kicked another horse for years. He’s never bucked when Scott is riding him. But according to all the people at the barn, Albert is trouble. Last year when we went to South Dakota, someone recommended that we tie a red ribbon on Albert’s tail to warn other riders that he kicks. When one of our friends wants to ride Albert, the teachers at the barn warn them away. We’ve had teachers tell our friends that if they want to learn to ride, they should ride a different horse. It’s like the kid at school who did a couple of dumb things in first grade and now a sixth grader, still hasn’t escaped his reputation. Applying the bat to folks at the barn to change their minds about Albert isn’t an option. So we ignore them. My sister is riding Albert now with great success. Albert is still insecure, but he’s learned to handle it. If only people were so easy.

Nemo, South Dakota

Since it started snowing here in Minnesota, we've been putting the final touches on our annual slide show set to music of the week we spend every August camped just outside of Nemo, South Dakota smack dab in the middle of the Black Hills National Forest, with our horses, riding the amazing trails in that beautiful country. Putting all those pictures to music for the friends who ride with us has brought back some great memories, thought I'd share a few here.

This is me sharing the love with my guy Scout. Didn't know if it would work out at the beginning of our relationship eight years ago, but he has become a great friend and trusted trail companion, going over every bridge, through every river or creek, and all the other things you want a good trail horse to do, and he does it all with an open mind and a willing heart.

Scout and me make our way down into a canyon on the Centennial Trail north of Nemo. The Centennial Trail runs over 100 miles through South Dakota's Black Hills, and the section that we ride, between Sturgis and Nemo, is especially rugged, only suitable for horses, and some of the most spectacular wilderness and scenery around.

My friend Nan and I stop for a picture. We've been to Nemo together for the last five years, had some great rides and campfire sing-alongs and nightcaps by the trailer door. It's fun to reminisce, and think about next year, as the snow blows around outside and I trade my trail riding in for cross country skiing for a few months.

Stick It In Your Eye

I spent the better part of the days before Thanksgiving teaching my horse Scout to let me poke him in the eye with my finger. It’s always his eyes, for some reason. There was the time he ripped his lower eyelid in two, and had to wear this goofy mask to prevent him from rubbing his stitches out as they healed. (Healing stitches are itchy!) He also had to be in a paddock by himself to prevent his horse friends from pulling his mask off for him.

Then there was the time his eye swelled and started weeping. This happens once in a while, and soaking his eye with cold water usually takes care of it, but on this occasion he continued to hold his eye at half mast even after the swelling went down. The vet found an ulcerated cornea, and Scout spent five days in the hospital having antibiotic cream squirted in his eye every hour to heal it.

This time when Scout’s eye didn’t get better with soaking, I was relieved to hear the vet couldn’t find any ulcers, so she prescribed an eye cream containing steroids, applied to Scout’s eyeball once a day for three to five days.

I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to apply eye cream to a horse’s eye ball, but let me tell you that Scout can get his head over eight feet in the air and keep it there to avoid cream in his eye. And how do you explain to a horse that a) the application of cream on his eye ball really won’t hurt, despite the alarming prospect of a finger full of cream in the eye, and b) it really will make him feel better in just a few days?

Scout knows the head-down cue really well (why he needed to learn to put his head down on command without fail is another story for another day), so we went with that, me putting my cream filled finger over his eye, then asking him to put his head down. As soon as he did, I took my finger away, so that eventually he understood that all he had to do to make the finger go away was hold his head down. Then, when he least expected it, wham! My finger-full-of-cream poked him in the eye. Once this was done, we did more fingers near the eye, head down work so that he got the idea that he wouldn't always get poked, and in the end forgot about the poke all together.

This all worked, sort of. Scout’s eye is all better. My right shoulder, (the one I used to keep my fingers on a flailing horse's head, eight feet in the air) is still sore, but I think it will be all right. And I am delighted to be able to look Scout in the eye rather than poke my finger in it.