Elly and Rose

Anastasia Daxtana

Faraon De La Montana x Troikav

Andalusian x Arabian, Mare

15.3hh

I am in a retrospective mood at the moment, partly because I am bed-ridden after a bee stung me on the temple and sent me to ER yesterday, partly because I have been reflecting on Abba and what I can do about the bolting, and thus looking back at the experiences I have had with green and rank horses over something like fifteen years at this point. 

The filly in this picture was the first young horse I worked with; her name was Wonder, and she taught me a lot about babies. She was not yet three when she was backed, with a nursing foal at foot (she had been bred as a yearling, running wild on a farm with other young horses, and was herself an accidental foal from exactly the same place). I landed up with the ride, because nobody else wanted to ride her, and of my previous two lease horses from this riding school, one had died from rupturing something internally when falling in the field, and the other been an iron-mouthed bolter who was sent back to her owner, so I was horseless. 

Things Wonder taught me about young horses very quickly included keeping my seat at a rear, gritting my teeth and hanging on for dear life while she bucked, and riding defensively, so that whenever she dropped her hind end and scooted forward I could go with her, instead of being left behind. A lot of this was, in hindsight, unnecessary, if my instructor had known what she was doing, but she did not, and I did not know enough to query her, and so just learned by the seat of my pants, quite literally. 

By the time Wonder was sold, however, she had become a lovely riding horse for me, though she was awful for everyone else, bolted, reared, bucked, you name it. One day I could ride her on the buckle through the vineyards and have the rest of the ride leave us behind and her not turn a hair; the next day, she would be bolting with a child up, or bucking so viciously in one case that the pregnant woman riding her at the time miscarried. But, because I had learned to adapt to Wonder, to have a soft hand, to have respectable balance, and to know when to put leg on and when to take it off, she liked me and treated me well in return. 

That is not to say she was perfect: she was so young, how could she have been perfect? She once took off with me, because she was spooked by a Jack Russell that had gotten away from its owner, and we rocketed all the way down a hill back to the yard, jumping a tree in the process. (It was a small tree.) She reared with me when guinea fowl burst out of the grass in front of her nose, coming up so high and so fast that my seat left the saddle, and to this day I do not know how I did not pull her over backwards. She taught me that young horses are easily frightened, because they simply don’t have the same experience that older horses do, and that you have to ride with sympathy. 

Another one of the greenies who taught me was Charlie Brown, a grey pony about twelve hands high, who was three, liked to drop his shoulder and his rider, and run for home, taking a moment to lie down and roll on the saddle in the process. Again, he probably had underlying physical issues, as well as just being very young, but, heck, I was expected to ride him through it all. And so I did, though I insisted that I was given a proper saddle instead of a sheepskin pad with stirrups, because that wrenched my back so badly I couldn’t walk for a week. 

Charlie being a great little sport.

We got on very well, though he did buck me off once, after a rustic cross-country jump, and then tried to take off for home; I, fortunately, had gone over his head holding onto the reins. and so when he accelerated, I just gritted my teeth, envisaged the beautiful little saddle being broken and having to return to the sheepskin pad, and held on, like a human sea anchor. I won that round, he stopped running, and I got back into the saddle, scraped and bleeding from being dragged, but so happy that I still had a saddle. Lessons from Charlie were less about the timidity of youngsters, and more about the necessity of being firm - not to mention that being a tall rider on a pony improved my balance hugely. On one trail ride, we had to descend a cliff. The other horses, being older, managed it fairly well, but for whatever reason, I was bringing up the rear on the green three-year-old, and between his horror at being left behind and the fact that he was still learning co-ordination, Charlie’s preferred approach to the cliff was a flying leap. Miraculously, he landed on all fours, narrowly avoiding another of the ponies; miraculously, I was still in the tack. Anyway, young horses are unpredictable as anything, and they will try all sorts of novel approaches to whatever they perceive as an insurmountable problem. 

Flash was another memorable youngster, three and a half or so, and maybe twelve and a half hands? Certainly under thirteen. She had a bucketload of problems, physical and mental, and I still get angry whenever I think about how she was “rescued”, only to be essentially neglected, because middle class white women are always right to take animals away from poorer people with more melanin in their skins, because middle class white women can do no wrong. She started out as a nice pony, but through mismanagement by her rescuer, she turned into a nightmare that nobody wanted to ride, so … guess who got the honour of sitting on another enfant terrible. 

Flash was not much of a bucker, that I can remember, but that was because she had a far worse trick up her sleeve. She reared - and once on her hind legs, she would spin, like a top, multiple times, and come down facing the direction she wanted to go when she thought you were sufficiently unstable to be unable to resist her. It was, frankly, terrifying, and riding her often made me sick to the stomach with anxiety, waiting for her to pull the rear and spin. I carried a whip when I rode her, which was unheard of at this riding school, because in her case, the important thing was to get her going forward the moment you felt the slightest resistance, because that resistance meant up. Looking back through the photos of her, she also went in a curb bit at some points, which was really not fair to a baby mouth.  

Poor little Flash.

Those three were my early education in babies and green horses (there were a few others before, but each of them I only rode one time), and, while I look back at the things I was expected to do and shake my head, I have to say I learned so much from doing it wrong, because with each of the youngsters, I was able to eventually make the changes I wanted to approaching them, and they improved. A lot of it came down to being willing to adapt to them, and having the experience, the hands, and the balance to do so. In the rare occasions I was given more authority over their training - I was once given Flash’s tack and was the only person working with her for two whole weeks - I tended to dial things down and try work from the ground, and go slower under saddle. 

There was a lot of trial and error, because my instructor did not have the knowledge to offer good advice: she made me ride Wonder in grass reins, to prevent her from getting her head down to buck, and the result was that the filly felt so constrained that she bucked so badly that day I was convinced she’d rearranged my innards; I flatly refused the grass reins after that, and when Wonder could stretch down and go forward, she did not buck. But the trial and error approach meant I was getting direct feedback from the horses themselves, and we learned quickly from each other. 

More youngsters and more greenies have come my way since, with much better supervision and instruction, and what was a real confidence boost from those horses was learning that the way I had been groping towards by myself was the right one. Riding young horses, riding green horses, riding rank horses, all of these horses have given me the skills that have been critical to rehabilitating Abba. I am also very, very glad that I had been riding for more than ten years when I first met Wonder, because if I had not had all those years of experience behind me, I would have messed up far more than I did. When she - and the other babies - did unexpected things under saddle, I had the muscle memory to go with her, rather than being left behind, and the almost instinctive knowledge of when to apply pressure, and when to take it away. I do believe that that was partly why the youngsters kept coming my way, because in addition to being horseless, young, and desperate to ride, and thus exploitable, I knew how to stick on a horse and move with it; the people who suffered when riding these greenies had less experience, and so messed up their timing and responses, which served to confuse the youngsters, and led to more resistance, and more dramatic resistance. 

I have also listened to advice people have given about riding youngsters, and laughed wryly. “Kick them forward so they can’t buck” is a good one - yeah, well, good luck with that. Forward can help keep them grounded, but most of the explosive baby bucks came when we were already going forward, usually at the canter. After all, who hasn’t seen horses at play in the field, bucking as they gallop around? Now rearing is an evasion to forward, and when a horse starts to get light in front, you get your leg on them and push them out in front of it and make them move so that they can’t go up. Bucking, however, can result from a frustrated desire to go forward, as happened with Wonder in the grass reins, or the mustang AJ I rode in California, who shot high into the air, all four feet off the ground, head down, knees higher than his ears, twisted, and landed facing downhill, which in California is no joke. And why did he buck? Because he saw the lead horse on the trail move off at a trot, and the second horse, directly in front of him, did not move off fast enough for him, and with a lot of forward in him and nowhere to go, he broke out the bucks; he was also a confirmed rearer, so the fact that he chose the buck to say Man, hurry up says something about which one expresses forward. Not to mention Abba dolphin diving for over a kilometre on our second (and last) kommando ride, going forward the entire time, and keeping it up even with firm leg on her side. Which is not to say that getting a horse in front of the leg is useless when stopping them from bucking, but if you expect that making them move forward will prevent a buck, you are in for a nasty surprise. 

AJ, the little mustang who captured my heart.

These days, I am really enjoying working with the foals and the young horses, and bringing them along, at the rate I prefer, in the manner I prefer. Which is slowly and steadily, and softly, but firmly. I have access to far better resources now, from books to people, and have far more control over the training process, which is resulting in less drama, by and large. (Shakira hasn’t quite got the memo, and is fond of standing on her hind legs; she is also very talented at it and has beautiful balance, but she has to learn to keep all four on the floor, thank you very much.) 

Since the days of Wonder, I have also been taught good groundwork skills courtesy of trained professionals with grown and trained horses, and what a difference it made, learning from a schoolmaster horse who could show me what the different placement of my fingers and different degrees in pressure actually meant. I have also come to appreciate the value not just in disengaging the hind quarters, by making the horse turn on the forehand and cutting the engine, as it were, but also, and critically, of having control of the horse’s shoulders, so that they will yield away and towards me with the forehand. Abba actually demonstrated the importance of this on Sunday, when she refused to give up her shoulders to me, counterbent herself, and thus nearly took my inside leg off on a large square bale when rounding a turn. 

At any rate, controlling the feet, as the NH practitioners say, is so important to establish on the ground. Dallas has learned about it, Dakota has learned about it, and Stella and Shakira are currently learning about it, in slightly different ways, given their different ages. When a young horse or a green horse resists, what I have found personally is that many of them do it with their shoulders. They often have their nose tipped away from you, which allows them to throw their shoulders into your face and pivot away on their hind end, which puts you on the wrong side, and usually behind the driving line, towards their hindquarters. In this position, the lead rope becomes immediately less effective, as it is now often pulling back, across their chest (or over the withers), and towards their haunches. Being able to push the haunches back out of your face is useful, but it is dangerous to do and sets you up for a kick, unless you can get their nose tipped back towards you, and their shoulders yielding away from from you, and the rest of the horse pivoting around those shoulders. If you can’t get those shoulders, you have nothing, and will be forced to release the lead rope if you cannot get back into a more effective position before the horse pulls harder, or kicks out. 

Love this photo, showing Dallas having a mild Moment, but with his head and neck tipped in towards Jane. 

The importance of shoulder control translates through to the saddle as well. If I had known about this years ago, my life would have been much easier, and the youngsters I rode would have had fewer fights and ugly moments, but it wasn’t until Abba that I really learned about it. Most other horses I had worked with would go where their nose pointed, because someone had schooled them. Abba, like those youngsters, did not, and still has moments where she does not. She showed me that I could have her nose bent to my boot, and she would still keep running in a straight line. My trainer showed me how to bend her nose to my knee, which immediately captured her shoulders, but if she expressed it in those terms, I didn’t understand, and it took a few more years for the penny to drop, through a tumblr discussion, actually. For me, it is now critical that a horse will yield its haunches, its ribs, and its shoulders, in any direction I ask, under saddle or on the ground, and so I do expect them to turn on the forehand and on the haunches (using these terms loosely, right now). Fascinatingly, the breakthrough moment seems to happen not when the horse turns on the forehand, with nose tipped towards me, and shoulders, ribs and haunches yielding away, but in the turn on the haunches, when they have to give up their shoulders to me and turn away when I want them to. They may be experts at crossing their hind legs, but so often they resist and resist and resist yielding the forehand away, bracing and pushing back, or backing up - and then suddenly they soften in the neck and shoulders, and take that first step of turn on the haunches, and everything gets better. (Mostly. In fits and starts. Learning is not linear.) 

So, going back to Abba and her bolting, part of the issue is that she hasn’t been in the ring for a year, and part of it is that she spent months not being ridden at all. We do need to brush up on some of these basics again, now that she has rebuilt strength and stamina and fitness to a respectable point, because she needs to soften her jaw to the bridle, and to yield her shoulders and haunches. These things are unlikely to happen when bolting, so it is imperative that I have everything installed in order to catch her in that moment before it happens, just as with the youngsters I needed to catch them before they reared or went sideways or scooted forward. 

Waaay back, four years ago now, when Abba still ran away regularly in the ring. You can see the nose to the knee technique, with my inside hand pulling up hard towards my hip (not beautifully performed, as I needed to be sitting back and deeper, with my shoulders above my hips instead of in front of them), and how she is still fighting it because her feet are pointing forwards, but her motion is at least stopped because she is being forced to give over her shoulders.

A moment later, Abba’s nose is at my knee, and you can see how her front feet are now starting to track sideways-and-forwards, which is what I want; if the outside front went behind the inside front, she would be evading me by going backwards. Her shoulders are now mine, and the runaway is stopped. (I am still tipped forward, and I am maintaining a stronger hold than desirable on the outside rein, because without a noseband, the bit can slip through her mouth, which renders the exercise pointless.)

Anyway, here are my ramblings on horses and training and things that have been knocking around in my brain for a little while now, but which I haven’t really had an opportunity to put down in writing until today. I am grateful for the opportunities that have come my way, but I am also so glad that most of them only arrived when I had enough experience under my belt to be able to handle the challenges, most of the time. Muscle memory saved me so many times on the youngsters, when things went wrong; I simply can’t fathom ever putting a beginner rider on a green horse, even though I know plenty of people still do it. It just isn’t fair to the rider, and it certainly isn’t fair to the horse. 

The way I do it now is much slower, steadier, and kinder than the way people wanted me to do it before, and there are many fewer fireworks, but even then, riding green horses, especially green youngsters, is challenging, and requires a specialised skillset. It’s not an unachievable one, but it requires nerve, patience, softness, firmness, good timing and very good balance, and most of these things take years to learn and develop, ideally by riding solid, made horses for a couple of years, before branching out to spicier ones for several more years, to establish a good foundation before tackling the challenges of riding youngsters or rank horses.