In over 56 consistent years of riding the event last week was a second time for me. So I am still mulling it over and developing a strategy to help Minnie, so that it doesn’t happen again. I have many years of experience riding horses that spook. My first horse that I raised from a foal was an Anglo-Arab that was born with a spooky unpredictable nature. He was a life long shier and I learned quickly that his spook was always dramatic and typically sideways. We would be going down a trail we had been on hundreds of times and if he saw a leaf on the ground or a fern waving in the wind he jumped high and to the side. I had to remain ready for it at any time we were on a road or in the woods. Trash cans and mailboxes were monsters. In wide open fields I could relax. His form of a spook was a single high sideways jump. I stayed with him, and we would have a discussion about the offending object while facing it, until he eventually went over and touched with his nose, then we would move on.

The one other time I had experienced a horse blow out, we were going quietly along at a walk down a back road in Vermont. We were riding out alone. There was no traffic on the road, it was a beautiful fall day with no wind and the sun was warm on my back. A split second later I was sitting in the middle of the road and my horse was galloping back toward the barn. It really was so fast that there was no time to think about it and no warning that it was coming. Immediately I was grateful that my feet had come out of the stirrups. I started walking back toward the barn. He was already out of sight over the crest of a small hill and there was no point in running. A few minutes later, in the distance I saw two people running toward me up the road, when they got to me the man in front breathlessly asked if I was okay. They were loggers we had gone past that were about to go into the woods and they saw my horse gallop past without a rider. I assured them that I was fine and thanked them for their concern, because I very well could have been hurt.

That event happened on a horse that I had out on trial, and I returned him the following week. I didn’t trust that that horse was going to hesitate and consider his rider in some fleeting thought in his brain before bolting. He was very athletic and it wasn’t safe for either of us if I couldn’t stay on when he spun and went from zero to 40 mph in a split second.

There are several types of spooks. Over the decades I have ridden many of the typical woods spooks where a partridge flushes out right next to you and it is a short leaping sideway gallop. Or when it is a deer in front of you and the horse stops, ears pinned on the deer, freezes momentarily and starts going backwards rapidly before turning to run. Or they hear something behind them and they leap forward rapidly. Those all are controllable spooks if the horse gives you a chance for an opinion and you offer a solution. On the rare occasion years ago that I have had Pearl spook in one of these ways, she offered to spook in a way that she knew I would not be unseated. She takes care of me. And I have never yelled at her for a spook, because these are all justifiably scary events. Over the years, whenever I had this happen I would turn her to face whatever was scaring her and I would stroke her neck and talk to her about it. After a minute she would settle and we would go on. Over the last several years of our partnership she just does a stomp with her front feet and spooks in place. The last major spook she had was a couple years ago when a mountain biker came flying down the trail behind us. She did a short bolt forward, I spun her around toward the bike while barking at the biker “Say something! She doesn’t know you are a human!”. He complied and yelled “Sorry! Hello!”. She stood quietly as he slowly walked bike past us.

Last week when Minnie blew out and bolted it took away a big chunk of her confidence that we had been steadily building. The weather was terrible for a solid week after the event, so I didn’t ride her again until 7 days later. We just rode around the ranch in an area she has been ridden in hundreds of times. She was in constant flight stance for the whole ride and her head was high and ears were pinned forward, her whole body was a ball of energy. She is usually a horse that is very aware of everything going on near and far, but in a relaxed way because of her confidence. I don’t have a problem with that as a rule, as I had mentioned in another blog post, her hearing and sense of smell is better than mine, so i do want her to relay the information. That first ride since the event we spent trying to draw in her focus. Every time her head went up I put her into a circle in the grass or figure 8 where she had to think about her footing. By the end of the short ride she relaxed and that was enough for that day.

The following day I had planned to ride out with Wayne. I called him and discussed where Minnie was at and formulated a plan about him coming across the field toward her at a trot and re-creating the same scenario that made her blow out. She was scared to walk out the gate, but with some circling and maneuvering we got out the gate in a relaxed way. I saw Wayne on the far side of the field before Minnie did. I jumped off and asked her to move her feet to the right, left, backward and forwards and then stopped and let her see him coming. Her head went up into Adrenaline mode and I asked her to go back to focusing on me and moving her feet as he crossed the field and the dogs behind the gate were barking and carrying on. She did a good job, she kept her focus on what I was asking her to do with sneaking glances at Wayne coming across the field. Once Wayne and his horse near us I let her stop. I pulled her over to a berm and mounted. Her back was tense but outwardly she was quiet - I could feel she could explode at any minute.

He asked where I would like to go, and I said I thought that a shorter very quiet ride would be good. We headed south toward the border, following a road that swung around to the east, and then cut across a wash to another road that heads north. It is about a one hour loop. She had heightened energy for most of the ride and I put her about a necks length behind while riding beside his quiet Arab gelding so that she could let him make the decisions and be the leader for this ride. At times I had to put her fully behind him so that she could try to relax. It was a very good successful ride. Every time she zeroed in her focus on something off in the distance I asked her to bring her focus back in to avoid the flight state. By the time we were riding westward through the wash toward the ranch she was actually relaxed. We put her in front for the ride across the field toward home and she stayed in a nice relaxed gait.

Yesterday we went out for about a one hour ride with her ranch mates. Typically she is in front for these rides, but on this ride I only let her be in front when she wasn’t in a heightened state. We ran across a couple of spots that sent her head up and each time I put her into movements that made her have to focus on what I was asking. On one road there were two people walking up in the distance while she was in front and she wanted to do the head up and freeze stance. I asked my friend Karen to come up along side me with her horse Dee. That helped but not enough to take away Minnie’s worry and adrenaline so I put her behind Dee until the people ahead peeled off onto a trail. A couple of vehicles went past us and those were not a problem. A 4 wheeler came up the road behind us very fast and Minnie was okay with it but that made Daryl’s horse, Kona, nervous. He relaxed after prancing for a minute.

So we have had two successful confidence builder rides under our belt now, and we will continue to work on this to get her confidence back to where we were. We are developing a conversation about what she needs to do to avoid the flight state with me on her back. I haven’t decided how long I can let her pin her ears forward and have her head up, but I am thinking that I might try saying out loud “I see it”, then asking her for re-focus maneuvers. So she knows that I see what she sees, have determined that it is not a threat and that she now needs to pull in her focus.

Have you ever stared at something long enough that your imagination makes it into something else? That happened to me when I was walking at night with my friend Concho in Vermont. We were staying at a cabin on Maidstone Lake up the Northeast Kingdom. We saw something ahead in the field and we both stopped and froze. We were staring at it trying to figure out what it was. What was probably a stump became in our minds a big bear and we both bolted and ran as fast as we could back to the cabin. I have never run so fast in my life as that night. We were so convinced it was a bear that we could hear it running through the bushes behind us. It’s a good thing I wasn’t carrying a rider.