LAST EDITED ON Nov-05-07 AT 03:51PM (MST)[p]The very best mountain horse I ever saw was a gelding - Quarter Horse of course. One of the most intelligent creatures I have ever been around and docile as a lamb. He acted dumb so he wouldn't get all the attention, but he was the most sure footed horse around. Never took a step he didn't think about first and he though quickly too. His half sister though was named Sassy but we started calling her Hell-Beotch. In her prime, there wasn't another horse that could run her around. She never bit, well maliciously anyway but one day after going sideways from Queant Lake all the way back to the West Fork Trailhead I wished I could have killed her! She was a racehorse as a 2 and 3 yr old and around other horses she had to be in the lead. If another group of horses was on the trail ahead of us, forget it - she would be on the dead run if she could to catch up to them and get in front. Found out too late that she should have been a cutting horse. Mom and Dad finally had to put her down a couple of months ago. She wouldn't have made the winter. We always let Triple-K think she was hers, but to tell the truth, Sassy knew we belonged to her.
For the most part she was a great horse - just had a personality. Even if she would have been a biter there is no way we would have ever really put her down. She was a part of the family.
You can train bad behaviors out of horses if you are willing to take the time and patience to do it right. You have to work with them everyday though. If you don't have the time, you just have to come to an understanding.
When I was 15 I started working my first real job on the Trail Crew for the Forest Service. I rode an old gelding that had belonged to the FS for a number of years. Most of the time the FS people who rode him didn't know jack about horses so he had acquired a few bad habits that I didn't necessarily have the time to train out of him. He had mainly been used as a pack horse and once they had rigged the pack wrong and given him a sore spot on his withers that got infected and almost killed him. He would always be bothered by that sore spot and didn't like the cinch tightened. Well the first few days I rode him he really tested me. I would make sure the saddle pad and blanket were on just right, protecting his sore spot and that the saddle didn't ride too far back and then I would go to tighten the cinch and that old bugger would step right on my toe. The first day I forgave him and blamed myself, the second day, he just caught the edge of my boot but the third day, which was already shaping up to be a bad day anyway, he leaned on me until I had to step to keep from getting knocked down and then he stood right on my toe and just ground it down. It was all I could do to lean back on him and move him off my toe and hold back the tears. I wanted to punch him and knock him out, but I knew that hitting him in the head would only give me more problems in the future so I didn't. Besides I had to pull my boot off now and see if my toe was still attached to my foot. It was, but man it sure felt like it wasn't! Well my savvy old boss helped me out a little and we took a length of rope with a dog chain on the end and chained it around his hoof, lifted it up and dallied it around the saddle horn while I cinched him for the next few days. Afterwards I would give him an apple slice and scratch his ears. That seemed to work and after two or three days of that he seemed to be cured. He only tried it one more time, when we were out on the trail and I hit him on the hocks with my knotted lead rope just as he was going to do it and he didn't do it again until the next year. So I would repeat the process again for the first few days. Since I only rode him for a couple of months out of the year, I could never totally break him of it. Finally, after 3 years of riding him he stopped trying to do it to me, but to others, he would still do it everytime.
UTROY
Proverbs 21:19 (why I hunt!)
