Heavy Horse Taste on a Standardbred Budget

I'm a huge fan of the long-running medical drama Grey's Anatomy.

Set in a teaching hospital in Seattle, the show follows multiple generations of doctors from their first days as interns through choosing their specialty and sometimes to becoming department heads or even more senior members of staff. Improbable challenges and wacky shenanigans ensue. Along the way, they follow a simple training mantra.

See one, do one, teach one.

This is a training mantra that I have adopted in my fairly limited experience of teaching people things, and watched my sister use for training staff in her managerial role. It sounds simple, but it encompasses the complexity of mastery. That to learn we must first observe the action, then experience it for ourselves, then explain that action to others.

From running payroll, to throwing on a pottery wheel, to safely tying off a hay net, we can learn enough to attempt the task by observing, but not until we truly understand how it feels to do the task can we effectively explain it to others.

My partner, Matt, has been learning to ride. He has had lessons on and off at a few different places over the past few years. It has been tricky finding somewhere he can stick with because of his work roster that prevents him from committing to the regular fortnightly lessons that many riding schools are set up for. Plus most riding schools don't really cater for larger riders.

We had been talking about getting him a horse for a while, but I wasn't sure it was a good idea. He tends to prefer being indoors and I didn't want to end up with another mouth to feed and care for if he wasn't going to be involved. I wanted him to have a nice horse, something kind and sound and trainable, but that sort of horse comes at a price. I didn't want to fork out for a ready-to-go horse if it was just going to sit in the paddock.

In the past few months I started looking more seriously. We've had a couple of little windfalls and had some savings put away, but we didn't really want to spend a lot. We looked at a couple of older Standardbreds, and observed that all the nice ridden heavier horses seemed well out of our budget.

I floated the idea of getting a younger horse, one we could spend some time getting to know until it was ready to ride. Not a really young one, something already fairly domesticated but needing another year or two to mature before starting serious training.

I kept a close eye on the online auctions because you just never know. And one day, a few weeks ago, there she was at the tail end of the catalogue. A 2yo Clydie cross, with videos showing her being handled by a fairly inexperienced man. An obliging young horse standing still to be caught, rugged and saddled. And she was just down the road from us.

I assumed she would be too expensive, but I watched over the course of the auction as she was bid up to her reserve price, which was very reasonable. I suggested to Matt that we put in one bid in the final minutes and if we won, then good, and if we didn't it wasn't meant to be.

So I put in the bid. And a minute later Yogi was ours.

More than I had really intended to spend, but we've landed a much nicer horse than I thought we were going to end up with and there were no transport costs with her being so close. We picked her up the next day.

There was a moment where we stood looking at this giant baby in my tiny roundyard and wondered if we had done the right thing. It's always stressful when a new horse comes home and you have to find the right paddock mate and hold your breath while they find their way in a new space.

It's also a bit intimidating when you are used to being around ponies and suddenly you have a horse you can't see over with huge feet and an enormous battering ram of a head.

But Yogi soon proved that she is a sensible kid, and before long Matt was catching and leading her, taking her rug off and teaching her not to push into the space of the person carrying the feed bucket.

And at this point two things happened. One I had hoped for but not really expected. It was a big part of the reason I finally decided to find Matt a horse. I wanted him to have a reason to get up in the morning. I felt like he needed something else in his life.

And soon, rather than appearing in the farmyard every couple of months to help me out with something, Matt was there every day that he didn't have work, and some days that he did. We've become a well-oiled machine through the grind of winter with horses. Making and running out feeds, gathering haynets and topping up waters. He seems much happier, and definitely easier to live with. Already that big goober of a horse is worth every cent, even if she does eat three times as much as any of my ponies.

He has also kind of adopted my nutty little perlino Welsh pony filly, Brie. Brie and Yogi are sharing a paddock, with Yogi proving to be the unmovable object to Brie's unstoppable force. Brie rules the paddock with her quick little gold hooves, and Yogi brings the zen, standing over Brie while she sleeps and sharing her hay pile knowing full well that Brie's wrath could turn on her at any moment.

Brie, for some reason, is much more comfortable around Matt than I have seen her with any other human. And that brings us to the other thing.

This whole arrangement has got me taking a good hard look at myself, my motivations and my capabilities. The knowledge that I am a massive control freak who has had unchallenged rule over the farmyard and paddocks for pretty much my entire adult life.

Now I have to put my reasons into words and take on board the opinions of someone else. And accept that my problem child pony likes someone else better than me.

It's time for me to teach one, if I want to keep learning.

It's one thing for me to demonstrate to Matt how to safely put a rug on a horse, and why we allow space between their feeders, but when he asks me how we get a horse to do things if we aren't teaching it that is HAS to... yikes. Putting these things into words requires a whole extra level of understanding.

Even more challenging to admit is that he is a natural at handling them. He doesn't have the baggage that I do, the years of doing it from a less empathetic standpoint. It's actually really easy to teach people to handle horses gently if they haven't already learned coercive techniques because gently is how most people instinctively handle horses.

I can pat myself on the back because when I picked that big horse's foot up for the first time I was doing it to see what she would tell me, not because I wanted her to pick her foot up. Not enforcing my agenda on her was a choice, because enforcing my agenda was once an option for me.

I'm not a natural with horses. I'm learning through sheer force of will, on the same day sometimes seeing one thing, doing another and teaching something else. Repetition and determination. Practice and study. Because I love it and can't imagine my life without it.

But after all these years, it sure is nice to have some company.

Matt with Brie.