The Truth Behind The Buck

When I started searching for a new kind of horsemanship, I had no idea where I was going to end up.

All I knew was that the way I had grown up doing it wasn’t the way I wanted to continue.

I studied intensively for three years. I listened to hours and hours of podcasts, read books, had lessons, attended clinics, completed online courses. Slowly, through my extensive explorations, I made discovery after discovery that gradually came together to create a training philosophy that doesn’t just feel right, it is a joy to apply.

The core of it is listening to the horse. But the other important factor is listening to myself.

In just a few years I have gone from being nervous about leading or even being around horses to handling youngsters, trimming hooves and starting to ride again. Along the way I have completely changed the way I approach training and seen results that I still sometimes find almost impossible to believe.

The flagship of my unorthodox training method has been Ava, a pony mare who arrived here at three years of age alongside her mother, who she was never formally weaned from, both of whom had only received nine days of structured handling.

I was all at sea. Ava did not want to be caught. She was suspicious and surly. I didn’t have anything resembling a plan or a goal.

But from the beginning, Ava gave me a vibe I could not ignore. Despite her initial distrust of humans, she was always steady and calm. Alert but not alarmed. She didn’t challenge the older mares, but maintained a quiet self-sufficient air about her.

As she matured, attained a higher rank in the herd, and had a foal of her own, her self confidence grew and I knew she was the sort of mare who is born, not made. Once her foal was weaned and I was sufficiently recovered from my surgery I started more regular training sessions with her.

She picked things up quickly, but it didn’t take me long to realise that she preferred to be handled quietly. It was easier to hold her attention with cues she had to look for. If I got too loud she would tune out. I accepted her challenge, and over time I have come to relish the soft, airy way in which we communicate.

She also seems to respond to me better if I am honest about my feelings. This might sound like wishy-washy woo woo, but for a sensitive horse it makes perfect sense. Horses read way more into our body language than we intentionally reveal. When we attempt to hide our fear or our frustration we give unclear signals. Horses see this hidden intention and blurred signals as a threat. When we are honest with ourselves about how we feel, horses see this emotional congruence as clarity in our intention – we are easier for them to read, and they feel safe in their understanding of what to expect from us.

So if I’m scared or worried about something, I tell her. More than once she has responded with reassuring behaviour. Like the time I was worried about walking out of the arena gate on her for the first time. I gave her the reins and she walked out of the gate, stopped, took some deep breaths, then walked back into the arena and stopped again. She did this twice more, of her own initiative, before I took my own deep breath, laughed to myself, took hold of the reins and steered us across the yard back to the shed.

I have made a point to prepare her for everything I have expected of her. We spent ages making sure she was steady at the mounting block, making sure she could work to voice commands on the lunge, and making sure she was comfortable with someone approaching her from the side while she worked along the arena fence. Our first rides on the lunge went without a hitch. We were walking all around the property with stop, go and turn established from light aids. Every time I asked her to step up, she did, with no hesitation.

Was my training perfect? Probably not. Had I gone into every suspicious corner, explored every eventuality and faced every fear? Also no. But did I feel like my fear was the only thing holding us back from advancing under saddle? Absolutely. I honestly thought that the next ride could be the turning point where we both realised that we actually had command of this riding thing, if I could just believe.

So when she had an extreme reaction to being asked to trot, I was shocked and shaken, but not even a little bit angry.

I posted the video of the incident, mainly I guess because it was a really good video. It predictably got a lot of attention. I’ve seen plenty of similar videos of people’s horses going off, and I know what I tend to think of them. Because horses don’t pull that sort of stunt for the fun of it.

Most of the comments I got on the video, and the subsequent post where I questioned what the hell had happened and what I was going to do next, were pretty restrained for Facebook. Lots of compliments on my snappy dismount. A few useful suggestions about balance, position and equipment choices. But there were also predictable recommendations to get rid of the pony, or to send her to someone who would buck her out. Someone took the opportunity to denigrate mares. Some called her ‘naughty’.

One person said ‘your horse is in pain’. I’ll get back to that.

Nobody saw the look on my poor mare’s face when she finally stopped bucking. She did not run off to join the other ponies, she just stopped and stood with her head low and an expression that spoke the many different moods of the phrase ‘oh shit’.

However shocked, shaken and surprised by the incident I had been, she was as much so.

Trust broken. The assumption that everything would be fine had been shattered.

The decision to straighten my saddle and get back on had nothing to do with preserving my confidence, and definitely nothing to do with ‘not letting the horse get away with it’. It was entirely to show my poor pony that we were still okay, that I still trusted her enough to get on her back, despite what had happened.

I came to realise, over the next few days, that whatever had prompted my reliable, gentle, easy-going mare to react so violently was as much of a shock to her as the resulting bronc display was to me. This was not an action born of a whim. Something was wrong.

That one person was right. My horse was in pain.

But it wasn’t just one person. I got a private message from someone I have known through horses for a very long time. She also suggested it might be possible that Ava was lame.

Part of my plan for working through what I initially thought was a training issue was to address the weakness Ava has in her thoracic sling. We built a set of cavalettis and I started working on strengthening exercises. We didn’t get far before the lameness became more obvious.

Invisible at a walk, and almost invisible at a trot on a straight line, but on a circle there was a telltale head bob.

So I booked her in for a lameness exam at the specialist equine clinic.

Minor soreness in the lower limbs can cause altered gaits and subsequent compensatory muscle movements, resulting in sore areas in the body that can be aggravated by the girth or the rider. This foot pain could absolutely have been the catalyst for her big reaction under saddle.

I was very afraid of what we might find, but on the day there were few surprises. The vet was very thorough, starting with hoof testers and a trot-up, moving on to nerve blocks and then xrays. The problem was clear – sinking and rotation of the pedal bone, with demineralisation and pedal osteitis. As the vet said ‘she has every reason to be sore and every right to be grumpy’. Blood tests showed insulin resistance, a key indicator of Equine Metabolic Syndrome, a common cause of laminitis.

From here we are looking at a long recovery, beginning with medication to help her process glucose, pain relief and regular trims to encourage realignment of the bones in the feet. Follow up xrays will be done after three months, at which point she may be allowed to start physical rehab while the hooves continue to grow out. Returning to riding is at least six and up to 12 months away. Managing her diet to prevent future episodes of laminitis will be a lifelong challenge.

Whether we are able to achieve any serious progress under saddle remains uncertain, and will only be done at her pace. I have had to let go of my reliance on that outcome and consider other avenues for my return to riding. I have a few ideas, but I’m going with the flow at this stage when it comes to opportunity as well as finances.