In the Company of Horses...........

.......by Kathleen Lindley( A year on the road with Horseman Mark Rashid)

I've been reading quite a bit recently and I've just started this one. I think I'm going to like it - we'll see.

"Horses are fantastical creatures, all at once beautiful, powerful, funny, charming and frightening. It seems sometimes that the very things we love about them are the things we begrudge them.

We love them for their power, yet it scares us. We want to borrow their physical freedom, while at the same time we strive to take it away. We know they're highly intelligent, but we treat them as if they were stupid. We expect them to read our minds, then deny what they find there. We praise their sensitivity, as we seek to desensitise them.

Our relationship with the horse is marked with fear, awe, love, passion, and of all things, contradiction."

This is the preface to the book, you can decide if it's for you or not...

"I stood in the middle of a big paddock in western Colorado, trying to learn how to catch my horse under the watchful eye of horseman Mark Rashid and a handful of clinic auditors.I'd arrived at the clinic two days earlier and had the audacity to tell Mark that I didn't know who he was, and I didn't care, as long as he could fix my horse. Well, something was getting fixed all right, and it wasn't the horse. The trouble I was having catching my horse, Ashcroft, was pretty indicative of our whole relationship - neither of us wanted much to do with the other.

I've lived, dreamed, and breathed horses all my life. When I was thirteen years old, I wrote an essay for school detailing how I was going to become a horse trainer when I grew up. My mother spent my college fund on horses and horse shows and talked herself into thinking that the horses and the horse shows were my college.When I impatiently graduated from high school, I did indeed become a professional horse trainer. I trained hunter and jumper show horses in the Midwest for a few years until, at the age of 28, my life took an unexpected turn when I found myself in an emergency room after having a stroke, of all things. A blood clot had become lodged in my brain, paralyzing my left side. Recuperation was a gruelling process. I learned to walk again, learned to operate my left hand again, and spent hours and hours struggling in occupational and physical therapy.As soon as I was able to, I moved to Aspen, Colorado to be with my boyfriend and two uncles who lived there. It wasn't long after I moved to Colorado that I got the idea bo buy a horse again. I suppose my real motivation was to prove that I could do it, ride and handle a horse, despite my handicap. Heck, I was still working on walking and opening milk cartons!
I told my friends and family that I wanted a "resale project", a cheap horse that I could train for about six months and resell at a profit.That's how I met Ashcroft. I saw an ad in an Aspen newspaper for a "sixteen-hand grey thoroughbred gelding, five years old" and figured he was worth a look. He was a sorry sight when I went to see him the first time. He was, indeed, a fabulous dapple grey, and additionally he had very clean, beautiful legs and a nice head. But he was very thin, had tangles in his mane and tail, and was standing up to his ankles in muck, surrounded by a family of goats. When I rode him, I found that he didn't stop, didn't steer, and didn't go forward on cue, but he was willing to jump a railroad tie for me. I talked the seller down to $1,500 and took him home. I assumed this horse would fit right into my plans for a horse to resell - uneducated but pretty and well bred.

Well, that was the first of many assumptions that Ashcroft shattered for me. Though I was a skilled horseperson and former professional trainer, I found myself out of my league with Ashcroft. He was easy to anger and would fight at the drop of a hat. He was fussy and high-strung. He was sick or hurt most of the time, wouldn't stay trained, and woudn't be caught. I tried to sell him but nobody would buy him. If I got someone interested in him enough to do a vet check, he was lame when the vet showed up. I was stuck with him, and I hated it. I prayed he'd get hit by lightning, just so I wouldn't have to deal with him anymore.

After two years of frustration and fighting, I figured I had to do something drastic. I was out of patience and out of money, and I had nothing but a mess of a horse to show for it. I had heard that Mark Rashid was going to be in our area doing a clinic, and on impulse I signed up. It was a last ditched effort on my part. That's how we ended up there that day, in that paddock, practicing catching. Mark had caught Ashcroft a few times, and it was my turn to try. Mark suggested that I not expect Ashcroft to do all the work when I went to catch him: that it was plenty good enough if he just stood still and allowed himself to be caught. So I went out there, halter and lead rope looped over my arm, mainly hoping my horse wouldn't turn tail and run when he saw me. Ashcroft was standing on the far side of the paddock, whinnying to some horses over on the other side of the property. I approached him from behind, as Mark had suggested. I saw Ashcroft's ears flick back to me occaisionally, but his eyes stayed fixed on the other horses. When I looked at Mark questioningly, he simply nodded at Ashcroft, encouraging me to keep at it.I got to within about eight feet of Ashcroft's hindquarters, and I shifted off to one side so we could make eye contact. He whinnied again to the other horses. When he was done calling, I kissed to him, hoping he'd turn around and face me so I could halter him. But he didn't turn. I kissed again. And then he moved. To my utter consternation, he backed up, eyes still on the other horses, until his tail was within easy reach. I was about to kiss again, to ask for a turn, when Mark said, "You've got him, he's caught"

What was so shocking to me about this was that my horse had offered me what I wanted, but in a way I didn't expect. Therefore I didn't recognise it. This revelation begged the question, then, of how many times he'd done this during the previous two years of fighting and frustration. How many times had he offered what I wanted in a way that made perfect sense to him but not to me?

When I looked at the catching incident from his point of view, his actions made perfect sense. I wanted to catch him. He needed to keep his eyes on his friends across the way. so he accommodated both of us at the same time. Now, if Mark hadn't been there to stop me, I probably would have insisted that Ashcroft turn around to face me, because it's just not "respectful" to present one's hindquarter for catching. And that was the difference right there. It was why what I'd been doing with Ashcroft hadn't been working - I had failed to see things from his point of view. It had actually never occurred to me that it might be important to a horse that I be willing and able to see things from his point of view.

I took what I learned at that clinic seriously. I felt a profound change in me and in my horse, and I wanted more. I could feel the presence of a whole world out there that I'd previously been unaware of. I think there were two things in particular that led me to the change in attitude I was experiencing. One was the horse I had, who chose not to give up, not to kill me, and not to change who he was, and second, there was my handicap, which suggested to me that technique would
only take me so far: I was going to have to think that all over carefully."
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Our barefoot trimmer came today and was really pleased with all the horses. Corky and Anky, who've had their shoes removed are doing great, he also said that Ankys feet were very strong which would suggest that she's digesting her food well enough, he's seen lots of horses with digestion problems and they invariably have poor feet. He also thinks the youngsters have great feet. Hee hee, I'm chuffed.