On the other hand, they're still bad.

Don’t hands matter anymore?

     In the process of learning how to ride, (and the way I ride to this day), I learned the ‘correct way’ to hold the reins.

     This being: The reins enter one’s palms between the pinky and ring finger, in contact with the hand itself. The rein continues up through the palm and exits forward (i.e., towards the horse’s neck), with the thumb  up and flat on the rein.   One held/holds the reins as if they were eggs. Space between the hands in a straight line from the bit to one’s elbows, which are tucked neatly alongside one’s ribs. The height should be no more than a few inches...one very good teacher told me to hold my hands only as high as an extended pinky could touch the withers.  

     Paying attention to what they’re doing has helped me develop what I’ve been complimented on as being ‘good” ‘soft’ ‘following’ hands.

    What inspired this particular post was seeing a photo of a Western Equitation rider with her hands waving about at shoulder height...HER shoulder height. Ah ha, said my now chained anti-Western Equitation demon, another way I can show how superior ‘english’ or ‘dressage’ is to WE.

     But I have learned to keep her muzzled before I shoot off my mouth, so I did a lot of Google Image searching with the search term “hands on reins’.  As hands are always connected to the rider’s arms, every photo had an example.

   What I found is depressing.

     It’s not just Western Equitation riders who don’t seem to know how to hold the reins. It seems NOBODY-not Western, not English, not dressage, certainly not jumpers or jockeys-holds the reins the ‘’’correct’’’ way. I looked at a LOT of photos, from all over the horse riding spectrum, and saw all sorts of styles. I could forgive beginners or horse husbands or kids, but I saw FEI riders making the same mistakes.

  Here is a sample of the rogue's gallery:

     I was amazed at the many ways riders hold the reins. Some hold the reins with palm up, or palms down, or out to the sides. Some were pinching a rein between thumb and forefinger, some as if holding a serving tray, many of the Western Equitation dangling them a foot or more above the neck. One or two pictured women holding the reins as if they were live snakes.

 

    I am including a picture (below) said to be from “Vogue”... a magazine that is published, it seems solely to market stuff to rich women. Look at this photo. I'd originally intended it to be an example of VERY bad hands, but it was just so full of 'wrong' I couldn't believe it. There are so many things wrong about this bimbo on horseback you just KNOW she’s never been on a horse in her life. I’m almost afraid for her...her boots, her bare knees, she’s bouncing up and down without a helmet. If she had pockets her hands would be in them, reins and all. But I must say that is one gorgeous horse. Not HERS, mind you.

 

    I even watch the riders in my own barn. Only one person other than me seems to be paying attention to how she holds her reins. I can’t bear to watch our Barnlord give a riding lesson, as she advocates holding the reins up in the air.

    Yes, I did find some hands that were correct. Finding a photo of ‘good hands’ was far more difficult than I would have ever dreamed.

    This rider’s hands are pretty much exactly what I’ve learned from good books.

But the vast majority of pictures of hands on the reins show them to be anything but correct.

    Which begs the question: is the way one holds the reins that important?

    I confess I am not experienced enough to be able to state conclusively that it is.

   Perhaps I’m looking at it the wrong way. Perhaps I’m speaking only from fairly recently acquired ‘experience’, and the horses I’ve ridden since doing so number equal two.

   Maybe I’m missing something. Because I found this:

   This single hand, apparently that of an older man, is riding in a bosal. I know nothing about this specific bridle/ reins, so I don’t know if this hold is correct or not.

   Somehow, though, I get the feeling that his hand is gentle. How a man’s hands can appear to be sensitive and giving, I don’t know. It just looks to be kind and respectful. It even appears as if he is also holding a rope. One doesn’t think of a roper having good hands. Yet, this is a gentle, giving hand. 

   Maybe it’s me, then? Am I too anal? Are sloppy hands okay now?

They can hear us think, you know

Here’s the real scenario:

Last fall, Matt, our farrier, came to shoe and trim two horses: Raven, and Laddie.

You know who Raven is, and he is always well behaved when anyone does anything to him, be it farrier work, floating, etc. 

Laddie is the newest horse in the barn. He is an immense, 17.2 hand Thoroughbred. I believe he’s about 16 years old and is/was an eventer.

O, Laddie’s owner, had seen Matt work on Raven in the past and decided she wanted him to do Laddie. 

Matt –who, like me, is beginning to feel his age and is trying to cut down his workload-asked her how she came to contract him to shoe Laddie. She said Barnlord had told her about his work. I admit, Matt is probably the best farrier I’ve ever been lucky to have.  

Laddie began to act up almost immediately. Tossing his head, flicking the tools out of Matt’s hands, tried to back up, etc.  He has white line disease in his hind feet and acted as if the methylene blue (that purple stuff that has a staining radius of fifty feet) hurt. 

As the process wore on, Laddie got worse and worse. He literally yanked his feet out of Matt’s hands, reared, kicked and tried to bolt. What should have taken no more than half an hour took twice that.

Matt later told me that afterward, he felt as if he’d been hit by a pair of linebackers..and Matt is a big, bear of a man, a burly cowboy/farrier, tough as nails. 

Yesterday, I walked into the barn. The barnlord’s farrier, Bob, was shoeing and trimming a big bay horse. 

Barnlord was holding his lead rope. The horse had his head down and was half asleep. It took me a couple seconds to realize it was Laddie.

“Holy cow, what did you do, sedate him?”

“No.”

Laddie was acting like any good horse, calm, patient, willing to accept anything Bob did to him.

What was the difference?

No, it wasn’t the farriers. 

It was the owner.

O wasn’t present for the trimming this time. 

O is the 22 year old daughter of some very wealthy, upper crust blue bloods back somewhere in New England (on the US East Coast.)

She drives a Mercedes. She bought a truck and a  horse trailer when she got here.  Her parents are paying her way through college. They paid to ship Laddie out here to the West Coast (something that is NOT cheap). They are paying for her rented HOUSE, and the barnlord sends all bills to the parents, not O.

O has very obviously lived a life of ease. She’s accustomed to “people”...a nice way of saying servants or employees..taking orders from her and doing things that she is too high society to do. 

She demonstrates no sense of responsibility. She is passive-aggressive-sometimes arrogantly insisting she knows everything about horses, and other times, completely ignoring the needs of her horse. Laddie was on the point of foundering and barnlord insisted O call a vet. O refused. He’s done this before, she said, all he needs stall rest. She wrapped some vet wrap around his fore pasterns as if that would fix it. 

Barnlord got pissed, and after O left, she called a vet, who got to the barn in time to prevent any damage. 

She billed O’s parents. She also, later, told O that she is NOT O’s servant, that O needs to accept responsibility for her horse. O...ignored her. 

O doesn’t really like Laddie, by the way. She’s taken him out eventing precisely once since she got to the barn last year. Laddie’s blanket is in tatters. She doesn’t care. She can easily afford a new one, but, she doesn’t care. 

And that’s the point.

We humans project energy without knowing. Horses pick up on it. You can’t lie to a horse. If you have had an argument with your husband, and are still stewing about it, you’re mentally broadcasting it to every living being in the  barn. 

 I think we humans are immune to it. We have to be, we’d go insane if we heard every other humans thoughts. But animals aren’t immune. They HAVE to hear in order to survive. Most dogs easily prove it. How many times have you experienced or  heard "my dog knows when I'm coming home."?  I think dogs are smart enough to know you’re not pissed at them, but horses aren’t. All they ‘hear’ is that you are angry, aggressive, and scary.

As well, if you don’t particularly like the horse, he’s going to pick up on that, too. He’s had prior experiences with unfriendly humans broadcasting their non-physical aggression, and he knows, now, that some humans are things to be feared.

It’s not just horses that ‘hear’ our thoughts. Wild animals are especially sensitive. 

We feed the wild birds. The deer have learned that there’s free food under the feeders. We have a group of six or seven black-tailed deer (depending on how many fawns the does produced last spring) that live on my property. If I walk out to the feeders and look hard at the deer, as if sizing them up for an attack, they bolt. If I merely glance at them, AND allow the damned earworm in my head to play or...if I mentally do my times tables (“2 times 3 is 6, 2 times 7 is 14”), they not only are unafraid, they come closer, waiting for me to dump the feed so they can feast.

(Excuse me while I boast...I no longer need to do that. They are accustomed to us trudging through the rain and snow with a pair of feed buckets that they barely wait for us to spread the feed before they’re in it. )

When Matt was there to shoe Laddie, O was supposed to handle her horse. While she did so, he began to act up. She slapped at Laddie, cussed him out, shrieked at him, and literally drove him crazy. He kept pulling his feet out of Matt's hands, making it almost impossible to nail a shoe on.

When a 17.2 horse rears and waves his size 3 hooves around your ears, it turns into a dangerous situation. 

Matt, being the conscientious man he is, carried on, but when he was finished he told her straight up, “don’t call me again. I’m never touching this horse again.”

O got pissed. She didn’t say anything but later, Barnlord said O complained to her about Matt being “incompetent’. 

I had left by then so I didn’t hear it. Which is okay, because Matt would rather she think him incompetent than risk getting hurt by her horse. 

When Bob came out to shoe Laddie, O...who had promised to be there but then decided to skip it, there was just me, Barnlord and Bob.  No one slapped Laddie. No one shrieked at him. Barnlord held the lead and expected Laddie to mind his manners like the good horse he is. She and the farrier had a long conversation about something other than the horse in front of them, and Laddie dropped his head and half slept,  as ho hum as Raven always is. 

They hear us and react. Keep a rein on your emotions.

Looking through your horse's eyes

     I have been riding bareback almost exclusively for over 20 years.

It’s not that I dislike a saddle, it’s just that I prefer bareback. I don’t risk my 60+ year old bones: I don’t gallop or jump, etc bareback. I’m not foolhardy. I guess I’m just lazy. It’s so much easier to merely groom, hop aboard, and ride. Besides, when I take off my sweated/begrimed jeans, my cat takes one whiff and goes berserk. She LOVES the smell of ‘horsey pants’. It’s almost obscene, watching her rub and writhe like a porn star, inhaling the scent of horse. Hey, cat, I love the scent of horse, too. 

Ooooh, horsey pants. I LOVE Mom's horsey pants.

 

Sable loves the smell of a sweaty horse

     Riding without the intervening barrier of a saddle enables me to have an enhanced conversation with the horse. I can feel what his body is thinking. It’s easier for me to project my desires to him, i.e. turn left, and I feel his response that much better.

     But what I like most about riding bareback is that I can more easily see the world through his eyes.

    Horses are exquisitely aware of their surroundings. Not a thing can be moved in the world without their seemingly instantaneous awareness of the change.

    Fortunately, they are fairly calm with the fact, but there are times when it means Something Is Very Different and Therefore, Scary.

    My Arab, Jordan, was always a ‘looker’. He would routinely look UP into the trees as we rode underneath them. His ears were constantly moving, his nostrils working, sampling the air, listening for anything that may be important. He would routinely stop on a trail ride and just look around. I learned this wasn’t just laziness. Once, he stopped, ears pricked and I could feel his back tensing up-to bolt? He was an Arab, after all, one who had to have a shy a day before he would settle down to work.

   But no, this time, after a good five minutes of our standing for no apparent reason, a hiker with a dog emerged from the forest. I had no way of seeing him or knowing he was approaching, but  despite the man being downwind of us, Jordan knew he was coming long before he arrived.

   One time, I was trail riding Jordan bareback and exited the forest into an open area. Jordan shied-because the last several times we’d ridden in that area, it had been chest high in Scotch broom. In the interim, all the broom had been cut down. It had changed. 

  He jumped sideways, and I fell off. (the best reason I know for riding a  short horse is one doesn’t have that far to fall). I had held onto the reins, and Jordan  immediately stopped moving and looked at me curiously, as if to say, what are you doing down there?

   I was able to scramble back aboard (another reason for having a small horse) and then we just looked. I could feel his back muscles tensing, his ears were pricked, nostrils expanded, taking everything in. Something Is Different Here.

   Even after he had accepted that the sudden opening of a previously overgrown area was harmless, still..he took no chances. He double timed through it.

   Now, when I ride Raven, I allow him to stop and just look. I think he appreciates it.

 

Raven stopping to take a look.

 

He's looking at some bicyclists just out of the frame.

    I enjoy just sitting on a horse, I don’t need to be doing something all the time. Yeah, I know. There are horsemen who tell me I should always have a plan for when I ride, a goal, always be in a training frame of mind every single time I ride. Every step is supposed to be asked for, every motion rewarded if it’s good and worked through if it’s not. I am supposed to do everything the same way every single time. Every single ride. Really?

   Sorry. That’s not me. I don’t have the focus and my goal has always been ‘don’t fall off.”  When I mount, I usually do so without a thought in my head other than it feels so fine to be riding this magnificent beast. I am not a horse trainer and I am not an expert rider. If he does what I ask when I think to ask it, I’m happy. If he thinks I’m an inept bungler for being inconsistent, he doesn’t seem to hold it against me. He’s kind and loving and patient with me. And I am with him. 

Not my best photographic effort...after all, I am taking from his back, but it does show his lovely eye and frame of mind.

   What I do seek with my horse is that ‘silent lucidity’…that feeling of one mind and two bodies, the link between his mind and mine. I have to purposely and forcibly shush the constant narrative voice in my mind.  Only when I stop listening to my mind, and allow myself to hear his, do I see the world in a different light.

    Though I’ve seen it before, still, there is a different look to the world. I see the sunshine dappling the ground beneath the trees. I hear the wind in the grass. I feel his muscles swish his tail. I see a mare grazing in her paddock, her head moving in a semicircular pattern…step, bite, step, bite, left, right, left, right. I feel his breathing expanding his ribs. I feel the muscles in his back tensing, relaxing. I hear vireos singing in the trees, a raven knocking, a train’s receding whistle.

   This is HIS world, his vision, and I can peer into his mind best when I empty my mind and am bareback. It’s the very same world as it was before I got aboard, but somehow, there is a clarity, a precision of vision that one normally ignores.

   So if you see me seemingly doing nothing, sitting bareback on lovely, black warmblood gelding, the only motion his tail, his eyes, his nostrils, his ears…we’re really not doing nothing.

   We’re looking.

The hardest part of being a delivery driver

One of the many jobs I held after retiring from the military was as a delivery person. 

I delivered flowers, balloons, and potted plants. This entailed a great deal of sitting down (driving) for long periods of time, and trying to find addresses in a rural/suburban county using a lousy map. 

Often, the address was almost impossible to find, as the people sometimes didn't WANT to be found, or there were no numbers on the house, or a street had no name sign, or the numbers on the invoice were transposed, making me having to ask if this really was the Jones residence and no, thanks, if not you can't have the flowers. 

I was once, unwittingly, sent to the worse part of town, where the street was covered with syringes and spent bullet casings, and the people on the street stopped talking and looked at me with malice and suspicion. But the recipient of the flowers was so very grateful for my efforts.  It wasn't until afterwards that my boss told me three other flower shops had refused to deliver there because of the risk. Gee, thanks.

I had to use my own vehicle, meaning I had to pay for fuel, maintenance, insurance, etc. 
I wasn't compensated for it, and it was a part time, minimum wage job. Pay was augmented by a small 'stipend'..fifty cents to a dollar per delivery. That was, I suppose, the companies compensation for using my own ride.
I was told I could keep any tips I received, but never once did I get one. The boss was a sweetheart but the company was run by a cut throat, lowest bidder bunch of cheapskates. They paid us virtually nothing. Management made millions.

This company had its headquarters in Maryland, but had tentacles all over the country, serving smaller markets. They had a contract with Teleflora, the bunch with Mercury as their logo.
Let me warn you: when you buy flowers for someone and have it delivered, it may nor may NOT be what you picked out from the company's lovely pictures. It all depends on what the latest shipment of flowers consists of. If you ordered very expensive lilies and none are available, your recipient isn't going to get lilies. The arrangers will stick something cheaper in the arrangement, and you will still pay for the lily. You won't be told this, mind you, especially if you order online.

Oh, and those lovely, tightly closed roses? The ones that cost an arm and a leg? Well, that's not how they look when they come into the shop. The rose that comes out of the box from the shipper is the size of a softball, with all the outer petals dead. The arrangers strip 75% of the petals away, until she gets to the tight bud. THAT's what you are paying for: a rose that was cut two weeks ago, packed in ice, shipped from Columbia or Ecuador, and then stripped, de-thorned and stuck in a plastic sleeve with a packet of crystals that you add to water to 'lengthen' the life of the flower.

It's a hoax. You can't extend the life of something that is dead. 

IT'S DEAD. The flower is dead. The only thing that the extender stuff does is cost you money.
By the way, instead of paying a lot of money for extender, here's a cheap and easy recipe for it: 

1 tsp (5 mL) sugar
1 tsp (5 mL) bleach
2 tsp (10 mL) lemon juice
1 Qt (1 liter) cold water. 
Mix and store in glass jar until needed

It's what the shop used for those displays of roses.

One day I was told they had to cut back, so  from now on, I would be paid ONLY the stipend, not a paycheck. When you put ten dollars of your own money in your gas tank and you make 5 dollars total in delivery fees, you know what it means. It means management wants you to quit so they don't have to pay unemployment.

So I quit. Much wiser, now, and with a solid map in my head of every spot in the county.
Given all that, you would think that the above things were the worst part of the job?

Not hardly. Actually, I liked being autonomous. Here's a bunch of flowers and a list of addresses to deliver them to, be back in time to punch out because we don't pay overtime.

No, it wasn't all that. 

THIS is what I hated about the job:Seeing the neglect of animals.

From: Transcend media.org

from: shutterstock.com

From: unchain your dog.org

source and location unknown

internet source unknown

 

From: arryr.org

If you want to see some horrific images...many times worse than these, just google images with the terms abuse, neglect, etc.

EVERY DAY I saw shit like this: horses in tiny pens no bigger than a bedroom, without a scrap of hay. Mud up to their hocks. Wounds raw and covered with flies. Hooves overgrown and curling up like elf shoes.  Their tails so ratted with cockleburs it was painful to look at. Bones sticking out everywhere. Halters left on their heads until the skin had grown over them. Dogs chained to stakes, or trees, their small spot of movement bare of anything but rocks. Dogs pacing, curled up in abject defeat, and being raped at the end of her chain by a loose dog.
The dogs were insane. The horses were depressed.

This is no way to keep an animal. No. How badly I wanted to drag the owners out into the cold, the heat, the wet, and chain THEM to a tree with no water, no food, nothing. How badly I wanted to kick the living shit out the assholes who stuck a horse in a pen without any room to move, to run, to stretch out and sleep.
A few years ago, a man was arrested (and subsequently released with a hand slap) because he'd bought a horse for his kids, stuck it in a hastily erected dog kennel, left a five gallon bucket of water and a bale of hay...and then left for a week. What? that isn't enough food? He was mad because the guys building his house ratted him out to the cops.

How many times I saw horses and dogs neglected,chained, kept in filth, unfed, untouched, unloved.
The worst of it was there was nothing I could do. Oh, yes, of course, I could report it to the police, who would then shunt my complaint to Animal Services, who made the determination that it wasn't within city limits so it wasn't their jurisdiction despite the fact that my tax dollars from an unincorporated part of the county pays for them. I would be advised to talk to a rescue organization, don't bother us. I couldn't photograph, I couldn't trespass, I couldn't scream at the owners until I felt better.



In another case about three miles from my village, Miss Paula Jean Nichols, supposedly a 'talent scout' 'dance instructor' 'boxer breeder', had 15 horses (three more were found dead and skeletonized in her pathetic excuse of a barn) on five barren acres, and 8 boxers in a kennel about 6x8 feet. The animals were taken from her, she went to court to get them back because they were her 'family". The judge, smarter than most, said no effing way. So "Miss Paula" (that's what her sign in front of her house called her) moved to Mason County, one with more areas to hide in. Last I heard, she allowed a litter of boxer puppies to die because she didn't heat their ''kennel'.  

It's always the same litany of excuses: 
The owners "didn't know", "can't afford to feed them", "they're not that bad" and of course, it took an act of god to take the animals away from them because they're property, not people.
Most of the time they protest, but by this time, so many of their neighbors are so fed up with the person that they whine and then shut up.
The unsung heroes of animal rescuers are angels, but there's only so much they can do.
(in fact, my Barnlord rescues her favorite breed of dog).

Once in a while, the asshole goes much further. a shithead woman in my county was a puppy mill breeder: raising dozens of Borzois (Russian wolfhounds). They were taken away from her by a Borzoi Rescue organization; fed, cleaned, medicated,  spayed, neutered, groomed up into something beautiful and then put up for adoption. The owner is STEALING THEM BACK, one by one. She's gotten three of them back, and can't be found. But the rescuers know who she is and what she's doing.

(update: these two were found and have subsequently adopted out.)

Having to quit, then, wasn't such a bad thing. For one, while I know it's still going on, I don't have to drive past these poor creatures feeling powerless. The second point is that quitting my job kept me out of prison.

Because every time I'd see these poor animals, all I wanted to do was put a bullet into the owners heads.

From Pintrest. 

I forgot to ad this poem. I don't know who wrote it. But he or she felt my pain.

Alone again

I wish someone would tell me

What it is that I’ve done wrong,

Why I have to stay chained up

And left alone so long.

They seemed so glad to have me

When I came here as a pup,

There were so many things we’d do

While I was growing up.

They couldn’t wait to train me,

As companion and as friend,

They told me they would never fear

Being left alone again.

The children said they’d feed me,

Said they’d brush me every day,

They’d play with me and walk me,

If only I could stay.

But now the family hasn’t time.

They often say I shed.

They won’t allow me in the house,

Not even to be fed.

The children never walk me,

They always say “Not now!”

I wish that I could please them,

Won’t someone tell me how?

All I have is love, you see,

I wish they would explain,

Why they said they wanted me

Then left me on a chain.

Author unknown