We're ALL Pony Nuts

The women at the barn all have good riding horses. Not a one of them is un-rideable. All of them are multi-talented, well behaved, mannerly horses.  Most of them are registered purebreds of one breed or another. One or two of them have been successful in the show ring, the dressage arena, or the 3 day events. ALL of them are deeply loved. We all love everyone else’s horse, and watch over them like doting aunties.

Yet, when Gretchen led Romeo, a rescue pony (officially a “miniature horse’, but let’s be honest. He’s a pony.) out of the horse trailer, every one of us women went suddenly batshit goo-goo crazy.  As the well-shaped ‘silver dapple’ stopped and looked around at his new home, we all went into paroxysms of “he’s so cute”. Even the Barn lord, who has never, ever in her life seemed to demonstrate any form of ‘awwwwwwwww’ was taken with him.  

Romeo, the barn's newest heart throb

We were as smitten as if the pony had been the latest Hollywood heartthrob.

Despite their appearance, ponies...especially Shetlands...are not domesticated animals. Due to their small size, (and obstinate refusal to be relegated to beta status) they can’t be ridden by an adult horse trainer. Thus, most ponies are halter broken and not much more.

Add to that the fact that they are as intelligent as any full sized horse, with a huge addition of mischief and out right scoundrel. Every horseman I’ve ever known has a story about a Devil Pony.

It was interesting to see the resident horse’s reactions when they first get a good look at Romeo. They are, in a word, astonished. Raven looked at him long and hard, snorting a little. He could SMELL a horse but this little creature was no bigger than some of the dogs. Another gelding bolted when he saw Romeo. Gretchen’s daughter’s gelding, Macho, could not believe his eyes. He literally reached out, gingerly, to touch this tiny creature. Suddenly understanding that Romeo was equine, he very civilly began to nibble the pony’s spine. Romeo kicked at him.

Romeo has little man syndrome. He charges any gelding he’s turned out with, consequently, he’s in a pen by himself. I believe he was gelded very late (he’s said to be 13) because he acts like a recently (or proud cut?) gelded stallion, by trying to dominate the much bigger geldings.

          But the mares? He struts, like a prince amongst the peasants. With one exception, the mares in the barn are as babytalking crazy about the pony as the humans. They think he’s the most adorable thing they’ve ever seen. Amazingly, Brandy, in the neighboring pen, is the most smitten. Brandy can be  difficult. She’s very, VERY alpha, opinionated, and will push you around if you allow it. But she is putty in Romeo’s hooves. On the few times she had foals, she was a doting, protective mother, and now, we are convinced, she thinks Romeo is a foal. She now sticks very close to Romeo, watching his every move.

Brandy and Romeo

The one mare exception is Gretchen’s mare, Lucy. SHE knew immediately that this pint sized invader had stolen Her Momma’s heart. Jealousy made her smoke, giving Gretchen the stink eye and pinning her ears at the very sight of Romeo. Romeo, Shmomeo, get the hell outta here, Romeo.(my apologies to Shakespeare)

What is it about this little horse that has turned all the women into slobbering fools? He has no training, but Gretchen is teaching him to lunge. He is much too small for anyone to ride, and we don’t know if he was ever saddled or bridled. He’s in a halter made for foals.

I think I know what it is.

Romeo is a toy horse. A living, breathing toy horse. Quite a big larger than the toy horses, the models, the Breyer’s horses you collected as a kid and if you tell me you’re all grown up now, you don’t have any toy horses, I’m going to think you’re lying or embarrassed. Hey, look. It’s okay. It’s just us horsemen here. I still have all the ones I collected during my childhood. Battle scarred, I admit, they can’t be considered in pristine condition. But they still stand proudly on a shelf, faithfully carrying my childhood dreams on their dusty backs.

My childhood dream weavers

We don’t grow out of our attraction to tiny horses. It matters not how good our real one is, or how old we are. We still go bananas over tiny horses.

Just like the toy horses, you can’t ride a pony, but you can enjoy them for their being small enough to be manageable. You can push a pony around, unlike that monster 17 hand warmblood that just looks daft as you try to push him off your foot.  We women have this innate attraction to small, cute things. Maybe that’s why so many women like babies, although THIS woman never could get it, and thus, never had them.

The advantage Romeo has is, we believe he was not only never broken, but never really handled. He came from a very bad neglect case, where over 25 ponies, a couple of horses and several dogs were taken away from the ‘hoarder’ owner who had never taken proper care of them. I’m certain she had Pony Syndrome just like the rest of us. Maybe she had brought home a mare, and then a gelding that was said to be a gelding but wasn’t...and things just took off.

But then, I’m giving the hoarder too much the benefit of the doubt. Like puppy millers, I don’t have much patience for someone who will throw fifteen horses on a bare dirt, five acre lot with a bucket of filthy water.

Luckily, it appears Romeo hasn’t learned all the dirty tricks a pony demonstrates...running full tilt into a tree to scrape a kid off his back, tearing up the blankets of the bigger horses around him, sneaking under the hot wire fence to get into mischief.

He’s friendly. I entered his stall and first marveled at how tiny his manure piles were. Compared to Raven’s mountains of poop, Romeo’s could be picked up with a hand shovel. 

Tiny horses make for tiny manure piles.

Gretchen, though, says that yeah, his piles are small but he makes a LOT of them. I guess it all evens out in the end.

He came right up to me, looking for treats, or scritches, I don’t know which. I literally had to step outside his pen in order to get a picture of him.

We must be careful. His hooves show he’s foundered at least once. Not unusual in ponies, they’re easy keepers and horribly inbred. In the short amount of time that he’s been at the barn he’s put on some weight.  So...no treats for Little Big Man.

There are no plans for him, honestly, other than something to play with. Although, knowing Gretchen, she’s probably going to try and break him to saddle and bridle. The problem is finding the tack. Maybe she'll break him to drive. I know Barn lord probably knows how to train a horse for that. That would be fun.

But if that doesn’t happen, he’s still the barn mascot.

As for us? Well, here’s a picture (sorry to say, it’s a third generation reprint, I don’t have a scanner that can take 35 mm anymore). I took at a 3 day event near Houston, TX, many years ago. 

All those kids in love with ponies.

The mounted girl is riding “Goldilocks”, a lovely palomino Welsh mare.  The girl won all sorts of ribbons. She was a good rider, and Goldilocks was well trained and willing. But I suspect that in most of the classes, she won because she was the only child rider in her age group competing.

The girl could not ride ANYWHERE without attracting a bunch of like sized girls-and even one boy. All of them were oohing and ahhing over Goldilocks.

Just look at the faces, the need to touch the little mare. Those girls were...like us...batshit goo-goo crazy for a pony.

My Non-Horsey Husband knows me. He stuffs a toy horse in my Christmas stocking every year. 

OK, so I'm still getting toy horses for Christmas

He found a phrase somewhere on the ‘net that fits me perfectly:

“I might be old, but I’m still going to ask for a pony for Christmas.”

This horrid nightmare

   I did not vote for the Great Pumpkin.

   I didn't like Hillary Clinton, either. Honestly, I wanted Bernie Sanders. I even though John Kasich would have made a good President, and he's a Republican.

   But this...this...excretion, this orange turd currently stinking up the White House is the worst thing that has ever happened to my country. He has insulted every one of our allies and friends, and is sucking up to Putin. He adores Putin.  His Republican Party (the spineless ones) are right in line behind him. They agree and fully support everything he says, has done and believes. They loathe the poor but are working hard to make all of us that way. He has filled the Cabinet  and government offices with his friends, self serving plutocrats who are busily dismantling the Constitution and making it into something that benefits the rich corporate white man at the expense of everyone else.
He has started a trade war with everyone and the only folks who will be hurting is US. I fully believe he is going to start a war with SOMEONE.
He spends his time on his golf courses.
He doesn't read. He doesn't listen to his advisers. He had his so called book ghost written and then didn't pay the writer. 

   He is a cult leader, and his believers have been given carte blanche to assault, attack and even kill anyone who derides their little tin god. 

Oh my god. What did we do to deserve this. 

After the fall

Well, it had to happen, eventually.

I've been riding Raven for several years. Bareback, usually.

I'm not quite sure what set off the normally unflappable Raven, but today, he shied (napped?) and I came off.

He'd been unusually fresh this afternoon. I think it's because Anakin, one of the mares in the barn, may have been in heat.  She stuck her head over the wall into the arena to say hello to Handsome Raven.

Raven is a gelding, of course, but being one merely means he is unable to actually mate with a mare. (and I knew a gelding who could almost achieve intromission. He pestered the hell out of his female donkey pasture mate when she was in heat.)

A gelding still knows he's a male and what male horses do. They're not misogynists. They can still chat up the ladies (when the lady allows him to.).  

Anakin finally left the side of the arena, where she'd been hanging out in her paddock, and it took more than a few minutes for me to bring Raven's mind back to what we were doing...riding.

I don't know what caused it. I apparently didn't have his full attention, because he suddenly leaped forward and I fell over his right shoulder. It happened like that.



You know the 'things they tell you to do' in a fall, of course. It's usually advice to someone in a saddle. I'm betting had I been in a saddle I would never have fallen off. But Raven is slick as a seal this time of year and I was in jeans and bareback.

So much of the advice was useless to me, talk about slipping your foot out of the stirrup, throwing the reins away, etc.   You're told to curl up into a ball. "Tuck and roll", they say, don't stick out your arms or hands to break your fall, etc.

And it's all bullshit. I mean, it is very relevant and very good advice but a fall takes a split second. One moment you're on his back, and the next moment you're on yours.

 I remember the very first time I fell off a horse. I was going over a very small jump. My school horse, a big rangy Appaloosa named "Sarge", went left and I went right. I remember thinking how odd the world suddenly looked, and then bam, I'm on my back with no wind in my lungs. 

I seriously doubt that anyone can plan on what to do when you're about to hit the ground. Our minds just don't work that fast. Gravity, we know now, works at the speed of light. Our minds don't work that fast. Even our nerves don't. Your mind is still trying to understand that you are about to fall. It can't process that fast and I'm absolutely sure that a yellow sticky note doesn't pop up into your mind saying " You're about to fall so do 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 in that order....."

Let's not forget that, unlike cats, we can't turn our bodies in midair. Wellllll, perhaps if one has trained as an acrobat, but, ordinarily, we don't have the leverage to conform our bodies into the desired shape whilst flying through the air.
Not relevant to today's fall, but the torques that a stirrup holding your foot is going to cause some hard to overcome elements to a 'successful' fall. 


Not for me the slip the feet out, throw away the reins, tuck and roll.  Not having all that extra stuff to do while in the middle of coming off was of no advantage. Nope, my mind had no idea my body was in the air.

What 'they' also don't take into account is that gravity is unrelenting. It works every time.

But I can say that I did have an advantage. Well, two.
The first was that I was wearing my helmet. In fact, that was the first thought I had when I realized that I had fallen. I am so glad I was wearing my helmet. This despite the fact that I didn't hit my head.
The second thought, then, was...I don't think anything is broken.  The third thought was, wow. I tucked up, without thinking, because I had landed on my left shoulder and hip, my head up and off the ground.

How I did that...well, it's funny how muscle memory...and training...stays in one's brain despite many years of non-use.

When I was in 7th grade (which means I was, um..........12? 13?) I took a class in Judo.
My sensei (teacher) was the  schools  girls gym teacher  who was  probably one of the first women in the US to hold a black belt in karate.
For a week, the first thing we learned was...how to fall. I learned to tuck and roll! I learned to stop a roll with an out flung arm, but learning how to fall was undoubtedly the best thing I've ever learned in my physical life.
She also taught us self defense measures, which, at the time, wasn't considered very lady like, but she was pragmatic. She knew girls were the preferred prey for rapists.

 This, too, came into play once in my life when I was attacked by a guy, who came at me in a fury, fully intending to knock me down and try to kill me. I kicked him in the nuts. Oh, man, that was the most satisfying kick I've ever experienced. He went down like he'd been shot and I got away, unharmed.

I don't remember purposefully filing 'how to fall' in to my brain, but I didn't have to. My reptilian brain...that hunk of brain matter at the back of your head, had filed all that muscle data into long term storage labeled 'Use in Emergency".

It worked. Again.

I lay there for a moment, thinking how grateful I was for wearing my helmet, and then saw Raven standing next to me. He was calm, head down, reins on the ground before his hooves. Good boy. 

After a few moments, I took stock of me. Nothing seemed to be broken. I got up, took the reins and thought, okay, get back on. I'm no longer the type to be afraid of riding after a fall, but...it's good to do so anyway. So I got back on and rode a few circuits in the arena, just to set things right in BOTH our minds, then called it a day.

Raven was a bit embarrassed, I think. I didn't tarry too long after our ride. I unbridled  him and put on his halter, walked him out to his paddock and let him go with my customary gift of a some carrots.
Usually, when I've done that, he either heads right out to the middle of his paddock, or he gets a drink from his trough.
But this time? As I shut the gate and was about to put up the hot wire, he came up to me and put his handsome head over the gate. It was obvious he had something to say.

Sorry.

I patted him. "It's okay. I'll be fine."

Well, as fine as a 64 year old woman who's just fallen off a horse can be and still be in one piece. My neck hurts. My shoulders hurt. My hip hurts.

I was grateful, too, that I wasn't alone at the barn. Our stable girl was cleaning stalls and two other horsemen were there, but no one saw me fall.
How many times have you gone to ride without another soul around? We treasure those moments, when you have the arena to yourself, when you don't have to deal with other humans, but sometimes...sometimes you WANT someone around, in case you really get hurt and need help.

The moment I got home, I took a hot shower, slathered on the Ben-Gay liniment, and took some aspirin. My husband came in just then and asked me the usual, "How was your ride?" and I said "Bad".

"BAD?" in exclamation point eyebrows and verbal  all caps.

"Yeah, I fell off."

"You okay?

"Yeah, but I'll be sore for a few days."

And I will be.

Will I ride tomorrow?

I should. But I'll let my body call THAT shot.


  

Sire and Son in Amsterdam's FEI World Cup dressage

As usual, my little rural area of North America is late to televise the 2017/2018 FEI World Cup Freestyle Dressage test held in Amsterdam.

Isabelle Werth won it on her fabulous horse who's name escapes me, but Edward Gal came in second on a hugely magnificent Dutch Warmblood stallion, Glock's Zonik (which, is now followed by the letters N.O.P which I'm not certain their meaning).

Glock's Zonik is registered as a KWPN (Dutch Warmblood). 

But did anyone notice that Zonik's SIRE was ALSO in the competition?

Zonik is by Blue Hors Zack. Blue Hors Zack was ridden by Daniel Bachman Andersen. He has a website filled with this horseman's idea of true eye candy. It's all in Danish, I think, I can't read it.  Zack is registered as a Danish Warmblood but like so many good European warmbloods, (to include his son), he can also be accepted by the other Big registries.

The unfortunately all too garrulous commentators didn't mention the connection. I noted it on the official FEI published results.

Glock's Zonik N.O.P., ridden by Edward Gal

Blue Hors Zack, ridden by (I assume) Daniel Bachman Andersen

Now this is an example of exemplary breeding. Father and son are almost alike in appearance, although Zack is bay.

Call me old fashioned, but I don't really care for the extended front end asked of Zonik. Gal rode Moorland's Totillas in the very same frame at the World Equestrian Games. Unless standards have changed in lo these many years, I was always under the impression that a horse must be 'even'...his hind legs matching the forelegs in impulsion, etc. Ideally, this means that the hind legs should reach as far under the belly as the forelegs are reaching outwards. Now perhaps the modern dressage horse  has been bred to be able to attain that reach, but..in Zonik's (and Totillas') case, I wonder how much is 'forced'. I hesitate to use that word. The correct one is escaping me at the moment.

There was some tremendous talent in that ring. I learn so much about riding, just by watching the masters at their craft.

And wishing, once again, for that magic lantern. Of the three wishes I'd be granted, one of them would to be able to ride like they do.



(and please...make sure it's Robin William's genie doing the granting.)