A Baby Boomer Dreams of Arabian Horses - The Maiden Season Part 11

Part 1 of the Baby Boomer Series

Part 1 of the Maiden Season

The hard part about staying in bed, (besides the fact I don't know how to sit still) was I needed to be working on conditioning the young Arabian stallion for his coming halter futurity. An awful headache reminded me if I tried to get up and move sooner than I was ready. Otherwise, I'd not sure I would have obeyed doctor's orders since the show date was rapidly approaching.

But gradually I did get back to conditioning Legs and working on his halter stance. The Arabian horse knew what he was doing because he had been shown as a yearling. But I didn't have a clue. It was time to get some lessons for halter.

I hauled the horse down to visit my friend, Jean. She's a whiz in halter so I knew I was in good hands. To be perfectly honest after this last accident, I was having some problems with fear. The fact that Legs had run me down was ever present in my mind. We were going to start with her schooling the young stallion and then in a couple of weeks I would be recovered enough to take halter lessons.

When Dave and I arrived with Legs, Jean had Dave just turn the stallion loose into the arena while she finished up a couple of things. This facility was built with a barn aisle with stalls on each side running down both sides of the arena. So the horse immediately ran down those wall sniffing and calling for horses on the other side.

One of those horses was a rank pony stallion. He didn't like Legs on the other side of his wall and began to challenge the horse through the wall. Trapped inside the stall was the owner who had been trying to clean. Now the rank stud had her cornered and terrified as he tried to attack Legs through the wall.

Jean went to free the owner instructing Dave to catch Legs. I was sidelined still from my injury so I could only watch as Dave tried to catch Legs and listen to the screaming pony stallion.

Fortunately for the pony's owner, Jean is as great hand with a horse. No one else could have extricated the owner from that stall and got the pony stud caught up and tied as quickly and safely as Jean did.

In the meantime, Dave was still trying to catch the naughty young stallion. By the time Jean came back, Legs was still running circles around my husband. Every time Dave would try and cut him off or block the horse, Legs figured a way to get through. The horse didn't want to be caught because he really wanted to see what all the commotion on the other side of the wall had been.

Jean was the first to point out that Legs was respecting even Dave's space. At no time, did the horse ever try to go directly through the man. And yet Dave rarely makes the horse mind, whatever respect the horse was showing Dave was because of what the horse had learned from me.

It was obvious to all of us, there was no way the accident in the field had been anything more than an accident. If the horse wasn't deliberately running over Dave under these circumstances, he sure hadn't deliberately mowed me down while only playing in the field. The horse just had not seen me until he hit me. That was a relief for me to know.

By the time the horse show rolled around, I was feeling better but still didn't have the hang of halter. The equipment and the stance all seemed foreign to me. So when I got the horse ready for his class, I put the show halter on with a regular stable halter over the top and the lead tied around the horse's neck. I didn't want to take any chances on the show halter breaking on the way up to the ring.

I had seen trainers do this and thought it would work well for me. But the fact is when you are clumsy with the equipment most anything can happen and it did.

When we got up to the ring, I heard first call for our class. I began taking off that regular stable halter. As I fumbled with the unfamiliar equipment I managed to get the lead of the show halter caught up in regular halter. In trying to get it untangled, I somehow lost my grasp.

The regular halter plunged to the ground and the horse raised up and moved back a step from the sound. Then in that brief instant as I reached to grab the lead, the horse realized he was loose.

To be continued.........

Part 12

baby boomer Arabian horse Arabian horses horses horse dream horse maiden stallion horse breeding halter horse Halter Futurity