A simple nibble

Take a moment to look at this picture. To most people’s eyes, it appears just to be a horse taking a mouthfull of grass. To just a handful of others, it is much much more.

Imagine that, as a 4 year old, you were taken from your mother. You, up till this point, had depended on her solely for food and attention. You had only talked to a few other people in your life, those strange beings that thought you were adorable for a little while, and those that were in the small apartments next to yours (and even then, only through the walls). Suddenly you are thrown into a 10×10 cell, and the only thing you can see, sense, or smell are the people in the adjacent cells. You go from relying partially on your mom’s food, to completely relying on this new dry substance. For the next three and a half years or so, you are fed nothing but a cup of oatmeal and half a granola bar once a day. As time goes on, sometimes you get to eat every day, sometimes you don’t.

When you turn 19, you have to start learning to work. You and your bosses speak different languages, and exercise corporal punishment when you won’t do exactly what they say, even if the reason behind it is that you don’t understand. You eventually kind of figure out what they mean, and start to do it mindlessly, without even thinking. You come to only know the scolding words in your boss’ language, and work only to avoid them.

At age 23, suddenly another boss hires you and you’re thrown into another cell at another unfamliar place. He expects you to work even harder than your last, and do it perfectly. When you don’t do it perfectly, the buttons your press shock you. You try to avoid being shocked, but you simply cannot reach far enough to hit the right button. This continues until you are about 31. At this point, you’ve rarely been outside, and rarely eaten anything but basic oatmeal and granola, but thankfully your last boss has given you a bit more and of better quality.

At that age of 31, something changes. Someone comes along and opens up your cell’s door. They let you walk out into the sun and for the first time in far too long, you can be human again. Simply human.

This is a basic outline of Harper’s (formally Jube) life. The picture you see above is her first bite of grass in at least four and a half years. She sat there, her nose to the ground, chewing the grass with her eyes closed. The wind was blowing, and she turned to feel it in her face. For a moment, just a moment, all was calm and right with the world.

She’s let me know that she doesn’t understand much of what is going on in the outside world. She shies away from butterflies, cars, wind in higher grass, stepping on a stick, etc. But she doesn’t fully spook, only says “I don’t know what this is, I don’t know whether I should be afraid of it, so I’ll err on the side of caution.” Progress with her will either be slow or fast, I’m honestly not sure.

I thought I would share this beautiful moment with you, and give you some insight into her situation. I’ll be adding some more pictures of her soon.

It all started with a look

As soon as the papers are finalized, I am the owner of a new Walker mare. She is six years old, and with pads nearly 17.1hh, with legs that go on forever. Jube has very old eyes, even compared to my 20 y/o mares, and has been through quite a lot for her young years. She has been starved, neglected, abused, and ignored, and has still maintained a wonderful presence.

The man who owned her before the guy I bought her from starved this huge mare down to being over 100lbs underweight. She was fed low grade pellets once a day and alfalfa every other day if she was lucky. Jube was only ever touched to be pushed aside to feed her a little, and when she was trained. She was stalled from the moment she was weaned, was fed that same ration that kept her so thin until she was sold to Mr. G.

Now Mr. G is a sweet enough old man. He has been a used car salesman, among other things, for upwards of 40 years and is pretty big in the Walker world. Mr. G lives down the street from me and my dad and I took him up on his offer to go look at a truck and trailer he had for sale. So early yesterday we packed up the Yukon and headed down to Bowdon, GA, which is not the end of the earth, but you can see it from there. We arrived to a pretty nice, large barn with a 35ft center aisle that the horses were trained on. Mr. G and his daughter showed me their show horses, only a few of which were mares, all very sleek and black, gorgeous and well taken care of. After an hour of looking at the truck/trailer, geldings, golf cart and building, my dad was wrapping up things with the barn manager and I was taking a final look around.

This is where things tend to get a bit mystical. I was petting a particularly large gelding (He had to have been nearly 18hh on pads) over his stall door near the far end of the barn when I felt this very strong urge to turn around. I fought it for a few moments before giving in. In a sea of black noses poking out over stall doors and through bars, way down at the other end and several stalls away from other horses was a pink nose resting against the lock on the door. I stood there for a second, but thought it was just another gelding, so I returned to the larger guy next to me who was demanding to be scratched behind his ears. A few minutes later the asst trainer walked down to pink nose’s stall and yelled “C’mon mare!” while opening her stall door. He obviously intended her to walk behind him, leadless like a trained dog, which she did until we met each other’s eyes. I haven’t the slightest clue how long we were there, but it was long enough that the trainer had already gotten to the other end of the barn with her all the way back at her stall. He yelled for her to come on again, which broke our concentration and she trotted up behind him and into her cross ties.

At this point I had no idea she was even for sale. I asked the trainer her name, who she was out of, general stuff. While I’m standing in front of her she did the one thing that every “soulmate” horse I have ever bought has done, she takes my entire messy bun in her mouth and starts trying to groom my hair. Instead of tacking her up, the trainer just sat there and watched a girl and a young mare rub and groom each other for a little with the most amazed look on his face. You know, that look that says “Poor girl, she must be a little touched in the head.” That’s a very familiar look to me, which I know is surprising to you.

Finally he started trying to tack her up, which was met with a sudden and completely unexpected bite in the dead center of the trainer’s back. He fought to get near her without being bitten for nearly 20 minutes before he relented and let me do it, after which she acted as if I had done this to her every day since she was born. After this he rode her for a bit, I took a quick turn (I have no idea of what I’m doing on a performance horse) and she did all the work for me. She had this look on her face whenever he stopped for a moment that said “I’m not going to put up with this for much longer.”

We wrapped up the riding and she returned with only a voice command to the cross ties. I stood there, washing her down and half grooming her, for nearly half an hour. Eventually we had to leave, and as I was walking out of the place I took one look back at her, and noticed something in the groomsman’s hand. I started walking quickly to her and noticed a strong smell of kerosene and something else I can’t quite put my finger on. She was standing there, head down, a near defeated look in her eyes until she saw me again. I made up more crap on the spot to keep the chemicals off her legs than I think I’ve ever had to. I’m honestly not even sure what I said, but I managed to keep it off of her for at least that day. I’ve never felt so horrible leaving a horse in a place in my life.

What has amazed me about this mare is that she has gone through all of this, but still holds herself and behaves with more grace and geniality than I could ever have expected. She is arriving here hopefully next Saturday, but nowhere soon enough for my liking. I’m going to be keeping updates on her here, and hopefully I’ll have a better picture of her up soon. Any advice is greatly appreciated!

My continued inspiration…

For the last 5 or 6 years, I have had a continuing inspiration in my life. He has fought off illness, nearly died, continued health problems and weight issues, and though he continues to be quite thin, he is still fighting. He can’t stand to not be working, but is always happy to show another who is doing his job the correct way to do it. And he always, always, does all of this with more grace than any human I have ever seen.

Flash back to half a decade ago. I’m looking for my first horse, and I was looking to show as a hunter/jumper at the time. After a few weeks of searching, my mom comes upon an ad for a 14 or 15 year old ex hunter/jumper and racehorse named Beau who is being sold by a farrier. From the way he sounded, I knew he was perfect and I bugged her for a couple weeks to let me go look. Finally she relented and we took the hour trip out to the middle of nowhere to look at this guy.

When we arrived, I looked out into the herd for a chestnut gelding, but all I saw were spectacularly bred quarter horses, amazingly muscled and perfectly shaped for barrel racing and roping. The farrier pointed out to me a thin, beat up horse who was being chased and bitten by a huge palomino mare. This horse obviously needed some serious work done on him. He had fungus on his legs from swimming in their pond, his entire body was covered in scars from the times he had been bitten or kicked, he was losing hair from being so stressed, and he was easily 200lbs under weight. No matter how many times I asked his owners not to, they insisted on taking him over a few short jumps for me (I honestly didn’t think he was rideable in his condition). The second he saw an english saddle being pulled out of the barn, he came cantering up and turned so they could put it on him. He lowered his head for the bridle, which was WAY too big, and stood quiet while the girl mounted him and rode him down to the ring. He seemed like he was 3 years old again, his head held high and prancing like the gorgeous Anglo-arab he is.

I watched as this older, thin, sick horse performed better than a jumping champion. He looked as if he’d never been happier in his life. He went over jumps, fences, and to my amazement sailed clear over a smaller horse. His owner had bought him from a girl who had decided that she would rather have a car than a horse about 2 and a half years prior to that. He hadn’t been ridden once since two weeks before they bought him.

Over time, I’ve come to respect this horse who I lovingly call Old Man far more than any human I’ve come into contact with or heard of. He is extremely nervous, terrified of everything, but quickly recovers and acts as if it’s nothing. He has choked and nearly died twice, losing about 50lbs every time and never gaining it back. He constantly has skin problems and ear problems. We feed him about three times as much as every other horse on the farm and he still will not gain weight.

I am posting this now because of something that happened yesterday. I was tacking up Maverick to ride, and Beau was hovering around asking to be ridden (which he can’t be). When I took Mav into the upper field and started slowly walking up and down the fence to warm him up, Beau mirrored our actions across the fence. As we did circles, practiced opening and closing gates, etc, he mirrored everything we did without a rider and perfectly. But what amazed me was that as Mav was performing these actions, he was watching Beau. As time went on, he started mimicking him and seemed to be learning from the older, wiser horse.

When I went into a canter, Beau followed suit. After about four rounds, Beau stopped dead and started coughing, having overworked himself. He had been carrying his head high, prancing like the horse he is, and in one moment of quick defeat he acted his age. But he recovered, slowing to a walk and coming up to where Mav and I had stopped. He looked at Mav, looked at me, then gave a nod and a snort as his permission to carry on without him. For the rest of the time he stood in that exact spot and snorted whenever we did something wrong, which caused us to quickly correct.

He does this with everyone. He is the mentor of the farm and the teacher above all other horses. I am very lucky to have him to teach me and the rest, and I am so glad he chose me. He is my continued inspiration, and I think he would want me to share this with you. Thanks old man.