Guest Post from Maureen Gaffney

It's interesting, isn't it, how some of our most memorable moments in this sport are wrecks that we barely survive, horses that are bad actors, or moments that really set our hearts racing? (And not in a good way.) Please enjoy this guest post from one of our readers, Maureen Gaffney, as she recalls one such incident. But first, a little about Maureen:

Maureen was born in Sebastopol, California, about an hour north of San Francisco.  As her family could not afford to own horses, she found a nearby stable willing to let her work for free.

This small Arabian horse farm was then purchased by new owners who dramatically expanded the facility and it soon became one of the top Arabian show barns in the country.  Starting as a groom and working up to assistant trainer, Maureen worked at West Coast Arabians for 8 years, then moved on to work for some of the best performance trainers in Santa Ynez and Texas before ending up back in Northern California. Horses supported Maureen through college in Santa Barbara and at UC Berkeley.

 

Eulipia

By Maureen Gaffney

While working at Paragon Arabians in Santa Ynez, California as an assistant trainer (this is code for ‘sacrificial rider’), we took in two horses from a new client.  They were brother and sister, both by the notoriously hot (and a touch psycho) sire, *Gdansk.  I had learned to be a little wary of the owner who brought in a young horse and cheerily proclaimed “Oh yes, she’s broke”.  Sometimes they were. Sometimes mom and dad had an interesting interpretation of “broke”.  It was time for me to find out on which side of the line “Eulipia” fell.

I grabbed the requisite fistful of strawberry and gray colored mane with my left hand, reins short enough for light contact with her mouth, and placed my foot in the awaiting stirrup.  For the previously mentioned reasons, this one made me nervous.  With one last full in-and-exhale, I checked her eye to make sure we were still on the same planet, and having been given the proverbial green light, I pushed off.  Somewhere during those yawning, eternal 4 seconds before I was firmly ensconced in the saddle, the light in her eye flashed red! red! red! and with my leg at approximately mid-arc over her back, the three-year-old filly with the hot bloodline lost her ever-loving mind.

She bolted--first up--then forward like a sleek hide-and-hair covered cannon ball.  Having not yet attained a sitting position much less the second stirrup, I was hurtled onto her neck which only served to further her profound and deepening pool of panic.  My attempts at soothing words were hampered not only by the imminence of my impending fall--only the severity of which was now in question--but by the copious amounts of her long silvery hair winding through my molars.  My soft-toned pleas of "It's okay honey" she heard as "run for the bay like a bunny" and so we lurched around the arena via the most tenuous of connections for a few more adrenaline-laced moments before she unceremoniously threw me over her head where I landed with a thud in a mushroom cloud of dirt. 

Generally speaking, horses--Arabians in particular--do not like to step on foreign objects in their path of travel.  In fact, they will go to great ridiculous lengths to avoid even a discolored patch of dirt.  A horse that you have finally decided is physically incapable of performing a simple cross-over move will suddenly embark on a 40+ mph supersonic side pass if a shadow or stray bit of hay interrupts his route.  For this reason, I was greatly surprised to find the filly placing not one, not two, but three hooves into the small, middle and upper levels of my back. I lay there for some time trying to decide if I was broken.  She gingerly approached me, reins and mane all asunder with that "So....um, hey--whatcha' doin' down there?" look on her face. 

I was not broken, nor--apparently--was she.  She persevered and menaced me further, but via a clever combination of a near starvation diet*, exhaustive pre-ride exercising, and an inventive program called "let the groom ride her", she never managed to unload me again. 

*not really.

Maureen has since hung up her spurs and is now a desk jockey working to plan and implement a long-distance trail around the San Francisco Bay.  She enjoys writing, riding (mostly bicycles these days), cooking, wine and friends.  Maureen has been published in Horse Illustrated, American Trails Magazine, and Dirt Rag (a mountain bike magazine).  She lives in Larkspur, California with her favorite man.    

Thank you so much for stopping by, Maureen, and sharing your story of one of those "memorable" horses. I'm sure many of us can relate, and glad that you survived to tell the tale!

Qrac and Me: A Work in Progress

It’s amazing what a difference a good indoor arena makes. Until I moved Qrac to my new stables, miles and miles away from my house (I’m putting a thousand kilometers per week on my car, which is a bit of a drag), I’d never worked him in a proper rectangular arena as both arenas at our previous yard were oval. Consequently, Qrac and I had never worked corners properly, because even when you improvise corners, or imagine “pretend” corners, it’s simply not the same. So I’m loving the four corners of our new, massive, wonderful indoor!


Not that Qrac and I have become corner experts in the six weeks we’ve been there; I still have a hard time pushing him into them. However, they’re fantastically useful for working on shoulder fore, especially in canter. I’m currently obsessed with shoulder fore as it’s really improved the quality of the canter. I’m able to collect him more and he’s more rounded, more springy, especially on the left lead, which is the one he prefers. Working shoulder fore on the right lead canter is still ultra-tentative; although he’s seriously improved and no longer feels like he’s falling onto his inside shoulder, I still have to be ultra concentrated, totally focused on where I’m sitting and where my inside leg is, making sure he stays in my outside rein, keeping him bent around my inside leg. Transitioning into canter is also still tricky; if I use my outside leg too much he’ll tend to stick to it and buck into canter, so my trainer is really working on getting me to work the transitions using my inside hip. Getting the timing right is really hard, but when Qrac and I get it right our transitions are really harmonious. I like to use my voice to help him understand the subtle shift in my position (“Qraaaaac, gaaaalop!”).

The more I get to know my horse, the more I’m amazed by how generous and willing to work he is. Qrac really tries, sometimes making me smile with his funny little effort-grunts! I think he sometimes gets frustrated with himself, trying really hard yet not quite managing to do what he knows he’s supposed to be doing. For example, during a lesson with my trainer about two weeks ago, we worked on medium trot for the first time, and Qrac found it really difficult to stay in a constant rhythm and got a little flustered and agitated (it was like he was saying, “for goodness sake, I should be able to do this!”), but I could tell he was trying extremely hard and was thrilled with the three or four nice strong strides he gave me. Like most Iberian horses, Qrac doesn’t have a fabulously expressive trot, but we’re working towards developing it as much as possible, slowing down the rhythm, getting him to reach for the bit and get him more active behind without rushing in front. To build a little more expression in his trot I’m working on the idea of passage, slowing him with my seat and getting him to work more upwards by thinking “up” with my ribcage. Maybe it sounds a little strange described this way, but it definitely helps. Until recently, Qrac’s trot tended to get quite rushy after the canter, and even now there is the odd day when he works himself into a bit of a state, becoming somewhat sewing-machine-ish, making himself hollow. By using the idea of passage I can now usually get him back into a slow, rhythmic trot again. If this doesn’t work, I just bring him back to walk, and do a gazillion half-halts until he’s attentive and relaxed enough to resume work.


Basically, since we moved to this new place we’ve been really been able to challenge ourselves and work on all sorts of things. We’ve done miles and miles of leg yield to get him to take more contact on the outside rein, and we’ve really improved our shoulder-in. Even the trot half-passes are beginning to come together, although I tend to be a little too timid with my outside leg, concentrating too much on the shoulder-in part of the exercise and not daring ask for too much (I’m so nice!). But when I do, he’s a natural-born half-passer!


I’m so thrilled with his progress that I’m beginning to consider the remote faraway potential possibility of entering him in some shows next season, which is really saying something since I’ve never been a big fan of shows, always getting way too nervous. Of course, neither of us is ready yet; we need to be more rhythmically steady in all three gaits, better our transitions and really improve the canter before contemplating going out in public. I don’t know how it is in other countries, but Swiss dressage judges tend not to like Iberian horses, so chances are we won’t get very far. However, I love my horse so much, find him so jaw-droppingly beautiful and am so proud of him that I’d like him to show everyone that Iberians can be just as good as northern European Warmbloods. I told Qrac about all this the other day after I’d dismounted, while we were pottering around the indoor, picking up pooh. He nuzzled my shoulder and gazed at me lovingly with his almond shaped eyes. Maybe he wants to show those Swiss judges, too!

Feeding Treats

By Laura Crum


Awhile ago I read a, shall we say, spirited discussion on another blog about feeding horses treats by hand. Some were for, some were against—enthusiastically so. So yesterday, while my little boy and I were giving each horse in turn an apple that we’d picked from our apple tree, I thought, with an inward smile, that at one time I would have been amongst those who were adamantly opposed to feeding treats. In fact, in theory, I still am. Ah, the difference between theory and practice….

I decided this would make a good subject for a blog post, so today I am going to discuss, not whether we should or shouldn’t hand feed our horses treats, but rather why it doesn’t matter as much as I used to think it did, and the difference between theory and practice.

First off, the way I got to be one of these folks who sneers at hand feeding treats (in theory, anyway) has a lot to do with how I was “raised” in the horse biz. My tough old team roper uncle would no more have considered feeding one of his horses a treat than he would have considered calling them pets. I was raised to think of people who behaved in this silly way as somewhat ridiculous, not real horsemen who we, the real deal, looked down upon. It wasn’t said outright, but everything implied it. At some point or other I absorbed the viewpoint that not only was it “silly”, but it made horses pushy, rude and mouthy. To some degree, I still subscribe to this viewpoint. I don’t, in general, feed my horses treats by hand. But…

At a later point in my career with horses, about the time I took up team roping, in my thirties, I began to get a little less rigid about how I treated my horses. I began to play around more. If I ate an apple, I’d hand the core to my horse. If I drank a beer, I’d pour some in my palm for Gunner, who turned out to absolutely love beer. I didn’t worry about making Gunner pushy, mouthy or rude (and he wasn’t). I just enjoyed having fun with him.

Then I had a kid. I began by teaching him not to hand feed stuff to the horses. It just makes sense. Why lose one of those little fingers? But my kid got older. He read books, he talked to other kids, he had ideas of his own. He wanted to feed his horses cookies and apples and carrots. I taught him to put the treats in the manger. But then he wanted to hand them to his beloved pony. I let him. The pony had very good manners. No harm resulted.

Eventually my kid wanted to give his horse, Henry, a birthday party, complete with heart shaped cookies to be hand fed to each horse, “to show that we love them.” I couldn’t say no. Some of the horses take treats nicer than others. I handed the grabby ones (who I believe have been hand-fed by previous owners) their treats, and let my kid hand over the treats to the polite ones. We got through the party, though I couldn’t suppress the occasional inward eye roll. This was certainly not the “cowboy way” I was raised with. But we did have fun.

And now, from time to time, we go down to the barnyard and distribute apples. Mostly we put them in the mangers. Depends on which horse. Do I think this is a good idea? Sort of. I have to say, anything that makes us feel connected to our horses and helps us enjoy them is not really a bad thing. I don’t, however, allow my kid to feed the more mouthy horses treats by hand. It just makes sense to me. I don’t want to spend my time punishing these horses for grabbing. Its better not to encourage them.

So what do I end up with? In theory I don’t believe in feeding treats by hand. In practice, well, I sometimes feed treats by hand and I sometimes don’t. Depends. How’s that for a nice clear statement? In my own defense, let me quote the famous Zen teacher Suzuki Roshi. “You’re perfect just the way you are, and you could use a little improvement.” That pretty much sums up my practice.

So how about you guys? Any insights on this subject?