Buying another horse was defintely not on my list of things to do that day but after calling the number, the ball started rolling. As it turned out, I had met the breeder previously and truly admired her facility and philosophy. In fact one of my former students has boarded her fabulous horse Deuce Bigalow there for a couple of years, and takes riding lessons with Muffy Knox. After talking to the owner, Heather Tanner, about this yearling and learning more about his temperament, I simply had to go meet him. For sure I didn't need another horse because Dexter definitely has my heart and full attention these days, so I took Gord to be my voice of reason. We decided not to make it easy and decided to leave the horse trailer at home.
As you probably guessed, this youngster had me at hello. Heather has done an amazing job with his handling and even Gord couldn't find anything thing to fault, except his young age. My thinking is that young horses are started too early, before their joints are fully developed, and in many cases this causes their early demise, as happened to my beautiful Nugget. Gord's voice of reason was that I will be caring for this youngster for a couple of years before he'll ever be ridden. My response was - ya so what's wrong with that? We grow our own hay, trim our own feet, do our own de-worming - not much cost to own one more and the extra feet to trim are OK by me. In hindsight, we should have taken the horse trailer to save a second trip.
When we picked him up, he jumped right onto the trailer without hesitation. I am so used to fixing problems, that I was surprised he went without issue. Heather's comment was, "he's always been handled by competent handlers and so he has never learned differently". Heather was absolutely right. He loads, picks up his feet and leads like all our other well trained "boys".
Unfortunately, most folks just starting out with horses are going to make mistakes. Our horses will give us honest feedback how we're doing. When we handle them well, they respond well. When our horses aren't doing what we think they should, it is an opportunity to reflect on how we could do things better.
Needless to say, the name Louie didn't work for me so I changed his barn name to Navar. Captain Navarre was the hero of my all time favourite movie - Ladyhawk, also starring Michelle Pfieffer and Matthew Broderick. I've shortened it for simplicity but it still makes me smile every time I say it.
I've promised Gord that, barring anything horrible happening to any of our boys, I will never ask for another horse. I'm not sure he believes me.
Tovie, baby Navar, and the big "boys".
1 comment:
Pictures Please! Or maybe I should just get on my scooter and come on over to meet Navar....I love Grullo's too, matter of fact I was going to buy a Grullo BUT he got sold before I could bring the cheque and I ended up buying my Zoe. :-)
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