Saturday, November 21, 2009

Well, he is NOT a city horse



Today was the Mounted Patrol obstacle and desensitisation seminar.

It was not our day.

I went to bed early, tried to get some sleep. Woke up at 3am, couldn't get back to sleep. Had to get up at 5:30 to feed, as I needed to load Santana in the trailer by 7. It was cold and dark out there. Yuck.

Not that the facility was probably open, but I wish I had gotten there a lot earlier.

Santana has never been anywhere but the public arena with one more horse there, or, the mountain, which , well, is a huge area.

I unloaded him, and my normally calm boy was a little excited. I had a bit of a time saddling him. I walked him to the arena. The organization putting this thing on didn't give you any info on how this was going to be run. I didn't know if it was going to be a few horse in the arena at a time, or what.

Wrong-o.

35 horses, most of whom were also very nervous and anxious. This is a covered arena with a P.A. system blaring, tractors going panels clanging. It was chaos, and the arena was crowded, and most of these horses were NOT under control.

Remember the horse that kicked that horse I bandaged?? Well, he was there. Ugh.

So, here is little Santana, in a covered arena for the first time, around a large group of horses for the first time, and most of them are not calm. At all. I didn't have a good feeling about this.

Now, in the arena about 20 feet away, there was a huge roping going on... cattle, and cowboys, more horses everywhere.
In the arena about 50 yards away, a gymkhana was going on. There were over 125 trailers, and over 200 horses on the grounds, in a fairly small area! Did I mention that Santana has never been around more than one horse at time??? This was nuts. Not a good environment for his first outing of this nature. I think it was overload, even for him.

I wasn't at all comfortable with the conditions in the arena, especially for my boy, as this was his first organized arena event. I walked him out during the "warm up" session. It was too much. I was nearly run down by a horse that took off like a bat out of hell when a tractor started up close to her. I saw a Clydesdale jump on top of a quarter horse in fear. (i thought those guys NEVER spooked?) I made the decision I was not gonna do this, not yet. I would let Santana "observe" from the rail, and get acclimated to this chaos.
After about an hour on the rail, he had calmed down, but I had not. I was watching all these out of control horses dumping their riders, crashing into each other, and , lets not forget, we had to watch out for the kicker that nearly killed Fancy!

I opted to just observe the whole session, which was four hours. SAntana did calm down, and I walked him to the roping, and the gymkhana, and just around and about. It was good for him to just hang out in this environment, but I don't think it would have been fair to ask him to participate, and I was concerned for both of our safeties. Maybe I just chickened out. I don't think so.

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