Wild as a deer
Wild as a deer.
~ My farrier on his horses’ behavior after a long, cold, dark winter of being left pretty much up to their own devices.
This sounds just like something my grandma from Maud, Oklahoma would have said. People don’t talk like this much anymore, which is too bad. I like the poetry of this type of language. (And a good drawl makes it even prettier.)
Doing some ground work with 3-year-old Toby last night, I understood exactly what my farrier was talking about. I hate to say it, but my big lovely pet was wild as a deer.
The Percheron gelding stomps around the round pen, full of his own magnificence. I halter him and lead him around in figure eights and serpentines, asking him to pay attention to me and stay at my shoulder, please. He shakes his head from side to side and threatens to nip. I point at him─stopping him dead in his tracks. We resume the lesson. I ask him to release his hindquarters to the left and the right, which he does very nicely, thank you. Then I gently wave the wand back and forth in front of him and ask him to back up.
It‘s cool. There’s a little wind. But that’s really no excuse for what happens next. Toby suddenly erupts in one big buck, striking the air with a hoof (something he’s never done on the end of a lead line before)─no longer my fairly good mannered 1,300+ pound horse, but a bull in a china shop.
I come down on him pretty hard, with a tug on the lead rope and a firm no, feeling kind of sick as a dog that all of that basic training last fall has disintegrated into this wild as a deer stuff over the winter. We work on a little more basic leading, start and stop, and end on a good note.
I put Toby up for the night. Give him a nice rub and let him know we’ve got lots of work ahead of us. I go inside and pop the Clinton Anderson ground training DVD into the player and promptly doze off.
It’s been a very long day. I go to sleep with the chickens.
Flickr photos: Fack to Bront; David Herd; Sand Dragon; Some Bonnie
