The horses are vastly preferable to the equestrians, who in Connecticut at least tended to be emotionally retarded women with high school educations and millions of dollars.

Actually that sounds amazing now that I put it that way. I was such a fool when I was slightly younger.

They're temperamental buggers.  The last time I got on a horse was in Egypt in 1991 when, in a fit of Lawrence of Arabia-enthusiasm, we hired some to ride along the Nile and around the Pyramids.  Ethically it was dubious as it was quite obvious that the Egyptians could not care less about animal welfare.  Anyway the guide soon became bored with our walking pace (or maybe he had just taken a dislike to me) and decided to slap my horse into a canter.  So off it took through trees and bushes before chucking me off on what may be Cairo's only golf course (fortunately for me this was into a bunker).  You wouldn't get me on the back of one those again unless it was so doped up it could barely move.

to conduct them, of course...

but if you look at Merkel...

She really has a bulldog face!

Last edited by Noble Savage (2011-09-07 13:20:57)

Hahahahah! Excellent!

There was a very old horse in one of the stables where I worked who would shit in his food bucket. I would come by to clean his stall and he would look intensely smug and I would know that he had dropped a huge deuce and that I would have to get an additional bucket of water and bleach to clean out his food bowl, which was screwed in to the wall (it was the only one of this kind in the barn). I actually liked this horse and I always suspected that his owner had somehow trained him to do it since she was a real piece of work.

The other horse who I owned, a huge 3/4 TB 1/4 draft from Ireland, was also a roller - he was the same age as I was and I had him from when I was about seventeen well into my twenties (he retired to an amazing horsey retirement facility in PA and died last year). Generally he was extremely wise and well-behaved but if he got the SLIGHTEST bit wet he would roll, grunting lustily the whole time, usually going completely over and back. Rolling in the indoor ring was basically his favorite thing in the world to do - he may be the only horse in history to get cast (that is, stuck lying down against a wall) in an indoor ring. Usually horses get cast in cramped stalls; he chose to march up to a wall in a vast, empty space and then roll into it. I had a non-horsey friend with me at the time and he thought there was going to be a very tragic end to the story since everyone in the barn came running with ropes to haul him away from the wall so he could stand (he basically didn't care and in a very un-horsey fashion wasn't even panicked).

But the rolling thing was quite consistent - if you were riding outside and it started raining and you wanted to continue your ride inside you could either just forget it or take all his tack off and just let him roll. Otherwise you would be going merrily along and then he would stop and begin a loud, mournful grunting and then, whoosh, out from under you he would go. I found it endearing.

While I was away at college a young woman who worked at the stable would ride him, and no one told her about the rolling thing. She of course chose to throw on her brand new saddle, which I bet he understood, and he of course dropped and rolled completely over on it, which caused her to fly into a rage and kick and scream at him (which he probably found amusing since he was enormous and she was rather slight). The saddle was fine.

He also had a phobia about vacuum cleaners and hoses and would very calmly break his halter or the crossties and walk away from them.

Last edited by Maximilien de Robespierre (2011-09-07 15:52:09)