3.) Sparky Chooses
By Peggy
This is a pretty minor communication, but here goes. A while back I was trying to figure out which saddle pad my horse, Sparky, preferred. I had been alternating days riding with two different saddle pads: one was a thick woolback pad and the other was a wool felt therapeutic pad that was thinner, but with a closed-cell foam core. I thought he would probably like the therapeutic pad, since the makers had listed all the wonderful benefits of using their pad, and had made it sound so good. After a couple weeks of using both pads, I walked out into the pasture, holding a saddle pad in each hand, to where Sparky was grazing. I said to him, "Sparky, which of these do you like best? Touch the one you like best with your nose." Well, he lifted his head from the grass, reached out and touched the woolback pad, and went back to grazing. Coincidence? Well...maybe. But the short of it is that we use the woolback pad most of the time.
I do talk to Sparky all the time. Sometimes I think he just tolerates having me around, but other times he seems to be listening, and I think he is really trying to tell me something, although I don't hear any "words". However, he is not a stoic horse, and is very expressive in many ways, and very adept at the type of horse sign language that I think we all understand pretty well.
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Now, I hesitate to bring this up, because it makes me look like an idiot, but it has been preying on my mind lately. Not too long ago, we were taking our first riding lesson after two years of just trail riding. We were riding in a small circle in the pasture, and everything was fine until the instructor asked us to canter on the left lead. It didn't feel right; Sparky felt unbalanced and I felt unbalanced, and the saddle seemed to be moving to the right. I stopped and told that instructor that something was not right, and I wasn't sure if it was Sparky or me, and asked her if I was riding crooked. She said that I looked fine, the horse was just acting up, and we should tighten the saddle. We started off at a canter again, feeling very uncomfortable. About half way around the circle, Sparky stopped suddenly, bucked, and I flew off. I hit the ground pretty hard, and hurt my back. When I looked up, he was standing a few paces off, with his head down, looking at me very sheepishly. Well, I'm sure that we can all agree that bucking off the rider is not a good thing for a horse to do. So, a few days later, I was sitting in the grass close to where Sparky was grazing, and I was telling him that it wasn't good that he bucked me off, and that I hurt my back, and that it could have been worse, and I was getting too old for this, and that he needed to find a better way to communicate his frustration. I was going on and on, and as I talked he kept his eyes and ears on me as he continued to graze, slowly coming closer until he was eating the blades of grass between my feet. Well, I didn't hear any words, but I knew he was trying to tell me something. If I had to guess, I would think that he was saying, "I'm so sorry; I really didn't mean for you to get hurt...but you were riding so very, very BADLY!"
4.) Clovis Makes A Move
So, now I am convinced that I am riding somewhat crooked, since I do have some back problems. Everything is fine riding down a trail, or even riding a circle to the right; but riding a circle to the left made it very apparent that something is wrong. I am currently studying my Sally Swift and Mary Wanless books trying to figure out how I am crooked, and how to correct it. This is very slow going. Sorry this is so long, but I am very frustrated at not being able to find an instructor to help me with this. The instructor I was using thinks the horse just needs "discipline". I don't feel like this is the right thing, in this case. Maybe I am crazy, but whenever I have ignored my gut feelings in the past, it has turned out to be the wrong thing to do. Anyway, it made me feel a lot better just to write it down.
Thank you for bearing with me.
by M. L.
My daughter's horse Clovis is a big boy. He's 13 yrs. old now, part TB, Warmblood and Quarterhorse. He's about 17.3, all muscle and doesn't have a clue how big he is. Since we acquired him I had always felt that he didn't know where his feet where in relationship to his body. He was anxious and easily distracted and I often thought of him as a child with ADD disorder. While I was taking a Tteam clinic with Maggie I received a call from a VERY UPSET daughter that Clovis was three legged lame. It turned out that he had subluxated his pelvis and the vet was recommending major stall rest.
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The barn manager where Clovis was stabled had been sick with Lyme Disease for about a year prior to this. She wasn't getting any better and was being treated very aggressively with IV antibiotics. She couldn't walk anymore and was starting to lose her speech too. The emotional climate at the barn was very tense.
Clovis had always required a great deal of patience in both riding and handling. I think because of the many distractions at the barn that didn't always happen. We also discovered that as a baby he had been broken very roughly, which was so abusive to his nature. I had always felt that Clovis had a lot of untapped talent and an incredible heart, but that we hadn't been able to help him realize his abilities. Sometimes I wondered if we would ever figure him out and I would feel very discouraged. I worried that if we sold him he was ripe to be abused again.
One day while I was home weeding the garden, not thinking about anything in particular, a statement came into my brain sort of like a neon sign blinking on a darkened street, "GET ME OUT OF HERE," but there was a desperate quality to this statement that made me think, "why did I think that?" Did I think that? What was that? Am I nuts?
And then in a flash, I just knew it was Clovis telling me to move him from that barn. It was a strange moment for me. I got a chill up the back of my neck because I realized that this was a different thing than when your brain tells you that you forgot to pick up milk at the store. I decided I needed to get down to the barn and see Clovis immediately. When I walked into the barn and looked at him, I didn't "hear" a voice not did thunder and lightning dramatically appear. Instead, his eyes and mine connected in a way that hadn't happened previously. Remember, this was my daughter's horse and she had the primary relationship with him. I began stroking him all over letting him know that I had heard him and that I would find him a better living situation as soon as I could.
I realized that many of the other horses in our barn that were stalled in Clovis' isle had experienced a lot of wacky problems. That's when I began to consider, and this one was a new one for me, that the horses were responding to the negative energy of our barn manager's illness. Horses being sensitive and Clovis being a major player in that department!!
We moved Clovis to a new barn where he has been for the past year. He has wonderful turnout and great pasture buddies. I also found an incredible healer who does Reiki and energy balancing as well as communication. She doesn't advertise herself as a communicator and when I realized that she was talking to Clovis she was able to confirm my experience as well as A LOT of other things I had only suspected. Well, we have finally figured him out and he now knows where his body is about 90% of the time. If it was 100% he just wouldn't be Clovis.
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