Bozo's Carrots

The usefulness of a nicely-padded horse

Hello. It’s getting to the crazy time of the year – Christmas time – and, although my family is remarkably small (by modern Australian standards: I am an only child of only-child parents), it still seems to always be a busy time for me. Maybe because around that time everyone is desperately trying to “catch up” with all their friends before they get swallowed up by the days of festivities in their own clans.

It seems not-entirely-coincidental then, that my memory and general mental capacity seems to be receding around this time. The latest stupid thing I’ve done, which is relevant to this blog, is forgetting to pack the saddlepad and the girth, which I carefully washed, into the boot of my car before driving the one hour to see Becky. Now, the saddlepad I could’ve somehow improvised (maybe), but the girth – that I could find no substitute for: the “spare” girth I had in my car (Becky’s old girth) was about a foot too short.

What was a girl to do other than put on the protective vest and make use of Becky’s well-padded back to ride without a saddle? It was the first time I rode bareback in a long time, and never before on Becky, so I had no idea how it would go. However everything I learned in the last 3 years told me that the most likely recipe for success was to not make a Big Deal out of it, but to try and be as precise with my intentions and aids as if I was in the saddle, and not to just meander around on a lose rein just to “see how it goes”. Which meant that I had to try and relax as soon as possible and not expect Bad Things to happen. Mind you, despite my intentions, I did fully expect to be eating arena sand at some point, particularly since the last ride I had on Becky contained more bucking and otherwise "swearing" on Becky’s part than in a long while.

I should probably backtrack and explain that last bit. As far as I can tell, Becky’s problem was extreme crankiness at being locked up. Being in the arena put her both further away from her buddies (with whom she could still communicate across the fence from her locked yard), and at a different perspective to them. She really did not want to be in the arena. Every time she was asked to turn away from the sight of her friends, she drifted with her shoulder, and, in the end, when asked to trot, started to throw her lunges and bucks. Since Marina was with me, I felt more confident than I normally do, and with her insistence that, for once, the bucks were not caused by my own inaptitude, but by Becky’s lack of cooperation, there was nothing left to do but persevere. So, I kept asking of Becky everything I intended to ask, and attempted to ignore her jumps the best I could. Including asking her to canter, which she does not do graciously at the best of times.

In the end I surprised myself by how little the bucks affected me. The thought of them truly is more frightening than the reality. By her 10th or so attempt to lodge her protest, her efforts just seemed pathetic to me, and, funnily enough, she quit the jumping soon after.

So, with this lesson fresh in my mind, filling me with both confidence and trepidation, I climbed bareback onto the somewhat surprised, but quite calm Becky.

As anyone who has ridden bareback knows, the first reaction is surprise at how different everything feels: everything moves more and is unstable. But what surprised me more, as soon as I relaxed, how much easier it was for me to feel when Becky drifted off the line I put her own. Logically, it’s obvious that it would be easier to feel, without the barrier of the saddle between me and her body, but the reality is quite startling nonetheless: all of her movements seemed emphasized to me… the downside being that all my movements (and mistakes) were emphasized to her: from the uneven pressure in my thighs and calves, to possible slippage of my seat off-center. I really had to concentrate on everything I was doing so much more.

That concentration really took my mind of Becky’s possible misbehaving and, to be honest, that thought never seemed to cross Becky’s mind either. By the end I was finding that I could do everything we practiced at the lesson in the walk, including the shoulder-in. In fact we practiced that a lot - getting it smoothed out - which primarily required me to get out of Becky’s way with the reins, relax and maintain a consistent position.

It went so well that I was tempted to up the ante and try a trot, but another lesson learned over last 3 years floated to the surface: to not bite off more than I can chew straight away. This was a great success at a walk, and it could all be undone by going to a trot, especially since I remembered that I am not good at bareback trot at all. That is something that I should leave till next time, and the success of the session makes me think that there will be a next time.

Bareback riding is something that is interesting to play with, although I can see that doing too much of it may disrupt my seat in the saddle for now – since I am still establishing it, and since I may not be doing things entirely correctly while riding bareback. For example, keeping my feet in a proper "stirrup" position is extremely hard bareback and, probably, impractical, but it could affect my seat in the saddle. I have heard conflicting opinions on this count.

However it is a challenge and is fun to try, and it is certainly good to know that it is an option the next time I forget my gear.

Becky is on a diet… and more on shoulder-in

I finally came to face the fact that Becky’s weight has become a real problem. It got to the point that her saddle – which has interchangeable gullet system, and is now on the widest gullet possible – no longer fit her, and I could not get on her from the ground without the saddle rolling. So, she is now locked up in a small private yard, and though there are horses in the yards either side of hers, she stands at the gate and looks at her former herd where she used to be the top mare… and they stare back at her.

Heartbreaking, but has to be done. I just do not have the time in the week to give her enough exercise to overcome the rich growing grass in the big paddocks, which was leading her straight to founder.

It seems to be working, too – the girth went up one hole already!

And it didn’t diminish her energy any. Maybe made her crankier though: when I rode her on Tuesday (just before the Melbourne Cup: what better way to spend the Melbourne Cup holiday in Melbourne than to ride yourself?!), she started doing her little jumping around in preparation to bucking at a walk. To be honest, I am still chuffed that I can now be clear, consistent, and just purely single-minded enough in my cues to actually overcome her tantrums. It takes confidence to be able to communicate that “we are doing this and that’s all we are doing, and you can just put your thoughts of going somewhere else, or bucking, aside.” And, amazingly, she actually does as told. No huge amount of force hauling on the reins, or kicking, or anything, is required – just the ability to interrupt her drifting out of line early enough and firmly put her back. Yeah, I say “just”, but I am still preening every time I am actually able to do it.

The latest trick that Marina taught me helped me enormously in this. It’s probably something that everyone has heard at some point: to think of your legs as being the guiding posts for your horse, and your feet in the stirrups as two fences, or rails, or skiis, or tracks that fence your horse in. This way as you turn your hips to communicate to your horse that you want to turn, your thighs and legs start applying the correct pressure, and the reins become secondary support tools, to be used if the leg are ignored. The second benefit is that you become very sensitive to your horse pushing with his shoulder or butt outside the line you chose (outside the fence).

That’s what permitted me to catch her drifting out of line early enough, and put her back with the extra pressure in my legs or reins soon enough, before she decided that she was the top horse in our herd of two, and tried to put me in my place by bucking.

The difficult thing about this visualization is that it doesn’t help all that much until you are sitting correctly in the saddle, with your legs under you and relaxed in your shoulders and arms – which is something that, believe me, doesn’t come easily, or fast. Once I started thinking about it, and using it, I realized just how much my legs didn’t do what was required before – because, all of a sudden, my thighs were starting to get quite tired! The danger there was to not get too tense in the legs, as I concentrated on “steering” with them, as that caused me to get tense all over, and to lose some of the feel of Becky’s movement.

This setting of the two lines of the “fence”, with Becky in the middle, helped me to get better at the shoulder in, which was all about having those fence lines going straight ahead, and Becky’s shoulder just off the line. Previously, I had a tendency to twist my hips with Becky’s shoulder, so I ended up sitting at an angle to the line too, and it all started to turn into a kind of awkward side-pass.

Now we are working on smoothing out the shoulder-in in a straight line, and also doing an exercise where we are moving laterally with the same body-position. So we start off about 5 meters away from the arena’s fence, moving parallel to the fence, then I ask Becky to take her shoulder off the line on an angle that is away from the fence– as in classic shoulder-in - and also ask her with my inside leg to move laterally towards the fence. The end result should have us approaching the fence smoothly on a diagonal, where we cover about twice or even three times the distance going forward (so, about 10-15 meters), as sideways to the fence (5 meters). The way I understand it, the benefit of this exercise is that it allows the hind inside leg to step even further under Becky, thus encouraging her to use her hindquarters. But, more importantly to me, it’s a more difficult exercise than shoulder-in straight down the line, which means that I am more aware of when Becky is resisting the bend, or tries to barrel straight ahead. In turn, the more I am “on the ball” in correcting Becky, the more she gets in tune with me, as she realizes that she has to listen to my cues carefully, and she relaxes more. Magic!

Working on this “diagonal” shoulder-in is what took Becky’s mind off bucking at the walk.

We then worked up to the trot, which is essentially the same, but the angle of the bend is a lot smaller. And then, just for the fun of it, played with some cavalletti poles that someone left behind in the arena. Given that we’ve never done that before, and that I didn’t really know how far apart they should be for a horse of Becky’s size and movement, I didn’t care about finesse at all. What I cared about is going through on a straight line, which really made me concentrate on setting Becky up for it and not letting her fall out. In the trot I had to really think about going forward - have all my intention going ahead and think “trot”, or else Becky would slow down, break to a walk, and start to weave uncertainly just before going over the poles.

In the end, we were quite successful, and it kept Becky’s interest which resulted in her finishing our session in a lot more relaxed and less cranky mood than what we started with.