When Evil Reigns
Submitted by: Pat Brunson
Phone: 540-967-0280
Email Address: teques(at)live.com
Date Added: 4/7/2011
When Evil Reigns
It was a beautiful morning as I remember it decades ago. I was with my friend and mentor. We sat on the bleachers overlooking a small arena at a local stockyard. The excitement was almost more than I could bear.
You see there was going to be a horse sale that night and my mentor took me to the stockyard at the crack of dawn to watch the truck load of horses come in and be prepared for the sale. It was going to be an event. Thirty well-bred, green, ranch horses straight from Texas were all going to be sold that night.
I was going to be a cowboy and a horse trainer if it killed me. I could not stop jabbering sitting there in those old bleachers. My mentor, a rodeo cowboy and a great horse trainer was a man of few words who taught by example. Proof is in the pudding, not in the talk, he would say. I was assured that what we were going to see that day would set the tone for me as a future trainer. ~
It wasn’t long before a huge tractor and trailer backed up to the arena in gate. An entourage of four pickup trucks pulled up and the show was on. The doors to the trailer were opened and the horses ran out into the arena. What a sight. The cowboys grouped the horses down at one end of the arena and a couple of the boys went to the pickups and retrieved some ropes. The show was on. ~
The first horse was roped just as slick as a button and was led to the center of the arena. As I watched I saw two of the men go back to the trucks and come back with what looked like two rubber hoses. The horse now was being held on about six feet or so of rope. As the two men with hoses approached they started beating the horse. At first I was dumbfounded. It took a few seconds for me to think and react. As I jumped up my mentor shoved me down hard. I tried again and met with the same results. I yelled and took a swing at him but was subdued by his agility and bull strength. Our fight by now was being drowned out by the loud horrifying squeals coming from the horse as he went down under the beating.
While I was being held down I watched that poor horse lying on the ground almost lifeless, then it urinated a flood under itself. As I gave up the fight my mentor growled in my ear “boy you can’t stop this in this world and two men to try today would be hurt or killed.” I asked why we were here.
The answer I got and the whole horrifying scene we had just witnessed, stayed with me my whole life.
He said and I quote “Training is not just about teaching, a lot of it is healing. How can you fix it if you don’t know how it got broke.” ~
You can never get rid of trauma. The best summation of how to deal with the problems I ever heard was from the great trainer Richard Shrake and I quote ”when you get a horse it is like getting a bucket of red and white balls. The red balls are the bad things and the white balls are good things. You can’t get rid of the red balls; you just keep putting white balls in the bucket until the red balls are buried deep enough so that when you go in that bucket you hopefully draw out a white ball.” ~
If you are kind and possess patients and leadership, if you watch and listen, a horse will tell you it has a problem. Rules, patients and consistency are the white balls.
I have two pictures here of Vegas and me. Vegas is a Mustang who was adopted and then returned to the US Bureau Of Land Management as a problem horse. We picked him up, worked with him and got him re-adopted.
Vegas was angry and afraid. If you look at the picture of him behind me you will see that I let him approach me and tell me. I sat for hours waiting for this. I had to act like I was ignoring him so he would get mad enough to get my attention.
If you look at his eyes and the furious rubbing of his nose on me you should see the anger. If you look at the ears loped to sides you will see the confusion and fear associated with the anger.
In the second picture you will see me telling Vegas that I understand and that it is OK.
Vegas turned out to be an extremely nice horse. ~
|
THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS!
RECENT GREEN PAGES!
