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Current Location: Living Room Sofa

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I have just survived an encounter with The Evil One, aka Softy. I was supposed to be riding Molly, but she was so lathered up after the last lesson that she was pulled at the last minute.

Softy is a very attractive piebald cob. Her markings are striking, and she looks like she should be taking part in The Big Country. But she's got white around the eyes which gives the impression that she's a bit wild and untrustworthy. It's not far from the truth. In my experiences with her, I've found her to be a lazy wilful minx who gives riding school horses a bad name. She has two speeds only: zoom, and dead slow and stop. And if you get on her wick, she is the archetypal Immovable Object.

Last time I rode her was three years ago. Our hour long Battle Royale culminated in a hissy fit and four hooves parked solidly on the ground. Nothing I could do would budge her.

Today, I survived my encounter unscathed. We had a few hairy moments, but there were none of the hysterionics from the last time. I guess I've learned that an outright confrontation with Softy just does not work. If you try and bully her into doing something, she will not do it. Psychological warfare is required.

We walked, we trotted, and Softy was grudgingly obliging. But my leg position went completely to pot and I felt like the experience put me back weeks. If your whole philosophy is to be at one with your horse and to be a fluid partnership, you're on a road to nowhere if one member of the duo just does not want to be there and will not be persuaded otherwise,

But looking on the bright side... At least it was better than last time:-)

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I'm sorry to say I'm feeling more badly for the horse! She's got not choice in the matter! I'd dig in my hooves too! :-)

So would I. I didn't really enjoy it, because I saw it as a waste of time for both of us. I suppose we both had to pay for their privilige - I forked out well-earned cash, and she had to go through the ordeal in order to get her board and lodgings.

The last bastion of slavery...

In horses with wide blazes/horses with spots, white in the eyes can be perfectly normal rather than a sign of nervousness - one of the steadiest horses I've known had the white showing.

Softy sounds like a horse who can teach riders a lot - do less, don't use force, ride correctly. Very often they're highly sensitive horses - if a horse stonewalls like that, doing less is always the first choice.

I just don't get any enjoyment from working with an animal that doesn't want to work with me.

We certainly got on a lot better tonight than we did last time.

If a horse is unwilling to work because they're uncomfortable - the saddle does not fit, they are sore somewhere - then I not only don't enjoy riding them, I will either scale down the work or get off altogether. (I've done that, £££ or not - if a horse is lame, I'm not riding it.)

If the horse is unwilling because it expects being ridden to be uncomfortable, I see it as my duty to show him otherwise; it's a service both to the horse and to the next rider.
Many horses who have had bad experiences with riding school riders are ridiculously grateful when they find a rider who rides light and gives precise aids.

They're not my favorite rides, but I love being able to make them go, and I do admit to a soft spot for a horse that will say NO when the rider gets too rough.

Edited 2011-03-05 22:48 (UTC)

I think her attitude was 'sod this. I want to be somewhere else.' All riding school horses must get like that eventually - though her owners really do seem unusually devoted to their horses' welfare. Their animals get turned out most nights and only get used for a couple of lessons a day, with a couple of days off a week.

When my poor horse was a riding school inmate, he had two weeks holiday a year and was ridden up to four hours a day seven days a week. No wonder he died young.

Perhaps Softy has a secret talent for writing sonnets or quantum physics. Sadly, we shall never know.

Riding school work is hard for a horse - they need to adjust quickly, many riders are not very capable and unbalanced. On the other hand, there's no chance of one mistake having long-term effects- every rider is bad in _different_ ways, so if you keep the horse tuned up, they can live forever. In my experience, two hours a day is a long-term sustainable workload for a riding school horse - they can occasionally do more, but no school I've known that regularly used their horses for three or four hours managed to keep those horses healthy for long. (Hacking/trekking is different, but an hour in the school counts for two of those.)

It sounds as if you've found a great school. I'm a great believer in riding schools - think what would happen if all of those people bought their own...

The horse always comes first with them, and it's nothing to do with protecting their financial investment. That's why I wound up stuck with Softy yesterday, as the first choice was so sweated up after her lesson that she wasn't fit to be ridden.

My poor horse had a litany of problems which stemmed from his early years of living in a garage in a town and being exercised in a saddle that didn't fit him. His back started to stiffen not long after I bought him, and that was back in the days when equine chiropractors were a novelty. I did my best to keep him going as long as possible, but he was crippled in the long-term by a combination of navicular and ringbone.

He is still sadly missed.

I found you through my friends of friends, and wanted to say hi. I'm particularly intrigued by your career, since I work as an architectural historian ... though I only occasionally talk about it on LJ. Mind if I add you?

Lovely to hear from you!

Ulp! You'll be able to correct me when I get my mullions and my transoms in a muddle... You architectural people speak a foreign language - half the time I have a horrible feeling I'm about adept at speaking it as Crabtree the secret agent in 'Allo, 'Allo has at speaking French!!

Heh ... don't worry about that, at all! Our version of historic architecture is much more primitive than yours. Nearly all of the stuff I look at is thoroughly vernacular -- log-cabin farmsteads and such. I'd be completely tongue-tied trying to describe the sorts of resources you encounter!

Look forward to getting to know you!

The equivalent of our Hebridean blackhouses and cruck-framed cottages... That's what happens when you cut all your trees down to make medieval warships and charcoal for iron-smelting. It's impossible to get enough timber to build anything.

I love your photos in the other blog - there's some gorgeous stuff in there...

Out here, of course, many of the prairie areas never had any trees to begin with ... so the earliest homestead houses were often built of sod. Nearly all long gone, of course, and left for the archaeologists to sort out. :)

And I'm very glad you like the photos. Many of the older links are broken at the moment, thanks to a change at my hosting provider, but I'm working at putting them back in place.

I'd never thought of turf-walled houses in prairie locations - I just had visions of the Laura Ingalls style cosy log cabins.

In such conditions, I suppose you'd have to import logs or planks for the roof framework - so do you get stone post pads with turf footings which rot down into mounds? If so, that's not so far removed from some of the early post-medieval structures you get over here...

No, not very often ... the roof structures on the sod dwellings out here usually rested directly atop the sod walls, so there were no vertical wood posts at all. (So when those buildings go, their disappearance is pretty complete.) Rarely, I've seen stone footings for vertical log framing in locations where the construction techniques were influenced by a particular ethnic heritage ... like an enclave of Swedish-influenced construction I examined once in North Dakota.

With vernacular log construction in the American west, the sill log of a building often rested on an evenly-spaced series of dry-laid stone footings, and you spot those once in a while.

From an archaeologist's perspective, the thing with building ruins here is that the climate is usually far less humid than what you're used to. That, combined with the fact that my area has only been occupied by Euro-Americans for 150 years or so, means that the ruins of a wooden building are still usually wood! :)

Fascinating! Thank you!!

I've seen the footings of turf hovels from the last 200 years or so surviving as little semi-circular footprints in the landscape up in highland Perthshire/Stirling, but any timber elements which may have existed have vanished - they may have been pilfered for use elsewhere. I'm surprised any stray timber doesn't get recycled as firewood - though I guess your population density wasn't great, so there wasn't that much pressure on resources...

In the agricultural regions of Montana, much of the initial white settlement was spurred by a government program granting tracts of free farmland to new settlers, provided they lived on (and "improved") the land for a period of years. That brought many thousands of hopeful people out here over a very short period. Unfortunately, though, the amount of land offered was wholly insufficient to support a farm, due to the difficult and arid climate ... so most of the early settlers left very quickly, largely depopulating the land. It was a tragic story, but it left lots of abandoned farmsteads out there, a surprising number of which are still readily identifiable.

Montana is indeed very thinly populated ... especially the eastern farmlands. I think we're something like 5 times the size of Scotland, but with fewer than a million people, and most of those are in a few larger towns.

And thank you for giving me an excuse to expound! Most of my friends just roll their eyes when I start talking about this sort of stuff. :) You're also reminding me that I really want to visit Scotland one of these years ...

Agricultural Improvements - Montana style!! It's the same old story, repeating ad infinitum, or ad nauseam.

You'll find quite a few turf heaps and stone footings scattered all over the place in Scotland. But we're a bit damp in comparison!!

That's alright. I won't roll my eyes. I'll just go "ooh! That's interesting!"

So frustrating when you want to concentrate on sitting quietly and in balance, and you're on a horse than refuses to move unless you flap your whole body...

Sounds like it's getting milder up your way if Molly was sweating up!

It's much milder. It feels like spring is just around the corner...

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