What I Learned From Running Horses

When I was a kid, my Dad was a feedlot cowboy.  There are a lot of things about being a feedlot cowboy that, as a kid, I enjoyed.  Getting to cut school to go ride with Dad was pretty high on the list.  The downside, not so much for my Dad, but for others was the short employee life.  There is a joke about feedlot cowboys and Saint Peter:

One day Peter was at the golden gate, checking names in the book.  Making sure that everyone waiting in the line, was marked there.  Finally it was this old man’s turn, as he stepped up to that big ol’ desk…this cowboy came loping by.  He waived at Peter and just rode on through the gate.  Peter waived back and then turned back to the book, back to checking names.

Waiting in lines has an effect on people that generally isn’t too pleasant.  The ol’ man snapped, just a little.  He said, “Why does that cowboy get to just ride on by and all the rest of us have to wait in line?”

Peter looked up, surprised.  “Him, oh, he’s a feed lot cowboy”, then he looked down at the book again. 

The ol’ man was still a little miffed, “what has that got to do with anything?” 

Peter said, “Why stop him, he’s only going to be here 30 days anyway!”

 

Kind of a lame joke, but it’s a lot funnier if you’re a feedlot cowboy or a feedlot brat.

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All that is a prelude to a story that has nothing to do with any of that! Just a chance for me to tell a lame joke!  Read on!

The Ballad of Mad Bob

Over 20 years ago, I worked for Sam Wilson back when he had Bob Acre Doc.  I never got to ride Bob, but in the 8 months I worked for him I rode every two year old on the place.  Ya, I know…eight months.  Not very long, but I think colt starters (especially young ones) are a lot like feedlot cowboys.  See I grew up with a Dad that was a feedlot cowboy most of my life.  The joke was that you didn’t have to fire a feedlot cowboy; he would be gone in 60 days anyway.  Don’t get me wrong, my Dad was an exception to the rule for the most part.  But I watched a lot of the younger guys come and go…like nomads, hence the similarities between young colt starters and young feedlot cowboys.  To bolster this opinion I have some scientific facts that I personally created.  When my wife and filed our taxes the year before we got married, she had one W-2….I had four.  That’s right, I said four.  Four jobs in one year….and still made less than $10,000 for the year.  No wonder I was so skinny, I was starvin’ most of the time!

But I digress, this is about one of the colts I rode for Sam.  We had a couple that looked like Bob, and being the creative minded guys that we were….we called them Bad Bob and Mad Bob.  The names had more to do with their temperaments than anything else.  Bad Bob was a nasty bucker, again the creative name.  Mad Bob, well you guessed it….he was an angry horse!

Super Ninja Cowboy

There was a time in my life when I didn’t know what the word impetuous meant.  If you look it up in Webster’s, it says:

1.  Marked by impulsive vehemence or passion
2. Marked by force and violence of movement or action

As I’ve gotten older, I can look back and see that I was train wreck on a horse.  There were some things I did, that offered a good deal to a horse….and there were some things that if anyone was watching they would be thinking, “what the heck is he doing up there?”  This is a couple of those times…

Checks My Ego Wrote

About 10 years ago I rode a mare I called Twitch ( wrote about her in the story “Twitch and the Leopard Print Onesy”).  Ol’ Twitch turned out pretty good and with all of the success I was having with my quasi-natural horsemanship, I started getting asked to ride other horses at the stable.  Of course this fed my ego pretty good and I got to thinking of myself as the next great natural clinician.  After all I had read a book or two and had me a cotton rein!  Looking back I’m surprised that I could keep my hat on my swole up head!

I was asked, at one point, to ride a little Arabian mare.  Now I had a pretty low opinion of Arabians at that time.  I thought that any time they got a little rattled, that BB would start bouncing around inside their head and lead to several different kinds of wrecks.  I now know that that it usually isn’t the horse so much as the horseman that is the problem.

Twitch and the Leopard Print Onesy

Sometimes the picture in your mind, of how things look, differs greatly from the way things actually are.  Sometimes how we see ourselves in the past also differs greatly, from how things actually happened and it affects how we see our skill set now.  For example, in my mind’s eye, I was a really good football player when I was in high school.  When in fact, I was a 6 foot 135 pound tackle.  I will say I more than made up for what I lacked in size by being slow (I guess that must have been the “good” part…skinny and slow, two skills that are hard to come by in the same body).  Now this has nothing to do with horses or cowboys, just a way to give you some perspective of how things look in the past.

Practicing Self Control…or Not!

Have I mentioned how little I think of the way I used to “break” horses?  This is a story of a past sin, when I used to lose my temper and how I used to break ‘em.

When Felicia and I first got married we bought a stallion from her cousin.  He was out of a horse called Barbazon Yogi, I think he was a race horse down in Louisiana.  I don’t recall what his registered name was, but he had some really long hair (he looked woolly) and Felicia said he looked like a teddy bear.  So the name stuck, we called him Teddy. 

Bad Bob

When I work for Sam Wilson, he owned Bob Acre Doc.  Bob was not a big horse but he was cowy and quick as all get out!   I have seen Sam with his boots dragging in the dirt when Bob worked.  Now that is impressive, until you realize that Bob was only about 14 hands tall and Sam was about 6’5”.  Still, Bob was a cow eating machine.  He really threw some good babies too.  Almost all of them were as cowy as he was, heck there were a couple that looked just like him. 

One of these was a horse we called “Bad Bob”.  Ya, I know…real original.  Bad Bob was not very big, he maybe stood 12-12.5 hands as a two year old.  But boy could he buck!  Don’t get me wrong, he couldn’t buck hard….he was just really quick!   When I started them in the round pen he out quicked me and dumped me into the dirt 4 times in a row (which is a fancy way of saying “he buck me off”).  He used to buck so fast that you felt like you were sitting on a fence post!  He would stick his head so far down between his front legs that you couldn’t see his head or his tail from the saddle!  He bucked out onto the concrete with me once, I was afraid to pull his head up and afraid to let him continue to buck!  I think it scared both of us!   I could just see him slipping down on the concrete, with me under him!  He bucked with me every day!  The other guys used to line up on the fence when I was going to get on, you never saw so much hootin’ and hollerin’.  To my recollection it felt like he was in training for 1000 days, but was probably only about 60.

One of Sam’s customers bought him and to my disappointment kept him there for us to get ready for the futurity.  Of course he did one thing that I liked, he gelded ol’ Bad Bob!  Now I took great advantage of that and only gave him one day off.  Turns out that was the only day he didn’t buck with me.  Oh, he wanted to….but was just way to sore.  I left there before futurity, so I don’t know if Bad Bob turned into any kind of a cuttin’ horse…..I just remember him as being a really quick bucker!

It's Not Stop, Drop and Roll...But....

When I worked for the cutting horse trainer I mentioned in (I'll Show You How It's Done), I was still pretty wild and young.  After I had finally gotten to the point he trusted me to ride colts, I learned quite a lot.  As I said, most of it was of the “what not to do variety”, but I did learn a lot.

Once someone brought this big sorrel colt, he was pretty strong and could buck a little, but he actually turned into a pretty nice colt.  At the beginning, he was just a little twitchy.  I guess he was a little scared of what I was going do to him, and I didn’t have sense enough to see the danger signs or even offer him anything different.  Usually after about a week of riding in a pen, we started taking the 2YRO’s out into the pastures to ride.  This at times was a little western, especially with this particular colt! 

When Age and Brains Come Together

As I have mentioned in the past, I really don’t think too much of the way I used to break horses.  And I say break because that is what I was doing to them.  There was no thought to an easier method, just get on and git-r-done!

Shady was a mare I rode for my parents when she was a 3 year old.  She ended up not being a very good momma (Annie and the Ego).  She was mistrustful and fearful and I missed all the signs, heck I wasn’t even looking for them.

At the time I was still fairly young and rubbery, so I did not spend much time doing ground work.  I used to laugh at my Dad for spending time walking around on the ground when he could be in the saddle.  I used to tell him that “anything he was doing on the ground, I could do in the saddle!”   Oh, how that statement came back to bite me…

Annie and the Ego

In 2004 or 2005 we bred a Skipastar / Boston Mac mare that my parents had, to a paint stallion named Hot Majestic Man.  We got a really nice baby, but therein lay the story.

I went down to the barn, one early morning, in May of 2005 to check on Shady (the mare in question).  She was due and Felicia had me on mare watch (Hmmm…seems like this was a little one sided).  As I headed down in the dark, I could hear the mare heading to the barn and I could also hear little nickers.  So I called Felicia and had her and the girls come down to the barn to see the new baby.  The girls were so excited; this was the first baby that was “theirs”!