Wednesday, September 2, 2009

Bad, baaaaaaad jumping poneh



The gate.

I work with horses and kids together. Teenage boys, to be exact. I am protective of the horses, but I am also protective of the boys. Some horsey behaviors, like kicking and biting (or threatening to kick or bite) have a ZERO tolerance policy. I take advantage of my 3 second time limit to punish such behaviors and NAIL them for it. They usually never try it again.

Yesterday Jasper was brought into a pen to have his evening bucket of mush. His mush consists of LMF Prime Time, Rice Bran, Flax, a probiotic, and Biotin. When he was done I opened the gate and told the boy who was feeding with me to shoo him out. Jasper pinned his ears and casually kicked at him. Oh no. Wrong answer. I slammed the gate shut and smacked him a couple of times with a longe whip.

He jumped out of the pen. Over the uphill skinny 4'7 gate practically from a standstill. He whacked his fronts pretty hard, and did this incredible twisting and contorting thing with his body and hind end to get over it. He didn't touch it except with his fronts.

There were some moments of shocked silence after he did it. Kind of like even though we saw him do this with our own eyes it really wasn't possible. Silence was followed by "OH..." (and then some other words).

Jasper landed on the other side, happily cantered over to the hay feeder, and began munching down.

He is fine today. No swelling anywhere, no bowed tendons, no nothing as far as I can tell. He let me catch him and we had a great ride in the arena.

Tonight when asked to leave the pen he did so nicely.

5 comments:

EvenSong said...

Don't you just hate it when they do something SO bad, but it's also so amazing?!? Sort of like when a teenaged boy is talking back, and says something utterly profound. (Or a toddler spits out their first cuss words....)

Michelle said...

I'd guess he's a pretty good jumper, huh?

manymisadventures said...

Ha.

I love that.

It's like you want to be angry at him, but what he just did was so ridiculously impressive you have to pick your jaw up off the floor first...

Britnie - Riding During Naps said...

HOW FUNNY! Well, and so how NOT funny, but you know what I mean. I'm glad Jasper wasn't hurt! Geesh, lets hope he doesn't make a habit of jumping your fences, right? You might have to cage him in like a bird, lol

Anonymous said...

Sorry, but just the thought of him launching over that gate from a standstill then cantering off is making me laugh!