My Crazy Cow Horse

My horse is not crazy.  He's actually quite level-headed, BUT I'm blaming his attentiveness, his reactiveness, and his worry on his cow horse breeding.

Derp.

I've ridden all of his spooks and he's never bolted or reared or anything.  Just bug-eyed flinches and quickened stride.  He's been that way since day one and to my own surprise, it doesn't make ME nervous.  I don't love this part of him, but he's never put me in danger, not even a little. Junior was way more dangerous in his spooking than Huck has been.  It's like Huck's starts some days on level 3 alert and may turn into a 5-6.  Junior, by comparison, was normally at Zero but would surge to an 8 without any warning.  Like the time he left me at the pond.  He seemed like he was fine with the geese being there and then he was gone and I was on the ground. At least I can read Huck. I was going with a 0-10 scale there, sorry if that was confusing.

Also nice is that he's never run into me or away from me and seems to look to me for assurance.  When I make loud rope-swing noises (he hates it...) he is calmer if he can hide behind me.  If he's tied to the rail (and being particularly nervous about life) and I walk away, he tries to follow me.

Huck's not lost his head over anything and we've thrown some pretty fantastic challenges his way.  You saw some of the visual/physical stuff we've done in my last post.  We've also done many audio challenges including live gunfire in the arena and yesterday we used a game-calling device to play all sorts of loud sounds from a vole to coyote pups and whitetail fawn to a "raccoon fight."  The device even played a cow.

Huck was interested in everything and mostly stood quietly at stiff attention, but the cow made him start moving around to look for the cow!

Why does Ledger sound like a cow?!?!?!

When I only ride him once or twice a week he is a lot more jumpy and reactive than when I ride more often.  Thankfully my theatre show is done and I can concentrate on riding for a while!


His face and leg are pretty much just scars now.  I hope with the spring shed he evens out.  I'm somewhat confused about the way the hair is growing (or not growing) back in the shaved places.

Healing!!!