Charlie Tales
Charlie
liked to conserve energy at horse shows. Now, I understand that
all you knowledgeable horse owners out
there know that it is unsafe to tie a horse with too much slack in the
rope, but Charlie requested that his be long
enough so he could lie down while tied to the trailer. Several
times members of his fan club came running over to tell
us that something was wrong with Charlie. He was lying down with
his eyes closed! When we checked up
on him just to make sure he was OK, he would lazily open his eyes to
say hello and then promptly resume napping.
We were
asked to enter Charlie in a reining class to fill it. Now,
Charlie knew all the moves, but he was
old (mid 20’s), stiffer, and somewhat overweight. His teen rider,
(unbeknownst to any of us) took him back
behind the barn to “tune him up,” smacking him on the neck and using
spurs to make him spin faster.
Charlie did the pattern in his Charlie way and life went on without us
suspecting that anything untoward
had occurred. The very next weekend we were at an outside arena,
and he carefully packed his 7 year old
beginner rider through a walk, trot, lope bareback equitation
class. Next came the same teen from the reining
class who chose to ride Charlie hunt seat for his age group bareback
equitation class to take advantage
of his amazingly smooth gaits. Charlie came snorting through the
in gate at a high trot and shied at stuff
around the edges of the arena (poles, people, cars, strollers, weeds,
grasshoppers and who knows what else).
When canter time came, he bolted like a freight train, ran
around the arena a couple of times, and then lined
himself up in the middle completely ignoring all the efforts of the
very red-faced rider. Meanwhile, we had
found out about the elder abuse the previous week end, and folks were
actually cheering for Charlie.
The rest of the day, he was his gentle usual self.
Now you
would think that would have been a lesson learned by the teen rider,
but alas, it required another
repetition. Again, unknown to us, the teen decided that Charlie
needed to lift his feet higher on trail obstacles.
And, yes, once in awhile the old man misjudged how high to pick up a
foot and might brush a pole.
Anyway, the teen rapped Charlie’s feet as he practiced the step
overs. The very next show, Charlie
very deliberately knocked down every obstacle on the course, feigned
fear of the same bridge and gate
he had previously negotiated calmly to win classes. He generally
made a shambles of the entire course.
(I could almost swear that he winked at me as he took his big
hoofs and whacked each pole.) We assumed
that Charlie had been done wrong again and confronted the teen
who sheepishly admitted to schooling
Charlie by rapping his ankles with poles. I must assume
that the teen did learn the lesson about what
Charlie thought was fair and not fair, at least when it came to riding
Charlie. Being a basically good horse,
he never did that again and went on with the same young man to win the
state championship in trail. One can
only hope that when that young fellow moved on, some part of those
lessons tempered his relations with future horses.
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Bob & Charlie 1984
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