Horse People are Crazy

Well, well. What a trip these past couple weeks have been. I have so much to discuss with you! I would like to begin by covering a point that is very important to me and has been since I first thought of getting involved in the horse world.

Back when I first got involved in horses, I was just a teeny little kid with no saddle skills, no horse of my own, but a desire to ride. Which meant that in order to be around horses, I had to be around the people who owned them. The people who worked with them. The people who fed them. So the point I would like to emphasize is this: horse people are crazy. That is all there is to it. If you cannot accept that, read no further. You have been, nor never will be involved in horses if you do not understand fully that horse people are either innately crazy or become so down the road. I am crazy, my staff is crazy, every boss I've ever had has been crazy, boarders are crazy, the lovely little eleven year old pony clubbers who spend their preteen years here are crazy, horse dealers are crazy, vets and farriers are crazy. I've been taught by a dressage queen how to properly sweep a floor (after I had already been a longtime instructor and horse owner and worked for several much larger operations). I have been reamed out as an eleven year old for polo wrapping a horse backwards (and have since reamed out many an eleven year old for the same offense because polo wraps can bow a horse's tendon with improper use). The horse world is full of neurotic, high powered and loud mouthed individuals with the right opinion.

It is a necessary character trait in this business. In order to get up each morning at six A.M. to feed horses and never mind the college degree you earned because they simply have to eat or to teach twelve straight hours with no lunch break because your students have a schooling show the next day or overextend your bank account in the name of hay, you must be crazy. Probably even more than a little bit crazy. And so I apologize for the long delay on this update, but the last couple weeks have been, well, crazy.

Yesterday, when I was down in the outdoor clipping nail heads off of a shoe dangling of off Shadow's hoof so she could walk back up to the barn without stabbing herself, balancing for twenty minutes on one leg with a horse hoof in one hand and a rasp in the other and simultaneously teaching two little jumper riders in preparation for the next day's show, I realized I hadn't peed in thirteen hours (craaaazzzyyyy). On Wednesday, I left the barn with an asthma attack. I went to the hospital, got a breathing treatment, and then came in the next day and taught a girl scout troop of thirty so they could get their Horse Lover badge (pushing psychotic). Kathi wakes up at four-thirty A.M. three times a week, makes breakfast for Victor, drives him to dialysis, comes to the barn to handle business and ride, drives home to eat, picks up Victor, comes back. On the days that he doesn't go to dialysis, she drives to Philmac and runs her second, larger, more soluable company. I am not sure when she sleeps because she sends me emails at all hours, never missing a stride (crazy). Carey, now living on the property, never leaves before the non-required pony club meetings begin, and never passes up the opportunity for a lesson, even if it means that she is riding Romeo at ten P.M. instead of heading home before coming in at seven in the morning. And there is still another horse waiting to be ridden and then walked a half mile out to his field for the night ensuing a brushdown and blanketing (crazy).

Horses are foraging creatures. They are designed to be grazing constantly. They drink between ten and twenty gallons of water a day. They are huge. That food and water comes out the other end in bulk to be shoveled, sifted, bucketed, tossed, composted, rotated, spread about fields. They are filthy by nature- love nothing more than a dusty roll after a bath. Their equipment gets dirty; everything requires cleaning. But in a barn, cleaning becomes more just moving particles of filth from one surface that needs cleaning to another.

The domestic horse is, in essence, helpless. They rely on us to provide anything they would otherwise seek out on their own. Horse keepers turn from interested and kind people to having to play God. It's impossible, in my experiences and observations, to take this responsibility lightly and still be a horseman.

I think it's okay to wonder at what cost we do things. I know that I do it at the expense of my health and sanity but then again, I'm neither particularly sane nor particularly healthy when I'm not responsble for sixty-one horses. They may make me crazy but I am never alone, I can always do better, and they will always need me. And that has been enough.