Mercy Wins.
Wooo, Mercy won last night. I didn't stay up to watch the race.Mercy who? you must ask; so here's my post about Mercy from early in the year. I'm so thrilled even though realize there wasn’t much talent in the race.
With her it's been one thing after another; the shin, her attitude, races being cancelled, races not going her way, being nervous in the paddock, nervous in the gate, only running half way, and so on. But after a six- week layoff this summer, her demeanor changed, from anxious and fretful to bold and self-contained.I think she was mainly suffering from pain in her shin, and the fear of pain in her shin made her difficult to work with. That layoff gave her a physical break that she needed, and probably put her finally into a more confident state of mind. She seemed able to comprehend the whole picture.
We went out to train in company with Copper, the lead pony, allowing her to run away from him, and she loved beating him. She really got better all around. Even though she's a bitch to gallop, that makes it all worth it. And here's a perfect example of what I was talking about in the last post; about working together (which by the way, that post needs a lot of editing to be understandable):
Last spring Mercy was so difficult to work with, I felt as if I had caused it in her. Maybe when I realized she was dropping her head and taking hold of the bit, I began letting her progress too fast. Then she got a shin (epiphysitis) and she and I began fighting about how fast she could go, and time dragged on. The shin didn’t get better and the horse had to run, because she had been in training for eight months or something- no sense letting her lose conditioning, right?
But the problem was, from the time the shin got bad she lost the alignment between her physical and mental states. And on top of that, the two older horses in the barn were not earning a dime, so all the pressure was on her. Worse, it wasn’t coming from Lori, the owner-trainer, but from her owner-boyfriend, who cannot feel even a little of what a horse feels. All I wanted to do was have Lori stop with her and give her six months off, just to forget all the stuff that was making her so sour and to let that stupid shin heal.
People seem to think that if they need something, the horse must produce it. But this isn’t about the modern human experience; “Tommy you must learn to earn your keep, so do your chores or be punished.”
You cannot reason with a horse that way. They don’t know why they are being asked to continue in pain; only that they are being punished while in pain. That we feed and bed them for doing so is a stretch to ask them to understand- it’s an artificial relationship, and not something they require of each other.
That’s kind of odd, when you consider what’s so for humans, at least us american ones; that our work ethic has a moral imperative attached to it is so inseparable from our Protestant legacy. We are unaware that we work to please God; we look down on our neighbors if they don’t work hard. The horse doesn’t fear god, and cannot understand the room and board exchange, and doesn’t require its neighbors to produce or be left to die; the lazy members are just lazy, without any repercussion from their kind.
So we expect them to try when they do not feel well, which to them is a threat to their survival. They can only see that we ask them to die willingly or be forced into death unwillingly. And we hate the lazy ones among them and among ourselves. The horse is the less intelligent, but perhaps not the less practical, or the less ethical. Could we take a lesson from the horse?
OK, enough of the philosophical wandering; the whole point is, Sweeny couldn’t give the horse a break, and it took Lori the incapacitating event of giving birth to force a well-needed break for the horse on an unwilling grantor of same.
Somehow, providence shines when truth and reality are aligned. The truth was, the horse needed the break. The reality was, finally, that the horse was getting a break. Horse gets a break, horse comes back renewed physically, refreshed mentally; with a new picture in her mind. She expresses it with a winning performance.
And the best part is the Providence: Maiden Special Weights pays $12,644 to the winner, including the return of the jockey fee ($1,2640) to the West Virginia resident owner, plus any breeder award for having a West Virginia bred; it couldn’t have happened in a better race.
Nor at a better time. Lori owes me so much in gallop pay (another squeeze from the owner-boyfriend) I’ve been afraid to count it all up. I’m only glad I permitted myself to be patient, and rather than getting mad and cutting her off of my services, I’ve stuck beside her, the only change being that I got my pay horses first, before getting hers out.
I’ve been so broke myself, and some days, like Sunday, have been so absent of horses to gallop, I might as well have stayed home. How can I stand in judgment of her?
So now, on a high note, I leave my readers to go about my day off, while Providence continues to bestow favors; a buyer for the Hoover Carpet Steamer I advertised on Craigslist for the second time a week ago suddenly appeared in my email. Just when I was down to my last ten bucks and a hundred dollars in my checking account.
But the bottom line is, it makes a difference when you don’t work together in the interest of the horse, just as when you do: Lori’s significant other put the screws down and it forced us to do the horse an injustice. Once that pressure was off, the horse returned to us an equal measure of what we needed. I’m only so glad I worked with her through thick and thin, testing her way of going, adjusting to her needs in the weeks after Lori’s maternity leave, because the victory is indeed a sweet one. ..
Too bad I didn’t bet, though….
With her it's been one thing after another; the shin, her attitude, races being cancelled, races not going her way, being nervous in the paddock, nervous in the gate, only running half way, and so on. But after a six- week layoff this summer, her demeanor changed, from anxious and fretful to bold and self-contained.I think she was mainly suffering from pain in her shin, and the fear of pain in her shin made her difficult to work with. That layoff gave her a physical break that she needed, and probably put her finally into a more confident state of mind. She seemed able to comprehend the whole picture.
We went out to train in company with Copper, the lead pony, allowing her to run away from him, and she loved beating him. She really got better all around. Even though she's a bitch to gallop, that makes it all worth it. And here's a perfect example of what I was talking about in the last post; about working together (which by the way, that post needs a lot of editing to be understandable):
Last spring Mercy was so difficult to work with, I felt as if I had caused it in her. Maybe when I realized she was dropping her head and taking hold of the bit, I began letting her progress too fast. Then she got a shin (epiphysitis) and she and I began fighting about how fast she could go, and time dragged on. The shin didn’t get better and the horse had to run, because she had been in training for eight months or something- no sense letting her lose conditioning, right?
But the problem was, from the time the shin got bad she lost the alignment between her physical and mental states. And on top of that, the two older horses in the barn were not earning a dime, so all the pressure was on her. Worse, it wasn’t coming from Lori, the owner-trainer, but from her owner-boyfriend, who cannot feel even a little of what a horse feels. All I wanted to do was have Lori stop with her and give her six months off, just to forget all the stuff that was making her so sour and to let that stupid shin heal.
People seem to think that if they need something, the horse must produce it. But this isn’t about the modern human experience; “Tommy you must learn to earn your keep, so do your chores or be punished.”
You cannot reason with a horse that way. They don’t know why they are being asked to continue in pain; only that they are being punished while in pain. That we feed and bed them for doing so is a stretch to ask them to understand- it’s an artificial relationship, and not something they require of each other.
That’s kind of odd, when you consider what’s so for humans, at least us american ones; that our work ethic has a moral imperative attached to it is so inseparable from our Protestant legacy. We are unaware that we work to please God; we look down on our neighbors if they don’t work hard. The horse doesn’t fear god, and cannot understand the room and board exchange, and doesn’t require its neighbors to produce or be left to die; the lazy members are just lazy, without any repercussion from their kind.
So we expect them to try when they do not feel well, which to them is a threat to their survival. They can only see that we ask them to die willingly or be forced into death unwillingly. And we hate the lazy ones among them and among ourselves. The horse is the less intelligent, but perhaps not the less practical, or the less ethical. Could we take a lesson from the horse?
OK, enough of the philosophical wandering; the whole point is, Sweeny couldn’t give the horse a break, and it took Lori the incapacitating event of giving birth to force a well-needed break for the horse on an unwilling grantor of same.
Somehow, providence shines when truth and reality are aligned. The truth was, the horse needed the break. The reality was, finally, that the horse was getting a break. Horse gets a break, horse comes back renewed physically, refreshed mentally; with a new picture in her mind. She expresses it with a winning performance.
And the best part is the Providence: Maiden Special Weights pays $12,644 to the winner, including the return of the jockey fee ($1,2640) to the West Virginia resident owner, plus any breeder award for having a West Virginia bred; it couldn’t have happened in a better race.
Nor at a better time. Lori owes me so much in gallop pay (another squeeze from the owner-boyfriend) I’ve been afraid to count it all up. I’m only glad I permitted myself to be patient, and rather than getting mad and cutting her off of my services, I’ve stuck beside her, the only change being that I got my pay horses first, before getting hers out.
I’ve been so broke myself, and some days, like Sunday, have been so absent of horses to gallop, I might as well have stayed home. How can I stand in judgment of her?
So now, on a high note, I leave my readers to go about my day off, while Providence continues to bestow favors; a buyer for the Hoover Carpet Steamer I advertised on Craigslist for the second time a week ago suddenly appeared in my email. Just when I was down to my last ten bucks and a hundred dollars in my checking account.
But the bottom line is, it makes a difference when you don’t work together in the interest of the horse, just as when you do: Lori’s significant other put the screws down and it forced us to do the horse an injustice. Once that pressure was off, the horse returned to us an equal measure of what we needed. I’m only so glad I worked with her through thick and thin, testing her way of going, adjusting to her needs in the weeks after Lori’s maternity leave, because the victory is indeed a sweet one. ..
Too bad I didn’t bet, though….
posted by hoofstep at
3:17 AM
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