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Aug. 19th, 2010 08:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickSo I went to Ag Progress Days with my horse. Ag Progress Days is held up near Penn State and it's sort of a free agricultural fair thing. There are horse demonstrations. Among the horse demonstrations is a segment where assorted breed associations (Quarter Horses, Appaloosas, Minis, Paso Finos, and Arabians) come in with sample horses and do a show-n-tell about their horse breed and why it's nifty. Nick happens to be a registered Arabian mare, 12 years old, AHR*556789 but the only way you would know that would be by looking at her papers.
Look. I adore my horse, who is a pearl of great price, having remained interesting for eight years and counting. However, I am not blind. I can look at the "ideal" arabian horse (an off-the-cuff metric for "ideal" arabian is Khemosabi) and see where my horse falls short of that ideal. She is not typey. She does not LOOK like an Arabian. She cools like an Arabian. She handles endurance work like an Arabian. She is smart like an Arabian. She is, er, opinionated like an Arabian. But she doesn't really look like one despite having the proper lineage or whatever. When people have to ask what breed your horse is, she is not a very typey example of her breed. When, upon hearing the breed, they ask, "Are you sure?" then yeah. So it goes.
The PA Arabian Horse Association representative was not having much luck rounding up people willing to take a day off work mid-week and schlep their Arabian horse to the middle of nowhere so that they could shroud it in drapery and canter around the ring for Ag Progress Days marketing purposes. She was willing to take what she could get -- and Nick is a registered Arabian who can be shrouded in drapery and cantered around the ring. Score! (Maybe the PA AHA figured the drapery would hide any issues of conformation...)
We did warn the PA AHA lady, though, so that she wouldn't be expecting fifteen hands of Properly Typey Arabian Mare when what she would be GETTING was fourteen hands of vaguely-arabian-looking mare. PA AHA lady said that would be fine.
When we got there, we tried the outfit on Nick. Now, I'd practiced up at home for Ag Progress Days by draping Nick in tablecloths and cantering around the buckwheat field. She tolerated it. Grudgingly. She didn't buck or bolt or otherwise do Unapproved Activities, but she wasn't happy about it. Like the PA AHA lady, though, I was willing to take what I could get.
Here's Nick wearing the outfit before I got on her in the practice ring. It fits over an English saddle, you have to take the stirrups off and rethread them OR remove the stirrups themselves and rebuckle them to get the saddle piece to stay on. Note in particular the string that goes under Nick's tail. She was not amused by that, not one bit.
This is right after I got on. Nick is definitely not very impressed. Note tucked up butt, uneasy expression, tight and tense trotting.
Later on in the practice ring, she relaxed some and looked a lot better.
There was also an outfit for me, that (a) fit and (b) covered up my hideously forward leg position. Hurray for drapery!
This is Nick framed up, actually a teeny bit overbent. Her nose should be out about an inch, so that her forehead is vertical with respect to the ground. Doesn't she look cute?
Here's the only cantering picture Trysta took. She was afraid we would die during the "hand gallop" portion of the program and apparently that forestalled any photographic record of the event.
There were three of us in the group. The lady on the grey mare (she has red draperies) was the PA AHA person who loaned the other two of us costumes and stuff. Here, you can see how utterly dinky and un-Arabian Nick is compared to her compatriots. She's practically swimming in her costume.
So. The deal here was that we would walk, canter, and hand gallop around the ring in both directions. I can walk. I can canter. We (Nick and I) do not particularly spend time schooling the hand gallop. Ever. I do not ask my horse to gallop, in hand or out of hand. We walk. We trot. We canter. We back up. We side-pass and shoulder-in. We turn on the forehand and hindquarters. We don't freaking hand gallop. For fuck's sake, I'm forty. My horse is an idiot. I don't have a ring, so any alleged hand galloping I would be doing would be in an open, unbounded field. I did NOT get to forty by doing that sort of foolishness. No. No hand-galloping for me, no siree. I figured I would ask for a little bigger canter and we would all PRETEND that that was a hand gallop. All the motion of the draperies would make it LOOK like I was going fast, see, and everything would be fine. We'd just canter a little faster, is all.
I should have run this plan by the horse. My bad.
So we're there. We canter into the ring (that's the picture Trys got) and we go to the walk. Announcer does some announcing. We walk. We canter. We are asked to hand gallop. I inquire of Nick: "Hey, how about a little more speed?" We went from a fairly sedate canter to the home stretch at Belmont in the blink of an eye. Zoom! Zoom! We were not lapping the other two horses in the ring but I am told that this was because they were making smallish ovals kind of in the middle of the ring. We were on the rail, using every available bit of ring space.
I did not really look at the other people in the class due to being very busy riding, but Trysta says that they both had a fairly sedate "hand gallop" going on. She said it looked like I was galloping (no "hand" about it) and also that the hell-for-leather nature of things would have been bloody obvious to horsepeople. (There is video of this. I have not seen the video yet. Maybe it did not record. That would be nice... but given my luck, unlikely.) I was way forward, over her shoulders like I should not have been, with a huge fistful of mane in case of emergency. (My equitation goes to hell when I am concerned about dying.) Nick was not bad. She didn't bolt or buck or spook or do anything even remotely evil. She just accellerated... and she KEPT accellerating for the duration of the hand gallop segments so that I had to keep racking her back. Nick is not a particularly slow mare. The last time I asked her for speed was going up Sideling Hill three years ago. I ran out of hill (it's a mountain, actually) and nerve before she ran out of accellerating.
So, yeah. The breed demonstration thing was kind of exciting, but not for any bad horse reasons. Maybe we should school the hand gallop at home some so that the next time someone wants to see my horse move out, I have some chops at the upper range of her speed. Interestingly, neither steering nor brakes went completely off-line. They were just... sluggish, like we need practice.
Also, FULL MARKS for my hot, fretful, worried little mare for coming straight away back to a flat walk after running around the ring like a horse afire. On both directions. She went immediately to a flat walk, no jigging and no stupid. GOOD HORSE. Also, we got most of our leads, blew one but fixed it after the fact.
The demonstration that we did had a pretend "placing" done by our ring judge (actually a horse judge of some sort) and by crowd participation. I "won" on crowd participation because the horse people were along and they whoop-n-holler with the best of them. The ring judge placed us first because we "fulfilled the requirements of the class the best and made full use of the ring" which I think really means You stayed on the rail and really hand-galloped instead of wimping out. It did not mean we had the typiest Arab horse or the best outfit. (The PA AHA lady had a really sharp outfit and an absolutely lovely mare, a much better example of the breed than Nick.)
Look. I adore my horse, who is a pearl of great price, having remained interesting for eight years and counting. However, I am not blind. I can look at the "ideal" arabian horse (an off-the-cuff metric for "ideal" arabian is Khemosabi) and see where my horse falls short of that ideal. She is not typey. She does not LOOK like an Arabian. She cools like an Arabian. She handles endurance work like an Arabian. She is smart like an Arabian. She is, er, opinionated like an Arabian. But she doesn't really look like one despite having the proper lineage or whatever. When people have to ask what breed your horse is, she is not a very typey example of her breed. When, upon hearing the breed, they ask, "Are you sure?" then yeah. So it goes.
The PA Arabian Horse Association representative was not having much luck rounding up people willing to take a day off work mid-week and schlep their Arabian horse to the middle of nowhere so that they could shroud it in drapery and canter around the ring for Ag Progress Days marketing purposes. She was willing to take what she could get -- and Nick is a registered Arabian who can be shrouded in drapery and cantered around the ring. Score! (Maybe the PA AHA figured the drapery would hide any issues of conformation...)
We did warn the PA AHA lady, though, so that she wouldn't be expecting fifteen hands of Properly Typey Arabian Mare when what she would be GETTING was fourteen hands of vaguely-arabian-looking mare. PA AHA lady said that would be fine.
When we got there, we tried the outfit on Nick. Now, I'd practiced up at home for Ag Progress Days by draping Nick in tablecloths and cantering around the buckwheat field. She tolerated it. Grudgingly. She didn't buck or bolt or otherwise do Unapproved Activities, but she wasn't happy about it. Like the PA AHA lady, though, I was willing to take what I could get.
Here's Nick wearing the outfit before I got on her in the practice ring. It fits over an English saddle, you have to take the stirrups off and rethread them OR remove the stirrups themselves and rebuckle them to get the saddle piece to stay on. Note in particular the string that goes under Nick's tail. She was not amused by that, not one bit.
This is right after I got on. Nick is definitely not very impressed. Note tucked up butt, uneasy expression, tight and tense trotting.
Later on in the practice ring, she relaxed some and looked a lot better.
There was also an outfit for me, that (a) fit and (b) covered up my hideously forward leg position. Hurray for drapery!
This is Nick framed up, actually a teeny bit overbent. Her nose should be out about an inch, so that her forehead is vertical with respect to the ground. Doesn't she look cute?
Here's the only cantering picture Trysta took. She was afraid we would die during the "hand gallop" portion of the program and apparently that forestalled any photographic record of the event.
There were three of us in the group. The lady on the grey mare (she has red draperies) was the PA AHA person who loaned the other two of us costumes and stuff. Here, you can see how utterly dinky and un-Arabian Nick is compared to her compatriots. She's practically swimming in her costume.
So. The deal here was that we would walk, canter, and hand gallop around the ring in both directions. I can walk. I can canter. We (Nick and I) do not particularly spend time schooling the hand gallop. Ever. I do not ask my horse to gallop, in hand or out of hand. We walk. We trot. We canter. We back up. We side-pass and shoulder-in. We turn on the forehand and hindquarters. We don't freaking hand gallop. For fuck's sake, I'm forty. My horse is an idiot. I don't have a ring, so any alleged hand galloping I would be doing would be in an open, unbounded field. I did NOT get to forty by doing that sort of foolishness. No. No hand-galloping for me, no siree. I figured I would ask for a little bigger canter and we would all PRETEND that that was a hand gallop. All the motion of the draperies would make it LOOK like I was going fast, see, and everything would be fine. We'd just canter a little faster, is all.
I should have run this plan by the horse. My bad.
So we're there. We canter into the ring (that's the picture Trys got) and we go to the walk. Announcer does some announcing. We walk. We canter. We are asked to hand gallop. I inquire of Nick: "Hey, how about a little more speed?" We went from a fairly sedate canter to the home stretch at Belmont in the blink of an eye. Zoom! Zoom! We were not lapping the other two horses in the ring but I am told that this was because they were making smallish ovals kind of in the middle of the ring. We were on the rail, using every available bit of ring space.
I did not really look at the other people in the class due to being very busy riding, but Trysta says that they both had a fairly sedate "hand gallop" going on. She said it looked like I was galloping (no "hand" about it) and also that the hell-for-leather nature of things would have been bloody obvious to horsepeople. (There is video of this. I have not seen the video yet. Maybe it did not record. That would be nice... but given my luck, unlikely.) I was way forward, over her shoulders like I should not have been, with a huge fistful of mane in case of emergency. (My equitation goes to hell when I am concerned about dying.) Nick was not bad. She didn't bolt or buck or spook or do anything even remotely evil. She just accellerated... and she KEPT accellerating for the duration of the hand gallop segments so that I had to keep racking her back. Nick is not a particularly slow mare. The last time I asked her for speed was going up Sideling Hill three years ago. I ran out of hill (it's a mountain, actually) and nerve before she ran out of accellerating.
So, yeah. The breed demonstration thing was kind of exciting, but not for any bad horse reasons. Maybe we should school the hand gallop at home some so that the next time someone wants to see my horse move out, I have some chops at the upper range of her speed. Interestingly, neither steering nor brakes went completely off-line. They were just... sluggish, like we need practice.
Also, FULL MARKS for my hot, fretful, worried little mare for coming straight away back to a flat walk after running around the ring like a horse afire. On both directions. She went immediately to a flat walk, no jigging and no stupid. GOOD HORSE. Also, we got most of our leads, blew one but fixed it after the fact.
The demonstration that we did had a pretend "placing" done by our ring judge (actually a horse judge of some sort) and by crowd participation. I "won" on crowd participation because the horse people were along and they whoop-n-holler with the best of them. The ring judge placed us first because we "fulfilled the requirements of the class the best and made full use of the ring" which I think really means You stayed on the rail and really hand-galloped instead of wimping out. It did not mean we had the typiest Arab horse or the best outfit. (The PA AHA lady had a really sharp outfit and an absolutely lovely mare, a much better example of the breed than Nick.)
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Date: 2010-08-20 12:33 pm (UTC)