Posted by: Alex
It’s an open letter to my horse. Dartmoor. Some days his nervous antics are funny, and others – like Friday – he makes me want to cry. I would never sell him because I can’t be sure that someone else will be able to give him the patience he requires. Things could get messy if they don’t – the accident I spoke about was a number of years ago, when I pressurized him to hard to perform a certain movement, and he reared up onto his hind legs, lost his balance and fell over backwards onto me. I needed 6 weeks of physio, he hurt his jaw and wouldn’t eat for weeks which enabled us to spot the bigger problem: he lost enough weight that we could see the break in his rib through his skin. The vet didn’t pick it up when we were trying to figure out what was upsetting this horse so much that he wouldn’t move at all if he could help it. Like I said in the story, it was my fault. I should have known better. But when things go wrong with this horse, they have the potential to go very wrong.
He’s had some sterling moments and achieved a fair amount of success. When he’s relaxed and confident he is truly brilliant. He has such an outstanding jumping technique. He jumps clean and carefully. He hates to touch a pole. But his confidence is so precarious: a couple of wrong moves on my part and it can take weeks for him to regain it. He’ll also never do a derby course. Banks, ditches and water-jumps scare the living daylights out of him. We once spent over an hour trying to get him to cross a ditch, 5 people. We eventually physically pushed him through. His mind had gone totally awol, his body was still with us, but he’s face had gone completely blank, you couldn’t get any reaction out of him.
All of this adds up to a competition show-jumper that isn’t really worth the effort you have to put in. Part of me wants to give up on him, but I can’t. I’m still trying to prove to all his detractors that he can make it in the higher grades, I want to reach the limits of his talent, not just the limits of his mind / confidence. He’s also too expensive to just have hanging around and like I said, I couldn’t sell him. So I keep working with him.
Occasionally I train a couple of other horses, as I am doing at the moment, and I’m struck by how much easier they are to work with. It makes me start to resent Dartmoor. I feel like after all this I deserve something easier. I have dreamt before that I had killed him (well, somebody had, I think it was me). When I saw his beautiful though lifeless face I sobbed and told him how sorry I was, but even in the dream I was secretly relieved that I could now move on. While I wouldn’t kill him in real life, I imagine that’s how I would feel if anything did happen to him: Terribly sad, but guilty relieved.