I had an eye-opening experience with my horse, Jake, a couple weeks ago. In a matter of less than a minute, I discovered the result of our years of hard work together. More than any planned training exercise, what happened that day illuminated our relationship with stunning clarity.
Jake is my five year old Suffolk Punch draft horse. He came to our farm at nine months old, and I've worked hard to train him for work on our farm. He’s been working pretty regularly since he was 3 1/2 years old, dragging pastures, harrowing the garden, logging, and other jobs. Someday he’ll be teamed with our other young Suffolk, Charley, for more work such as tedding and raking hay, pulling hay wagons, and bigger logging jobs. Jake is an extremely intelligent horse, calm, willing, a strong, steady worker. He’s personable and friendly and funny and a joy to work with. He still has a bit of growing up to do emotionally at moments, but those moments get farther and fewer between all the time.
I’ve spent a lot of time with Jake in my training and every time we work together to build trust and respect, taking every opportunity I can to make that foundation stronger and stronger. Jake has never shown an inclination to bolt -- he tends to take spooky things in stride and quickly adjusts to new situations. I’ve always felt that Jake finds it more work than it’s worth to get upset about things. I’ve learned to trust that solid steadiness in him, and always try to reward him when he shows that valuable trait.
On the day of our adventure, I had a feeling things could be a little edgier than usual. The day was quite windy, with steady winds of over 20 mph and gusts much higher than that. I’ve long noticed that the horses are much more alert and jumpy when it’s windy. The wind brings lots of spooky smells and sounds and sights and brings out their prey instinct to run from perceived danger. I’ve never enjoyed working the horses on windy days and prefer working in the woods if possible where the wind is much less of a factor. But on this day, the job that needed doing was to drag a pasture the cows had just left before the weather turned cold and made the manure too frozen to spread with the fuerst harrow (pasture drag).
Although Jake had dragged this pasture before, it’d been more than a year since he’d been in this field so the area was pretty unfamiliar. There is also a new house going up next to the field, which Jake definitely noticed as something new. It’s fascinating to me how sensitive horses are and how well they remember things -- and thus notice when something is different. To add to the stimulation of the wind and the new house, there was loose insulation on the new house’s porch roof which flapped erratically in the wind. There was also loose plastic flapping on the windows of a house across the road and a new (unfamiliar) trailer in the yard. I paid close attention to all the signals Jake gave that certain things were bothering him -- increased pace, head high and looking around a lot, ears moving back and forth. When we moved away from these bothersome objects, he was much calmer even with the constant wind.
Jake and I went around the field several times, sometimes stopping close to the scary new house and flapping plastic to give him time to look at them and to see that they wouldn’t hurt him. I kept my voice calm and steady and soothing and worked on keeping his head low and his pace slow. One of the surest signs a horse is thinking of bolting is that they raise their head high. A couple times, Jake made a little run off our path but each time I felt I had good control of him and that he didn’t really want to run.
But on about the sixth time around, a variety of stimuli came together all at once and it was too much for him. We had passed the new house alright, but he was looking a little sideways at that new trailer and the flapping plastic on the other house. A particularly big gust of wind came up and a car came up behind us on the road, splashing through the puddles and making a lot of noise. For the first time in our years together, Jake bolted. I ran along with him as long as I could, trying to turn his head to stop his forward motion and calling whoa, but now the fuerst harrow was rattling behind him and he wasn’t going to stop. I tripped and fell and lost hold of the lines and watched with dismay as Jake galloped off. I quickly got up and called to him. I saw that he was turning and might head toward the road, and I moved to block that path, worried that he would get out on the road and really be in danger. My heart was in my throat, but then I realized that deep down I just knew Jake’s heart wasn’t really into running away. I stood still with all my energy down, looking at Jake and calling quietly to him with a kiss and my hand outstretched, our signal to “come to me.” He had slowed about 100 feet away and then he came to a walk, looking at me with his ears forward. He walked right up to me and stopped in front of me, blowing hard but with his head down and ears forward to listen to me. I stroked his face and neck and spoke to him gently, quietly gathering the lines and moving to unhitch the now tangled fuerst harrow.
Jake and I then walked up the road together to the barn where my husband, Rob, was working. Jake’s energy was still high, but I could tell that he was listening to me and wanted to stay with me. Rob helped to untangle the harrow and hitch Jake back up, and then I spent another couple hours dragging the other end of the pasture with Jake by leading rather than driving him, just to be sure and to reconnect with him. In the end, we got a lot of work accomplished and Jake was completely his old self -- calm, steady, willing, and affectionate.
I feel strongly that this experience didn’t hurt Jake at all, and in fact it may have helped him to see that the easiest and safest place to be is with me. And for me, the accident that could have been a disaster and undone so much painstaking training instead turned into one of the best days of all my work with horses. Jake showed me a depth of trust that made me intensely grateful and immeasurably deepened the love I feel for this wonderful horse.