Bombproofing R Us

Everyone who rides lives in fear of the grand spook, that heart-stopping, muscle-wrenching moment when your horse looks ahead, says "What on earth is that? It's going to EAT me!", spins and bolts. It really isn't fun, and the older you get the harder the ground becomes. When I began taking clients out riding, I knew that I had to have horses who would not do the grand spook for anything. Happily, I have the perfect place to unspook horses...the Egyptian countryside.

Most people who ride in Egypt do so in arenas if they are training for jumping or dressage, or they ride in the desert for pleasure. The desert is nice and empty...seriously empty with only sand, rock, and the occasional rider or ATV. So the horses in the desert get used to seeing nothing very alarming. They don't have to work in a confined space as it is the Sahara after all and you can ride ten people abreast at 2 meter distances if you like. So most horses are a bit taken aback in the countryside. But I had two horses who needed 6 months of rehab on hard ground and the countryside was the only place to do it. It was an interesting 6 months but well worth it. Once I'd gotten them past the heebie-jeebies, they made excellent teachers for the others.

The photos accompanying this post were taken by Kelly Anderson on her rides around our area this summer while I was laid up with knee surgery. They illustrate some of the training objects that we use for bombproofing. A horse drawing a cart is of some concern to most saddle horses. "Is that what happens to bad horses who spook and spin?" "You betcha, toots. Look carefully." The man with the lethal ice cream cart is more of a physical danger to the kids buying the ice cream but someone climbing halfway into a brightly painted box pushed by a bicycle is definitely suspect. And the tuk-tuks! Those little covered tricycles with huge boombox music blaring out of them! Definite horse eaters.

The trails in the countryside run alongside the irrigation canals and the farmers often use diesel pumps to transfer water from the canal to the fields. When working the pumps put out a powerful stream of water about 6 inches/10 cm in diameter. The farmers are very obliging about turning off a pump that is projecting across a trail so that we don't have to get soaked, but encountering a diesel pump being hauled by a donkey on a narrow trail is a sure sign that the horses are going to slow down rather than rush up behind something that is suspiciously coiled and jiggling.

The alternative form of water transport is almost as horrifying as the diesel pump. This is the sakia, a form of water wheel that is donkey powered. Of course, donkeys are not stupid and will not voluntarily walk in circles for hours so the farmers blindfold them, often with objects that look like reject props for a Madonna concert. A still sakia is no cause for alarm...but a sakia that is being run by a dangerous punk donkey definitely rates a second look.

Then we have the final, most dangerous countryside object...the dreaded crake, or dredge. With millions of kilometres of mud-sided canals to keep working, a number of backhoes with broad scoops work 24/7 cleaning the accumulated silt and whatever out of the canals, also broadening them where the sides have slipped in. To their credit, the horses have learned to walk carefully past the dreaded crake as it rests quietly by the trail (the operators are very cooperative in this regard), past piles of slippery smelly mud until we can feel the sighs of relief as the monster is left behind. I have on one occasion tried to ride past a dredge in the dark of the night when the strong halogen lights affixed to the long arm throw enormous beams of light into the darkness. Suffice it to say that discretion is the better part of valour and we returned along our original path. Some fights simply aren't worth it...and I thought it was pretty spooky myself.

So if you really want to bombproof your horses, just drop us a line. We can pack up some of our wonderful neighbourhood spooky creatures just for you. The European storks that no longer seem to migrate north in the summer are already fairly mobile and standing up at about 4 feet with an easy 6 foot wing span, they can certainly take care of any avian issues. Happy to help.


copyright 2010 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Walk Dammit!

Sometimes I help people learn to ride. I wouldn't say I'm a riding instructor, but sometimes I help people learn to ride. When they want to really learn to "ride" as in dressage, jumping or just the proper way to sit a horse, I usually send them to friends of mine who are riding instructors...and most of the people who I help to learn to ride do end up with proper instruction at some point.

So what do I do? I really like to start people in their quest to learn to relate to horses. I particularly like to help women in their early days with horses. Women have a special love affair with horses. Horses are beautiful, strong, soft, gentle, powerful, fast, free creatures...horses are all that we all want to be and often feel we aren't. But horses can teach us so much as well, much more than we realise at first. On weekend mornings I host the local American school riding clubs for the middle and high school, most of whose members are teenaged girls. Some of them have established their relationship with horses and some of them are just trying it out. I teach them about the kind of animals we are, horses and humans, and how it is little short of miraculous that our horses learn to trust us predators so completely. I teach them about the natural hierarchies in a herd of horses, how the older mares who have the nerve to push up to the hay pile and tell everyone else to move over get the respect. I point out to them that the horses are not saying "please" or making quiet requests but they are asserting what they feel are their natural rights. Most teenaged girls are a bit fuzzy about what their natural rights are, so I think that it's good for them to learn to boss someone around.

When I got my first horse, Dorika who is currently my partner of over 20 years, I was in heaven and hell simultaneously. I wanted desperately for her to be my friend and ally...and she bit me. A wiser horseman told me that before she could be my friend, she was going to have to respect me. In order to earn her respect, I had to be able to order her around, tell her what to do, have her obey me. In short, I had to stop saying "Please" and just say "Do it". I tried it and we found a new way to work together.

Most of the girls who come to ride here are really polite young women. I put them on horses who will stand around looking at the flowers until they are told in a believable way that the rider wants them to move. Don't get me wrong...these horses know how to move just fine. Tell them to go for a two mile canter in the desert and you will get one you'll never forget, but if an unsure student is sitting on their backs, they will await their orders. We start out with "Please walk" and work our way up the ladder of intensity and force. After a while, I tell them that I promise not to tell their mothers but they need to be able to at least think "Walk, dammit!" in order to get their point across. Giggling nervously, they mutter "Walk, dammit!" and lo and behold, the ponies amble off around the arena and young women grin.

As I point out, if you can boss around a horse, the sky's the limit.

copyright 20010 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Equestrian Consciousness Raising

I'm working through a mass of information, inspiration, and thought. I was lucky enough to have a friend of a friend come to stay at my farm to give some clinics in balanced riding, saddle fitting and ground work. To say the least, this encounter has provided food for thought on a number of fronts. I'd like to clarify something first: I've had horses for about twenty years now, all of them in Egypt. I took proper riding lessons from about the age of eight to twelve and all the riding that I've done since then has been without proper supervision other than 18 months of informal dressage lessons that I took with a friend about 13 years ago. I've been out of touch with virtually all the equestrian trends in North America for as long as I've owned horses. At the same time, my academic background in social psychology and interest in animal behaviour has been very useful in helping my horses to teach me about them. Perhaps other people might not have found so much revelation in this learning experience, but then other people aren't writing this blog.

One of the basic points that really knocked me over was the fact that horses were never made for people to ride them. That may seem truly elementary, but to a genetically horse-mad person like myself it was like a bolt of lightning. Our clinician, Zsuzsu Illes, was explaining the theory behind saddle construction to a group of us with a drawing on one of my horses. The back of the horse is like a suspension bridge, to quote Zsuzsu, created to carry the belly of the horse underneath the spine. The musculature of the back is there to provide locomotion to the horse, not to carry the sometimes considerable weight of a rider. The saddle is intended to spread the rider's weight across the back so as not to harm the horse.

Every so often one runs across an idea that knocks the years of experience for a loop. The thought that horses were not created to be ridden was one of those. Oh, I know that horses were domesticated over centuries and that riding as a discipline has developed over the centuries, but somewhere inside my soul was a horse-mad little girl who "just knew" that horses existed to be ridden. In fact, when examined seriously and without the madness, the concept that riding a horse is a somewhat unnatural act has a lot of evidence and induces wonder at the kindness of these large creatures who willingly place themselves at our beck and call. But I recall watching my last crop of youngsters starting out to carry riders. They'd been introduced to everything but a steady pressure on their backs and they were very calm for experiencing their first time under saddle. However, their steps were tentative and it was clear that one of the issues was one of balance, not so much their own alone, but that of the rider on their backs.

Recalling the horses' concerns for their ability to balance with a rider on their backs, and the design of saddles that rest on the muscles for the locomotion for the horse, the realisation of the importance of saddle fit hit me like a truck. Up to that point, the question of saddle fit had been something that I would skirt gingerly like an angry snake. In a country where virtually every saddle has been imported by someone who never had a chance to try it on a horse, what were the odds that all of my saddles would be shown to cripple my horses? Very scary thought. But Zsuzsu put my fears to rest to the extent that she could.

I have about 19 riding horses (and some youngsters still not under saddle) and about 10 saddles. Ideally, each horse and rider would have a saddle that is perfect for the combination of the two. But I have many people riding my horses so the best that I can do is try to have each horse have at least one saddle that fits him/her relatively well. After spending a couple of days trying saddles on horses, I can say that I have one saddle that doesn't fit anyone at all, and a number of horses who can use a variety of saddles with varying degrees of success. The trick to this lies in the gazillion pads that we already had on hand and the three new ones that I bought from Zsuzsu. Almost none of my saddles are perfect, but with the right combinations of pads, we reach a decent level of comfort. Considering that three of the saddles were expensive American custom fit endurance saddles (the saddlemaker fit the horses herself on a visit here years ago), one might hope for at least three horses with a perfect fit, but horses, just like us, change shape over time and now these saddles don't fit perfectly.

As we moved on to the riding clinics I found more saddle fit revelations. I was aware of pinching, rubbing, and so on as issues in saddle fit but I hadn't thought about the way that a saddle could balance or unbalance a rider. As the clinic photographer I had plenty of time to notice and think about the issues that Zsuzsu brought up. Like myself, the riders who came were people who had either bought new saddles in the hopes that they would fit existing horses or they were people who had found used saddles that more or less fit their horses. The fit could be fiddled with the right kinds of pads, but in many cases the effect on the rider of a saddle that wasn't really the right one for the horse or the rider was unfortunate. A jumping style saddle could affect the balance pulling the rider's knee forward until the heels were no longer under the hips, creating an imbalance. If the seat of the saddle was too small, or tipped the rider either forward or back, the same thing could happen.

I ride horses a lot. It's how I make my (and my horses') living. But I have never really thought as much about how I ride as I did during those two weeks with Zsuzsu. It was rather like surviving a mental tsunami. When she and I went out for a ride for fun, I started laughing about half an hour into the ride and told her she'd ruined riding for me because now I was thinking about all the things that I was doing wrong. I was only partly kidding. Nothing could ruin riding for me. It's my sanity, my joy, and I'm most alive when I'm in the saddle...to say nothing of the fact that only there do my arthritic knees not bother me. And it wasn't a bad thing to bring myself back to the consciousness that my horses were not created to carry me, although they do so very willingly, and that it is therefore my responsibility to make their work as pleasant and painless as possible.

copyright 2009 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani