The Red Mare & Progress
A non-fiction post about my horse and how she's improved over the years.
Last Saturday, June 8, I put my horse, Skye, in hobbles for the first time.
Hobbles— for the non-horsey people— are one of the forms of getting a horse to stand still without being tied. They tie the horse’s two front legs together (sometimes adding a hind foot in three-way hobbles) in order to ensure that the horse doesn’t walk away when it is unsupervised or being tacked up. Sometimes they come in leather, sometimes in cotton, sometimes in nylon; but, really, no matter what they come in, they all have the same purpose.
Since horses are prey animals, and naturally resist pressure, hobble-training a horse can be a difficult, sometimes dangerous endeavor. Having their two front legs completely immobile puts them in a state of vulnerability, which means that to have a hobble-trained horse, you have to have a broke, bomb-proof horse that doesn’t care what scary things might be thrown their way. Spooking a horse while it is hobbled can lead to huge wrecks if the horse decides to flip over backwards, or run forwards, which would cause them to trip and fall on their face.
Which is why finally putting my mare in hobbles is such a feat for me, especially considering her background.
I got Skye in 2021 when she was three months out of a kill pen, spending time in a rescue center that was not much better than where she had previously been. For already having been in the rescue facility for three months, Skye was in terrible shape, with her skeleton protruding from fatless, muscleless skin, her coat barely grown in, a growing abscess on her throat (we would later discover that it was strangles), a huge cut on her hind leg that rendered her a tripod, and the remnants of her kill-pen sticker still stuck to her rear.
It was safe to say that she hadn’t come from good circumstances. She had been on the racetrack for a few years, was thrown out due to injury and turned into a brood mare, and it was when her owner died that she was sent to the killpen. I am convinced that somewhere along that line she was abused, as when I got her she was extremely headshy, terrified of the whip, and prone to sitting back against the fence (there are definitely a few pieces of my tack that have been fixed with duct tape and carabiners due to these freak-outs of hers).
For the past three years, I’ve spent most of my time at her side trying to show her kindness and prove that the world isn’t as scary as it seems. It hasn’t been an easy journey, but she’s made improvement, and this summer I came to the conclusion that it was time to start trying her in hobbles.
Skye is a very claustrophobic horse, so it’s safe to say that I was nervous when the idea came to my head. She’s been better about sitting back on the fence, but she’s still prone to panicking, which is both the reason I wanted to train her to stand in hobbles and the reason the idea scared me.
If she realized she was stuck in the hobbles, there was a very big possibility that she would freak out and do something crazy that would end in a wreck; which was the very reason she would sit back. Sometimes, when tied to the fence, Skye would realize she was tied and pull back to start thrashing against the halter until I came over to set her free. Luckily for me, she learned not to do it anymore because the halter never breaks and she just ends up tied back up anyway.
On the other hand, if she learned to stand quietly in hobbles, she would learn to ground-tie (stand still without being tied or hobbled) and she would learn to not panic if she ever got caught in something, instead giving to the pressure being applied, which would fix the majority of our problems.
So I knew I would have to introduce her to the hobbles slowly.
I started with a lariat. For four sessions I would tighten the loop around one of her ankles and pull forward until she took a step and gave to the pressure instead of leaning against it and resisting. At first she stomped and kicked out, but quickly she learned to give.
I walked her around in the rope and kept alternating legs. Not once did she panic. She was quiet, calm, and patient; a stark contrast to the horse I’d bought three years ago.
On Saturday, I did some rope work, and then decided it was time to put the hobbles on.
Once I put them on, she stood for a few moments, unaware that she was hobbled. I took a step back, and she shifted to follow me.
It was then she realized she was stuck.
I have always known that Skye is a good horse, and I often think about how her sweet nature and everything she’s shown me was almost put to waste in a kill pen. Sometimes I think about those other horses that didn’t make it out. What potential they had, where they could have ended up later in life had someone decided to take a chance and be patient with them.
My little mare is not just good because she’s sweet, but because she’s smart, too. When she isn’t panicking, it takes very little time for her to process and understand information, and then work to do the right thing every single time.
That’s exactly what she did in the hobbles.
When she realized she was stuck, I expected her to freak out.
She didn’t.
She stood and shuffled her legs a little bit, licked and chewed, and went right back to standing quietly. She watched as I walked away to rope the steer dummy (so that she would get used to movement around her while she was hobbled) and waited patiently until I took the hobbles off ten minutes later.
It was a small feat, only ten minutes of standing still, and there are definitely more training sessions to come, but I’m so proud of how far she’s come since I first met her. She and I both have improved so much, and I cannot imagine how disastrous hobble training would have been three years ago for us. But since then, we’ve both learned, and I am thrilled to see what else we’ll do in the future.
I don’t usually write nonfiction on here, but I felt a need to share this, and I’ve been wanting to write about my horse for a while now. I will definitely be sharing more of our journey later down the line!
So awesome - some of your best writing as it’s real and about the two of you and your journey. We are so proud of you.