PrintNo one in their right mind will tell you that the British, the Irish or the Arabs don’t know their horses.
So it came as no surprise to me when, in my travels in various parts of the world, I got to play with their horses and discovered well-muscled, alert beasts glowing with good health and energy. What struck me most noticeably, as I got older and presumably wiser, was the different kinds of care and attention these horses received and the fact that they responded so well to care that in other parts of the world would have been cause for alarm.
My first experience with horses was at about age 2, sitting on my father’s honest-to-goodness cavalry mounts, his show jumpers. They were always glossy, perfectly turned out, and, of course, handled by professional grooms, since officers didn’t do any of the day-to-day care and maintenance.
When we returned from stays abroad, I rode for a dealer with side excursions into Pony Club and the British Horse Society’s Instructors program. In all three of these locations, I learned horse care that bordered on obsessive-compulsive. I could safely have eaten my dinner off the floor of my horse’s stall in the Horsemasters program. In fact, the stall floor was considerably cleaner than the dining room in the Big House, especially after we were done with it.
In the Horsemasters course, we were each assigned the total care of one (yes, one) horse. (I handled six at a time when I worked at the racetrack.) That horse’s stall was sanitized daily (I hesitate to use the words “mucked out” as unduly mundane, considering the effort involved in keeping that stall up to standard) to school standards, and when I say inspection I mean white-glove inspection.
Dried oats under the lip of the manger? Demerit city. The tack was subject to the same standards. Traces of saliva in the joints of a bit? Boy, did you hear about it. A mane not pulled to regulation length? Ditto. And heaven help you if you showed up to ride in anything less than a fresh shirt and tie, clean boots (even though you had to slog down a muddy lane to find your horse) and pressed breeches.
On the subject of ironing breeches, you might have gathered that this was before the age of stretch materials. The muck-heap was a work of art that would not have disgraced a good architect.
We picked poop out of the stall on an hourly basis, because the Inquisitor (as we called her) might randomly drop by your stall and pick up your charge’s foot to see if that foot was clean. The resultant droppings were placed, not tossed, into the castle that was the muck-heap (although it would not have been inappropriate to refer to it as the Accumulation of Excrement).
Feed was precisely and scientifically measured, and we learned the exact amount any given horse should be fed, depending on his workload, age and body weight. There was a specific chart of grooming steps, and woe betide you if you skipped one. The horses were treated like working animals, not like pets; they were permitted no treats, and we were instructed not to become too fond of them (if they caught you “loving” on one, they reassigned you to another horse on another part of the property). We were expected to behave like hardened professionals throughout the course.
