PrintHe was a little yellow pony in a show barn full of big, fancy hunters.
Technically, he was neither yellow nor a pony; he was a palomino who stretched to make it to 15 hands. He stood out like a sore thumb among the tall brown and bay Thoroughbreds and warmbloods.
He came to the barn a scruffy, rank, backyard grade in shoddy western tack. His mama was a beginner who thought it would be glamorous to own a palomino parade horse and learn to ride, and he’d been advertised as broke. He’d developed the pleasant habit of unloading his mama with a little buck and twist and did it frequently. His mama was, quite understandably, afraid of him and had the good sense to find help.
After four or five lessons with our trainer, in which mama hit the ground at least once a lesson, the trainer suggested, politely, that it might be a good idea to turn the pony over to one of his other riders for a little “tuning.”
He would, in the meantime, put her on one of his lesson horses until she was more confident and safe riding hunt seat. She agreed, and Little Yellow Pony was turned over to…me. My show hunter was in foal, and since I had some experience with attitude adjustments, I agreed to take on the LYP as a project. My trainer wanted the pony turned into a beginner packer. He needed to get to the point where he could be trusted to jump small courses on autopilot.
Needless to say, the first few weeks were a time of testing—for both of us. I started to learn about the pony’s likes and dislikes, and, after catching me napping a couple of times, he discovered there was no real merit to the buck-and-twist, since it wasn’t getting him anywhere.
We spent time discussing things like “leg,” “bend” and “basic dressage,” for which the pony seemed to have developed selective amnesia. Eventually, though, we came to the conclusion that someone, at some point, had put some really solid basic training into him. Being ridden by beginners just made it easy and convenient to forget.
He had, at one time in his past, learned to work off the leg, and eventually I could drop the reins completely and ride him solely off my leg. My trainer sometimes used the pony as a teacher when his juniors started to go overboard with hand-riding. Once we passed the initial get-acquainted arguments, he turned out to be a cheerful, companionable pony.
He loved trail rides and was quite pleasant on strolls in the woods. We started him over small fences, introducing him to the kinds of things he’d meet in the show ring. He took to this like a duck to water. Since we were going to show him in the hunters, he had to learn flying changes. My trainer figured we’d need about two weeks to be sure he understood. Try five minutes. Again, somewhere, sometime, somebody had put some time into this little guy. Clean, pretty changes. Every time.
Off To The Show
So, of course, he got included in the trailer-loads going to local shows. He remembered what we’d taught him about folding his knees tight and rounding his back over fences, and he’d skip merrily around the courses as though he’d been doing it all his life. He actually acted like he was having fun at the hunter shows.
