Lexington, Ky.—Aug. 31

Tying a giant stuffed animal to your unstarted horse’s saddle might be an unorthodox way of introducing it to riding, but that’s the approach Casi Majeski took when it came to training Salazar.

The 7-year-old Andalusian stallion had been largely unhandled prior to arriving at Majeski’s Tucson, Arizona, farm, and working him required a lot of patience and little ingenuity.

“They were basically afraid of him,” said Majeski. “They wouldn’t handle him, even to clean his stall. They would run him to another stall to clean his stall. … He was 7, and [my friend] sent me a video of him running on a longe line. I was like, ‘Sure, that sounds like a project. I’ll take him.’ ”

When Salazar, who they later dubbed “Tesoro” arrived from Mexico, Majeski left a halter on to ensure she could catch him in his stall, and even then it took a couple weeks for them to reliably be able to get him. For the next seven months, Majeski took her time with Tesoro, longing him, touching him, picking up his feet, finding small milestones for him to meet.

“[He] never did anything ever mean,” she said. “He never bit, never kicked. Even if he got scared, he’d go away from you. He was just super nervous. Like, might as well have been a Mustang off the range.”

Once she was ready to start introducing him to riding, she employed a couple of unique tactics. The first being the stuffed animal—a horse, specifically—that she tied to his saddle in all manner of ways. Later, a pair of jeans filled with sand joined the stuff animal.

“We spent at least a month climbing up and down a mounting block, just so he’d get used to somebody climbing, because he would just like go 20 feet away and stare at you, like you had four heads,” she said “As soon as you got up higher, he was not OK with that. It took a really long time to get that.”

With that patience and a lot of brainstorming about what baby step they could present him with next, Tesoro slowly began to trust.

“How do we break it down into a lot of little things for him so he can digest it properly?” Majeski said. “He really had to not just trust but know what we were asking him, he could do.

“That we weren’t going to push him to a point of ‘I can’t do this,’ or ‘I’m going to get forced to do this.’ I think if there would have been any pressure in that sense, any force, it wouldn’t have gone well. We maybe could’ve forced him to do it, but not happily.”

When Majeski first got Tesoro, it was with the intention of making him a dressage horse. But Tesoro chose his own path.

One day while she was longing him over poles, he took himself over some cavaletti set up in the ring. Given his natural instinct, Majeski tried taking him over some poles propped on a barrel and he happily took on the challenge. Another time, as she rode him in the outdoor jump ring, she decided to take him over a fence.

“He just went right over, like he’s done it a thousand times,” she said. “Never blinked an eye at anything. And so I was like, ‘Well, let’s go see what he does cross-country.’ It was like he’d done it a thousand times, just like he was mentally bred for it.

“So I started eventing him, and he just never blinked an eye at anything,” she continued. “He loves to jump, and he doesn’t really look like he can jump, but he’ll jump some of the novice jumps a foot over, no big deal, doesn’t matter. In and out of water, up the banks, down the banks. Just has yet to question any of it. It just seems to be what he chose himself. He gave himself a career.”

Majeski, who runs Desert Sun Training, starting riding on the hunter/jumper circuit as a junior, but in high school and college, she was looking for a change, and someone suggested she try eventing. She estimates half the riders at her barn are dressage people and the other half are jumpers, but she’s working on converting a lot of the kids to eventing.

“I love the dressage,” she said. “I appreciate the dressage, did regionals last year on one of my other ones. There’s definitely fondness for dressage, but you can’t beat that cross-country.”

Now 10, Tesoro has competed novice this year, but this week the pair are competing in the beginner novice horse division at the USEA American Eventing Championships and scored a 35.2 in dressage and went double-clear on cross-country to sit in a tie for 17th.

“We’re going to go as long as he’s happy going,” she said. “Now he’s cruising around at home. We’re doing novice; we’re happy.  Maybe next year we can pull some training, sure, awesome. But it’s kind of wherever he wants to go.”