Two years ago, at the MCTA Horse Trials in Maryland, I rode up to Kim Meier-Morani to congratulate her on finishing a fabulous 10th on her homebred Test Run in the Rolex Kentucky CCI**** the weekend before. She was riding another homebred, a 5-year-old, I think, at novice, and she smiled broadly and said to me, “You know, I’m more nervous about riding this one cross-country than I was at Kentucky.”

Ever since, I’ve thought that Kim’s self-analysis rather neatly summed up the difference between riding babies and riding veterans. Even though you may be jumping much, much bigger fences a lot faster on an older horse, 99 percent of the time, you can confidently predict what he’s going to do. But with a baby, well, you just never know what he might think of (or not think of) doing next.

The steps you take with a veteran to improve, to progress from one level to the next, can be arduous and aggravating as you struggle with new concepts and challenges.

But babies can make such gigantic improvements overnight or even in a single session. One moment a 3-year-old you’ve just started sitting on is so anxious and uncertain that his back feels like a stone wall, and the slightest touch of your leg sends him flying God knows where. And then, suddenly, you feel him take a breath, and the tension drains from the muscles across his topline. Unexpectedly, you feel he’s accepted that you’re aboard.

And the next day you can put your leg on him, turn him in circles or across the ring, even do transitions (OK, not great transitions, but at least you’ve changed gaits). Another day you start trotting him over cavaletti, and he never blinks or stumbles. And another day he spooks at a strange noise behind him and bolts, but you quickly regain control, directing him safely in a moment of panic for the first time.

Yes, these are minor victories, but they’re big steps, clear indications that your student is learning, is moving toward becoming a useful member of the equine community.

Figuring out and dealing with the personalities of all of our equine partners is always fascinating, but even more so with babies. It’s especially important when they’re young because what you do could influence them for the rest of their lives.

Certainly, training horses requires a system. It requires you to have education and experience that develops a correct point of view about how horses should behave and perform and exercises to develop that. But your system has to be flexible, able to accommodate horses with different fears, needs, strengths, weaknesses and levels of ambition.

Sometimes a youngster is so physically and mentally strong and confident that everything seems simple. This horse just loves to work. On that first day you sit astride his back, you can feel him trying to figure out your aids, and in a few weeks he’s jumping tiny fences and hacking across the countryside, hesitating only at things he doesn’t understand.

Another one is even smarter. And he’s high-octane. He too figures things out right away, and then he wants to move on to something new. And if you don’t challenge him constantly, he amuses himself by bucking you off. “I was bored,” he says.

Or a baby could be anxious, needing to be frequently reassured and calmed. He’s not afraid of things in his environment, but he is afraid of giving you the wrong answer. Unlike the super-smart one, who every minute needs something new to do, you spend a lot of time, quietly reviewing the things you’ve done and slipping some new things in. You want him to think, “Oh, look what I did! Aren’t I wonderful?”

Or you could have a youngster who’s genuinely afraid, and big and powerful. Perhaps he lacks confidence anyway, and he’s had some experiences that scared him. So every day is an adventure, with wheeling, bucking, bolting at sights, sounds, horses galloping around the fields, or at just being alone in the ring.

You spend months, even years, building his confidence in you, in the aids and commands you give him, teaching him to believe in himself and to trust that if you say he can do it, it’s true.

The hardest to deal with are the hard-headed or willful and the uncooperative, especially the spoiled. It takes a lot of tact and subtleness to convince the hard-headed that it’s their idea to cooperate, and it takes a lot of perseverance and determination to motivate the spoiled, to convince them that going forward from your leg, when you tell them to, is actually easier than getting whacked again and again.

They’re the ones that make you appreciate all the others even more.

Here’s What I Do Get
Why we don’t ever want our veteran equine partners to grow old and have to retire.

Because they’re so much fun, so empowering. The exhilaration you get when riding an experienced horse over a tough course of jumps, doing a great dressage test, coming home from a long day of foxhunting, or completing an endurance ride explains why the centaur is such a popular mythical creature. It’s the joy, the feeling of camaraderie, of flight, of harmony, of oneness.

It’s a feeling you begin to crave, to not want ever to evaporate. When you feel it, you can imagine what David O’Connor felt with Custom Made and Giltedge, Carol Lavell felt with Gifted, Hilda Gurney felt with Keen, Ian Millar felt with Big Ben, or Debbie McDonald still feels with Brentina.

I’ve got a horse with whom I have a relationship like that now, and I dread the day when I won’t be able to ride him anymore. We’ve had Merlin for nine years, and he suffered a minor injury in August and won’t compete again this fall. And I pine for the next time I’ll be able to ride him on cross-country.

We know each other so well that we can anticipate what the other wants or will do, and we have complete trust in each other. We completed the Jersey Fresh CCI** (N.J.) in June, just before we moved to California. And I was anxious about how rusty we’d be going cross-country again for the first time, more than two months later, but as soon as we left the box, I knew it would be a great ride. And, yes, it was.