Finding the Missed Path. Mark Rashid
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“You’re still in frame,” the director said. I backed farther, going another 5, then 10, then 15 feet. “There,” the director shouted. “You’re clear.”
By this time I had already been away from Rusty for a good 30 seconds, and he hadn’t moved a muscle.
“Rolling,” the camera operator said.
“Rolling,” the first A.D. repeated. Several more seconds passed. Rusty still hadn’t moved.
“Set,” the camera operator said, indicating he was ready to shoot.
“Action!” the Director shouted.
Rusty stood perfectly still, looking off into the distance from time to time, smelling the ground, looking toward me, then toward the camera, then back at me. A minute passed, then two, then three.
“Cut!” the director yelled. I moved quietly back to where Rusty was standing. He still hadn’t even offered to move.
They repositioned the camera again. This time they would be shooting in close up. The makeup man came in and began applying fake blood to Rusty’s side, shoulder, and face. He put a lot of fake blood on the big white mark near his withers left by all the past ill-fitting saddles. Now, instead of it looking like a saddle mark, it appeared to be a large, gaping wound. I stood next to Rusty but this time didn’t even feel the need to put the rope over his neck. He never moved a muscle as the makeup was applied.
The steadicam operator was now in charge of the camera: it was placed on a harness attached to the operator’s body, and he filmed as he moved around Rusty only a few inches from the horse’s body. Once again, Rusty stood like a champ as the camera slowly scanned his fake wounds, starting at his flank and traveling all the way to his head.
After scanning his body with the camera three different times, the director said, “Cut,” and finally, Rusty’s day of filming was over. From start to finish, Rusty had stood unrestrained in the same place out in the middle of the desert without a fence for miles in any direction for nearly 45 minutes.
I mention this particular story because there was a time many years ago when I would have thought the only way to get a horse to comply with a situation like the one we had Rusty in was through hours of training and weeks or maybe even months of constant repetition. But as I’ve gotten older, I have come to understand that while training is indeed important, what is actually more important is that the horse physically feels good. When our horses feel good physically, it in turn allows them to feel good mentally. It is this mental soundness, if you will, that creates the springboard from which the relationship and connection between our horses and us is ultimately built.
As I mentioned earlier, when we first got Rusty our primary focus hadn’t really been on training, but rather on helping him feel better physically. We addressed the issues that seemed to be the most pressing: his teeth and his overall physical stiffness. Once these were taken care of, his overall demeanor and his unwillingness to be around us changed dramatically, which, in turn, allowed him to be comfortable enough to do something as foreign as standing unrestrained on a movie set in the middle of the desert at night for nearly an hour. And all this without him having any special “training.”
For me, this story helps to demonstrate the importance of limiting the kind of stress that horses might feel when they are dealing with physical problems, and how quickly and completely their disposition and outlook on life can change once those issues have been resolved.
In another situation several years ago, I was dealing with a bit of a dilemma in regard to our horses, in particular, the horses that travel with us when we are on the road doing clinics. I have always owned at least one, and usually more, fairly good-sized saddle horse. These are horses that usually weigh between 1200 to 1400 pounds and stand anywhere from 15.1 to 16.3 hands. They are the horses I had ranched with: big enough to drag a calf to the fire, doctor a steer, or pony a young horse. They are big enough so they can physically handle the work.
However, due to various circumstances over about a three-year period, we suddenly found that all of the horses in our herd of seven were about the same size, roughly 1100 pounds and between 14.2 and 15.1 hands. They could still do the kind of ranch work we needed, but none were physically substantial enough to hold their own should we latch on to a struggling horse or steer that was their same size or bigger.
As a result, I began searching for, and eventually found, a nice ranch gelding with the size and abilities I was looking for. He was named Cooper. Like all our new horses, we took care of any physical issues, had his teeth and feet balanced, found him a saddle that fit, and eventually took him out on the road with us.
Cooper did very well with all aspects of his new job as a clinic horse during that first trip. He was good around other horses, he didn’t worry if I had to pony another horse off him, or throw a rope, or use him to help demonstrate a certain movement or technique. In fact, he did so well that most folks who saw him thought he had been traveling with me for years.
We had done four clinics in four different venues during the first month I had him when, on one of our days off at our final stop in Wisconsin, I decided to get Cooper out and go for a little ride. He and I rode around the trails on the farm for an hour or so without any hint of a problem. We arrived back at the farm’s arena around mid-afternoon and with it being mid-week and a bit warm at that, there were no other riders in the arena. I decided to take Cooper in the arena and finish up our ride by doing a little loping, something we had not had a chance to do much of since we owned him.
The two of us trotted around for a couple of minutes with Cooper being his calm and quiet self, but then, almost as soon as I began to set him up to pick up his lope, I began to feel a tightness in him that I hadn’t felt before. Keep in mind, when I say I was setting him up to pick up his lope, all that consisted of was trotting into a turn on the far end of the arena, then, as we were coming out of the turn, I simply began to think about changing the rhythm we were in from the two-beat trot to the three-beat lope. As with all of my horses, when asking for a change of gait, I use minimal, if any leg, and in this case, I used no leg that I was aware of.
Still, as soon as I began thinking lope, or three beats, I felt a tightness that started in Cooper’s lower back and seemed to spread both backward into his hindquarters and forward into his withers. Instead of pushing through the stiffness, I slowed him down and asked him to relax again, which he did almost right away before we began setting up for the lope once again. But again, almost as soon as I began to think about changing rhythm, Cooper’s back began quickly to tighten. This time, however, and before I could ask him to slow and relax, he threw himself into the lope, took two uncomfortable hop-steps, and then dropped his head and started bucking.
I asked him to keep moving forward and after about three pretty good bucks followed by three or four very choppy and unbalanced strides, he lined out into a fast but fairly relaxed lope. This took me by surprise a little, as Cooper hadn’t shown even the slightest inclination to get upset about anything during the two months we’d owned him. To have him come uncorked like he did was completely out of character, and while I was pretty sure we had taken care of all his physical issues, my first thought was that something physical must be bothering him.
When we slowed from the fast but relatively relaxed lope into a nice relaxed trot, Cooper acted as if nothing at all out of the ordinary had just happened. We made another lap around the arena in that relaxed trot and as soon as I started to think about loping, like before, his back immediately got tight, he jumped into the lope and then went to bucking again. Just like the first transition, he let out three pretty good bucks, took another three or four choppy, unbalanced strides, then lined out into a relaxed lope as if nothing had happened.
I asked Cooper for the lope six or seven more times that afternoon, and while things did get a little smoother each time we did a transition, it never did feel right. So after about a total of 30 minutes and getting one fairly nice transition, we quit for the day.
Remember, just weeks before Cooper had gotten a clean bill of health from