Traumatized

Last weekend, my husband and I participated in a jousting demo at Pioneer Farms. We took Saga along for the experience but left Red at home, since we're still dealing with his abscess. Fortunately for my husband, a good friend of ours was kind enough to bring an extra horse for him to joust on, since Saga hasn't had any training to prepare him for jousting.

Saga was horribly traumatized about horses wearing trappings. First, my husband rode up to us on his loaner horse, Bandit, and Saga was ABSOLUTELY CONVINCED that the trappings had eaten Bandit and were now coming after him. We followed Bandit around for a while (horses are always braver when they're chasing the scary thing rather than being chased by it) and Saga just could not believe that Bandit was OK. He kept reaching over to touch Bandit with his nose... it was pretty funny. My poor traumatized horse!

Our friend Azulox was out taking pictures - he's a professional photographer and I don't want to steal his pictures, so here's a link to Bandit and his trappings: Saga says, "Eeek! Red and yellow, kill a fellow! RUNNNN!"

Unfortunately, at that point our friend Alexis came galloping up on his horse, Booker, who was also wearing trappings. Well, apparently Saga does have some Quarter Horse in him because he did a maneuver I've only ever seen working cow horses do - essentially, he dug in and skittered sideways with his belly about two feet from the ground. This would have been fine except that my boots were covered with slippery mud, and despite my grippy stirrup pads, my right foot slipped out of the stirrup. Normally, riding with one or no stirrups would be fine (note our disastrous stadium round at Pine Hill a few weeks ago where I lost a stirrup after fence 6), except that Saga was still skittering to the right, so all my weight was in the left stirrup... and my foot slipped out of that stirrup too. I had that one eternal moment to think, "well shit, this is going to hurt," but I somehow managed to get my right leg over him (I'm pretty sure he just slithered out from under me at this point, still going sideways to the right) and landed, quite neatly, on my feet with the reins in my right hand. Not only did it not hurt, it was actually much more graceful than many of my intentional dismounts after I've ridden at home. Of course, nobody saw my graceful maneuver, but everyone asked me why I had gotten off!

After hopping back on Saga again and walking around a bit more, I put him away to go help with the games, combat, and jousting. We did a little work with Saga on the mounted combat, desensitizing him to the foam sword. He did pretty well with that but needs lots of practice. It takes a lot of work to get a horse to play the SCA games and joust, even if the horse has a laid-back personality and is generally amenable to humans doing crazy weird stuff. Hopefully that's something we'll have more time for this winter.

During the breaks, Saga and his buddy Lucky hung out at the trailer. Unfortunately, Lucky took exception to the fact that Saga had hay and he didn't, so he kicked Saga. (Aside: WHY OH WHY can I not own a horse who will stand up for himself? I used to call Cash the Great White Weenie Horse, he was such a pushover. You'd think that a 16.2 hh gelding would stand up for himself, but noooooo... sigh). Anywho, Lucky managed to land a kick on Saga's left rear cannon bone, leaving a nasty cut and slightly swollen leg (Lucky wears hind shoes). I hosed it and cleaned it out and was happy to find that it didn't go through all the layers of skin. Then I went to wrap it, only to find that I had no vet wrap. Seriously, if I don't have my own trailer, I forget SO MANY things, it's crazy. So I asked around for vet wrap and guess what... the only vet wrap around belonged to Duchess' mom, whose favorite color is... you guessed it...

PINK.

Have I mentioned how much I HATE PINK?

So it was my turn to be traumatized for the day since I had to put pink vet wrap on my horse.

The world may never be the same.