Adventures With Horses

Jess's Adventures

THE LLAMA

Jess, the 18 year old, was filled with the idea of personal indestructibility so typical of youth. He has spent the last two summers breaking out the young colts here. He got to feeling cocky because he has had such good luck training the horses with no accidents/injuries. Although he has taken a few spills, mostly when old equipment has unexpectedly given way, he recognizes that occasional spills are normal when dealing with green stock. He'd heard the old saying when someone was bragging that they'd never fallen off a horse, "Oh, haven't ridden much, huh?" He'd never gotten hurt going off until one day in June when he was riding one of the outside mares.
The ride started out normally enough. After a warm up period, they went riding down the highway, turning down a gravel road over by a neighbor's where he'd ridden many times before. Things were going smoothly until the neighbor's LLAMA, who is normally tied out, came up to the pasture fence, reared up (which makes him an AWESOME creature more than 10' tall,) and whistled at her, warning her to get out of his territory. The poor little mare, who is barely 14 hands, took one look and twirled and fled in a blind panic. She BELIEVED!
When the saddle slipped sidewise while she was going full tilt, Jess came off and bit the gravel big time. He damaged his hands so badly that he missed work for several days. He passed out while trying to clean the gravel out of his palms, and I ended up taking him to the emergency room for X-rays. Healthy 18 year olds who have recently banged their heads, then pass out, tend to alarm us old fogies.
I told him that even broke horses might have panicked upon encountering a belligerent LLAMA for the first time. When an animal is in a blind panic, trying to fight with them to bring them back under control is pretty useless. Center your body, ride it out, try to keep them and you safe until the panic passes, then go for control again. Anyone trying to bail will almost always get hurt somehow. I've bailed onto rocks I could not see, barb wire fence peices buried in the foliage, Canadian thistle... it is far less painful to ride it out if you possibly can. You also do not have to spend an hour and a half searching for the horse afterward.
The guy who owns the llama says it chases the horses around in the field and won't let him add new ones to that pasture. (They also SPIT on people!)
This guy likes exotic things. He had a whole flock of fancy pigeons in his barn, and peacocks around his trailer, but they all escaped and went into the backwaters of Lake Rathbun. He has turned loose in that fashion hundreds of dollars of exotics, that he claims are probably eaten by local fox and coyote, as they are not wary enough to survive on their own.

Next inststallment:

Touching the Buzzard