Defending Their Honour

(or something?)

I promise that I'm still working on finishing my recap from my mini-clinic with Sandra. I had a trainer ride which was super informative, and learned a number of new exercises which I have been using. It's been a busy week and getting it all written down and organized is just taking a little longer than I planned. In the meantime...

Do you ever find yourself over-zealously defending your horse from insults?

Someone told me that Kachina had bad ground manners the other day. This is basically true. We have done a lot of work on ground manners and have made some improvement, but we have a ways to go. Kachina isn't mean in the slightest, and respects your space most of the time. However, for her, forward motion is usually the answer to everything. If you put her in a situation where you don't leave any forward options open, i.e. blocking her path to get her to stop or back up, she doesn't always listen and will try to keep going forward regardless. This is basically what happened when the person offered to hold Kachina for a minute while I grabbed something.

Despite this truth, when I heard "She doesn't have very good ground manners does she?", I immediately found myself denying it. I ended up replying by saying something like "well, she isn't used to being handled much by people other than me". While that is technically true, it doesn't really have anything to do with the issue.

For the next few minutes I found myself being grumpy and thinking to myself about the ways that Kachina was better than their horse. I am glad that I realized that these were illogical, jerk thoughts that I was having, and I got over it without putting my foot in it (too badly). The fact remains though that I had such a strong negative reaction to someone insulting my horse. Kachina doesn't care that someone insulted her ground manners, why do I?

She's also not very good at makeup application.
A little too heavy on the eyeshadow and lipstick there Kachina ;)

It almost felt like that kid sibling reaction: "I'm the only one who's allowed to insult my brother, if you say anything bad about him, I'll beat you up!"

How do you feel when someone says something negative about your horse?