I bought Chase as a weanling from an experienced breeder named Sharon Prestegard who had been in the halter show world for quite a few years. I got a deal on him, as he was only just halter broke, and in two weeks she had been planning to take him to auction.
I met him for the first time the day after he been weaned for the first time. I had been looking at a couple other horses at the time, but the breeder who had the palomino I had been looking at back then insisted that I take a look at this one before I made my decision.
He was first off-the brightest, shiniest red I had ever seen on a horse. AND he had a blaze and four strikingly white stockings. Every girl's dream-or at least mine. He was extremely shy of people at the time-when I entered the stall that he was in to meet him, he stayed in the corner farthest from me, too timid to look most of the time, but once he came over and sniffed my hand before darting back into that corner. He was a lot younger than I had been looking for, and I went back and forth a few times before deciding-one of the pushing factors was that my family was tired of looking and were ready to retract the permission they had given me to buy a horse.
So it was two weeks later, the private facility owner I had signed a boarding agreement with brought her trailer, and I stood by as his breeder and my new boarding manager loaded my very young, long legged red colt up into the trailer-more along the lines of almost picking him up and putting him in.
Driving back with 'Manny' in the trailer, I didn't feel as I was expecting to feel. I'd imagined getting my first horse would be full of happy tears, the like, ect. It felt like we were driving someone else's horse to the boarding facility instead. 'Manny' and I were still strangers.
Over the next few months, the newly named Chase and I began to bond. I was afraid of him at first-when he got comfortable around me he started really playing around me, and it was intimidating. There was this one particular move that he'd do when we played-he'd run up to me like he was going to plow right into me, and then veer off at the last minute kicking and bucking and tossing his head like any other colt. It was pretty awkward learning how to teach a young horse to be genuinely handled at first-there were a lot of moments where I really didn't know what I was doing, ect. The first year, we developed a relationship, but not necessarily a positive, each respecting the other one kind of relationship. I grew to love him, of course, and he'd nicker and meet me at the gate, but when I tried to play with him, I didn't have nearly the leadership he needed. There were times when I really wanted to give up-he got especially good at yanking the rope out of my hands when he got bored, sometimes to the point of dragging me along the ground when I tried to hang on. Looking back, I really, really did not know what I was doing at that point.
We kept hitting a dead end-I had no idea how to get him to listen to me long enough for me to try to make things interesting. I bought the Liberty and Horse Behavior set, ect, and studied for hours, but didn't really 'get' it.
When I felt like I had gone far over the end of my rope, so to speak, my friend Fran told me about a breeding facility in South Dakota that happened to be taking in interns. And it just so happened, a three star parelli professional was living there at the time. Pretty convenient, huh?
More in Part Two, which will be posted tomorrow.
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