The Tolerant Horse

One thing I forgot to mention in my original polo post – those horses are so well trained! Imagine horses slamming into each other without so much as an ear flick, a batted eye, or a lifted hoof. They make no attempts to kick or bite at each other. For those of you not familiar with horses, they are fairly space conscious animals. The way one horse asserts its dominance over another is to be in charge of the available space. Part of horse training is to assert that you are in charge of the space and that the horse may not ever be in your space unless you initiate it. So for these horses to be so close together that your legs are pinned in between them – yes, that happened a few times – without being remotely bothered by it is pretty amazing.

Not only that, but think about all the times that they get clocked with a mallet or binged by the wooden ball that’s being batted around. I saw horses get hit with balls several times last night, one of which took it right in the face and didn’t even flinch. According to my friend Jess, it’s not all that uncommon for them to get hit in the face with a mallet on the upside of a swing – yikes!

In fact, last night, I took an awful swing on the left side of my horse. Keep in mind that the mallet is in the rider’s right hand, so I’m trying to swing across my body and the horse’s. I completely messed up the part where you’re supposed to swing the mallet parallel to the horse’s body – not so easy to do backhanded across both our bodies. So the end of the mallet, the part that looks like a hammer, went flying inbetween my horses back legs. Immediately I felt awful. Then, I felt the head of the mallet hook on the horse’s right hock, so I’m leaning to the left with my mallet underneath the horse and now it has hooked on the back of his right leg and he’s still going forward. Perhaps my immediate though should have been that I might get pulled under the horse with that physics going on, especially since I was already leaning over holding a heavy object across my body in the same direction. I guess I knew I could just let go of the mallet. Instead, my guilt immediately turned to panic. I was envisioning the mallet twisting up between his legs, causing more tension as it remained hooked on his right leg and he brought his left leg forward, and him either falling down in a tangle or breaking a leg. I started to let go of the mallet to avoid that scenario when I felt it spring free of his leg and swing back to his side. Whew!!! Later Jess told me that the mallets are designed to break for exactly that reason, so the most likely thing would have been for it to break before he fell or broke a bone. Not knowing that at the time, it was fairly stressful! The most impressive part of it though, was that my horse didn’t care at all. He wasn’t annoyed and he didn’t hold a grudge. I suppose that kind of thing has probably happened to him a lot. Regardless, the level of patience and training those horses have is awesome.

One more note – I think it’s fascinating that some of the horses actually play polo. Meaning, even if the rider doesn’t quite know what they are doing, the horses will chase the ball and push other horses off of it. It all depends on the individual horse, but Jess told me, for example, that her horse is a more aggressive polo player than she is. If there is a moment of indecisiveness, sometimes, the horses will just decide for themselves and run down the ball or another horse. I think it’s a really interesting insight into animal psychology that they participate in a game to that degree. Whether their motivation is some kind of distortion of natural competition or something more like having fun is a question that probably can’t be answered, but it’s still pretty cool.