You don’t sit on your crotch - you sit on your hip bones – sit on the pockets of your jeans, not the crotch seam. Your legs should stabilize, and bear part of the weight of, your body. If you’re sitting heavily on your ass with your legs flapping around, ur doin it wrong.
You don’t just flop around like a sack o’ potatoes, you actively follow the motion in various ways. In English you post (stand in the sadlle and sit again, in rhythm with the trot). In Western, the horses are trained to trot with little vertical motion = less bounce. By following the horse’s motion, your ass will hardly leave the saddle at all
ETA: and gaited horses, like Tennessee Walkers, have special way of striding that’s extra smooth.
They did, because your actions showed them you were not in charge and frightened. Since they were green, and you were green, you had problems. As it is said “green + green = Black & blue”. You uncle sounds like an ass by the way.
this sounds like he just wanted to look at you and missed. Horses don’t see the same way people do, and have almost no depth perception on the sides (they only have a small field of binocular vision).
The thing is, horses are physical creatures. They kick, nip and thump each other all the time. It’s part of how they communicate (and as social creatures, they communicate constantly.) They’re big and strong and it doesn’t mean much to them. When they do it us humans, they use the same amount of force that they’d use to another horse but we’re so much weaker than they that we feel it more. A horse that casually nips or swats you isn’t trying to hurt you (if he seriously wanted to hurt you, you’d know it.) He’s just trying to see what he can get away with. Slug him right back and your quality of life will improve noticeably.
That doesn’t mean you should walk right up and slug a strange horse. Just don’t let them push you around.
This is why experienced riders carry whips and use spurs (and also why inexperienced riders, shouldn’t). It’s not about hurting the horse but, rather, communicating loudly enough for the horse to take notice.
Don’t discount older horses either. My first horse was 17 when I got him. Old roping horse that half the young guys in the Paw-Paw bottoms S/E of Sallisaw had learned on.
He had an iron mouth. He had 4 gaits, eating, stopped, walking & going as fast as he could as long as he could. He taught me many things.
I took him to town at the end of the summer before my senor year and put him up at a stable about 1½ miles from school. I would drive my car past the school, get Tony and ride to school and picket him outside of the class rooms I was usually in so I could make sure he was OK.
Turns out he was not a ‘chick’ magnet but I did better than I usually did.
What I liked best was that fall when it got cool at night, I would go to his stall, and him being old, slept laying down a lot and I would lay down against his lower chest/stomach facing him, head on his lower front upper thigh or what ever it is called, the part right next to his chest, stick my left hand under him in the hay, right hand up on his side and feet near his pvt part. No stud was he.
I slept better doing that with him than I think I have ever slept before or since.
I was later told that was very dangerous. Not if it was me & Tony it wasn’t.
I learned to rope off him, steer wrestle, ( we called it bull dogging ) and how to fall off if he ziged when I though he was gonna zag while riding bareback. Feet like pie plates, could not catch really fast calves, I was not that good anyway. I really miss that old horse. He died 45 years ago.
At Paso Fino and Peruvian horse shows, they commonly have a “class” (typically informal, in the evening, with no judges around) in which the entrants ride around carrying a glass of wine. One person plays the part of “ring steward”, calling the actions (different gaits; when to reverse; etc.). The rider who finishes with the most wine still in the glass “wins”.
ETA: I saw several such “classes”, both Paso Fino and Peruvian, in several different cities in California, and there was one rider in particular who was at all of them, and participated in this “class”, and won them all.
I loved reading your story, and I understand how you felt about Tony.
My first horse was a paint with the glorious name, Chief War Lance. He was used in the Sheriff’s Posse, roping and parades before I got him so he was bullet-proof. It was three months before I was given a saddle, so I rode bareback everywhere - down the median of the highway, up and down motorcycle hills, along the sidewalks of subdivisions.
I was in 4-H, and the main focus of our group was rodeo events. My best friend had a fancy, well-bred Quarter Horse and we both liked running barrels in the stable’s weekly practice rodeo. Her horse was much faster than Chief, but Chief could slide around a barrel with not even an inch to spare.
The 4-H leaders took the group to a real rodeo at the end of summer, the only one I ever attended. My mother made me a beautiful Western shirt to wear, with ruffles down the front and pearl snaps. Chief and I came in 8th. My friend was 9th, so I was on cloud nine and so proud of him.
There’s just nothing like the first time you bond with a horse. I still have the picture taken on the day we bought Chief. I was sitting on him barefoot, and my toes were curled up in excitement. I looked ridiculously happy.
That moment a scared wild yearling gives you his heart is a moment to treasure forever.
Oddly enough the first “How to Train Your Dragon” captures it perfectly
Come to think of it, that is probably what it was. You just sparked a rather fond memory of my cousin sketching out a horse’s visual field on a piece of paper and trying to explain to me how their eyes worked.
