Introducing: Push

I've made a few references to April's "new" baby horse, Push, but haven't done a formal post about him yet. I fail at blogging. April has had Push for nine months already. Whoops!

By this point, I think we pretty much consider Shadow, April's standardbred, a graduate of the TUH program. He has been doing awesome with her, and has really turned into a horse who knows his job and enjoys it. April takes him to hunter paces and rides him in her free time. He's not getting any younger and he battled some lameness issues for a little while there, but over all he's awesome, and is definitely her heart horse.

Kristin on Arrow and April on Shadow during their first hunter pace of the season. I love that my students "grow up" to ride together.

Last summer, April brought up the idea of getting a second, younger horse, that could grow up to be the jumper she has always wanted. I did tell April that I thought she was nuts for getting a second horse when she had so much other stuff going on, but then she showed me Push.

Sweet Pusher Man was a just-turned-two year old chestnut thoroughbred gelding, available through one of the local racehorse people who is always rehoming racehorses. He was never tattooed and never raced. Reportedly, he would walk out of the starting gate and sort of look around and go, "Meh." I'm not sure that story is true, but the bottom line is that he never made it as a racehorse.

When April showed me Push's ad online, I commented that he was a nice looking horse and worth taking a look at. After lessons one day, we drove over to meet him in person. He was laid up in a stall, recovering from an abscess. He was sweet on the ground and put together nicely. I asked to see him out in the open, and said, "I understand that he might be a little off, but I'd like to see him move."

Well, Push was a gorgeous mover and not the least bit lame. As he tore around the ring with his tail in the air, I told April, "I think you're crazy if you get a second horse right now, but if you're going to get one anyway, this is a nice one. In fact, if you don't take him, I might consider him for myself!"

We talked price and April got a great deal. Less than a week later, Push moved to Cara's.

A lot has happened in the last nine months, and there's no way I'm going to catch up on it in one entry. April graduated dialysis school, got a new job, bought a house (with a barn in the back yard) with her boyfriend, and added a puppy to their growing family. She managed to juggle all of this with having not one, but two horses, and I am extremely impressed.

In the mean time, I worked with Push here and there. My conclusion is that they threw in the towel on him before he even got in the starting gate. I also suspect that someone along the line was very rough with him. He has a lump on his poll that indicates that he may have flipped over and whacked his head at some point. This doesn't surprise me.

Here are the things that Push was really good at right from the get-go:

• Being groomed
• Taking baths
• Getting saddled and bridled
• Getting in a trailer

These are the things Push was not very good at:

• Picking up his feet
• Tying
• Leading
• Lunging (especially lunging)

Most of Push's issues stem from fear. While he is a serious sweetheart on the ground, Push quickly gets panicky under any kind of pressure. I suspect that he was cornered and reprimanded for getting the wrong answers in his early training. In the beginning, Push was prone to kicking out, and he was very quick with his feet. While he's  not malicious at all, I did worry that he would injure someone out of fear. He also did not have any concept of giving to pressure. Lunging him resulted in him locking his neck and bolting away from his handler until he either dragged them or ripped the line away and ran off. Honestly, it was really sad to watch. It was also pretty scary, and it wasn't long before Push earned a bad reputation at the barn.

While Push was at Cara's, we worked on desensitizing, picking up our feet, and learning to give to pressure instead of fighting it. It was a long, drawn out, and tedious process, but Push was improving.

Baby steps.

Eventually, April moved her horses home, and I went over there to work with Push some more. The nice thing about April's house was that she had a nice, enclosed space to work with the horses in. I had suggested that Push was the type of horse that would benefit from working in a round pen, but there was none available at Cara's, and the lack of enclosed space was really slowing our work down. In one session at April's, we made tremendous progress, and I gave April some exercises that would help Push choose coming to his handler over panicking and fleeing the situation.

In a turn of events, April needed to make some repairs to her property to make it better set up for horses. Push and Shadow moved temporarily back to Cara's. In the time they were there, I worked with Push every single week. Finally, we started to have breakthroughs. Push learned to give to pressure. He started picking up his feet like a pro. He stood tied and cross tied without a fuss. Lunging started to fall into place. 

The desensitizing was also going ridiculously well:

Being silly after a good session.

In fact, these days, he lunges beautifully. We've even started to introduce side reins a little at a time. Best of all, April is able to do the work with him herself.

Looking like a grown up.

Last week, the boys went home again, hopefully for good this time. We had a session there too. Even though there was a lot going on and Push was distracted by the "new" surroundings, he ended up being relaxed and well-behaved. 

Push turns three in less than a month, and we're getting ready to put a rider up for the first time since April has owned him. I imagine he's been sat on before so that part shouldn't be a big deal. I am excited to see where this horse goes from here. He is a beautiful mover and he's smart once he stops being fearful. He is lucky he ended up with someone so patient and determined. I would love to know what his complete back story is, but I suspect we'll never know.

Did I mention he's a big baby?