After reading everything I could get my hands on and obsessing about horses my entire life, I bought my first horse in my early twenties.

It turned out that everything I thought I knew about horses was not going to help me train my new horse.  My Arabian mare, Amore was 11 years old and barely halter broken.  She was small, fiery, and very sensitive.  Her responses were hair-trigger and extreme.  She would gallop around and snort and prance and sometimes it seemed it would be easier to train a gazelle or a butterfly to be ridden.

Along my journey with Amore, I came across other horses with personalities similar to hers, and met the people who rode and loved these horses.  I also heard about many horses like my mare that had been deemed too unstable or dangerous to work with, and some of these horses had been put down in their prime.

Eventually, after I’d learned to accept that my mare was not the same as most of the horses I met, I also came to realize that I was not crazy, my horse was not crazy, and that just as some people like to drive race cars and ride motocross, some horse people prefer the high performance models of horses.  Just as race car driving is more dangerous than driving on the freeway, riding these horses is assuming more risk than many riders accept on a daily basis.  But just as race car driving is much more fun than driving the family sedan, riding the “other” horses is exciting, adventurous, and sometimes an incomparable rush.  It can be addictive, as long as you are willing to accept the risks along the way.

A person can’t just hop into a high performance car and drive it away without any specialized training.  Similarly, I wish I’d known more about high performance horses before attempting to train one on my own.  By the time I began with another “square” horse, I’d learned many things about what to expect and how to handle an atypical horse and it was a much easier process for me to begin.

This blog is to share my thoughts on training, riding and enjoying the horses that adventurous horse people often end up with.

           Valhalla, my second “square” horse.