Requiem For Grace

Requiem for Grace

I’ve never really been a fan of mares. My earliest experience with a mare resulted in a broken wrist and I’d often said I never met a mare I really liked. As a result of my attitude toward them, most of the mares at the rescue didn’t seem to like me very much either and I tended to avoid working with them. But that was before I met a little Arabian mare named Grace.
Like many of the horses that come to our rescue, the horse who arrived at our doorstep was nothing like horse described to us by her desperate owner. Grace’s owner had fallen on hard times and could no longer afford to pay the board. When she failed to find a buyer for the mare she called our rescue, telling our director that Grace was a quiet mare who had “done it all” and would make a great first horse for almost anyone. As described by her owner, Grace was a pretty little bare mare with a while blaze and soft eyes, but she turned out to be a nervous little animal that was about a green as a horse could be and we knew right away that we had a project on our hands.
I hadn’t been studying Parelli for very long before Grace arrived and most of my experience had been working with my quarter horse, Sonny. Sonny is a confident horse who can be pushy and stubborn and is easily bored so I had learned to escalate phases rather quickly with him in order to get a response. My lack of experience also meant I was a bit mechanical when first using the seven games and I wasn’t sure what to do when a horse didn’t respond to my cues.
After introducing Grace to the carrot stick and string, I tried to play with her they way I had been playing with Sonny but this approach with Grace went no where quickly. Rather than being confident, Grace was timid. When I applied the slightest pressure, she became tense. If I escalated the pressure, rather than moving away from the pressure, she froze. Nothing I tried seemed to work. As I got progressively stronger, she just seemed to shrink into herself. After 30 minutes of pure frustration it seemed to me that all of my prejudices against mares were justified and I thought she was both stubborn and stupid.
But on my drive home, I kept rerunning the tape of our session in my head and the more I thought about it, the more convinced I was that maybe the problem was me and not Grace. Suspecting that I was in over my head, I called a friend who was a more experienced Parelli student, described my session and asked for suggestions.
“Sounds to me like Grace is more unconfident than stubborn and you are probably putting too much pressure on her,” she said. “It probably felt to her like you were yelling at her. Just try to stay with a really gentle pressure and wait for her to respond. You may have to wait a long time but when you get the slightest response, release immediately and retreat. And whatever your do, wait until she is looking at you before you do anything. If she can’t look at you, you’ll know you are giving her too much pressure.”
This turned our to be good advice and in our next session, both Grace and I made progress. I slowed down, used minimum pressure and waited. Although it seemed to take forever, Grace gradually relaxed and began to trust me and to respond. She needed a lot of reassurance at first and I would often let her come in and stand next to me during our sessions. She seemed to want to be touching me at those times, leaning into me like a cat when I stroked her and pushing her head into my chest or my hand when I stopped. But she proved to be a quick study and before long she was moving backwards and sideways, squeezing between me and the fence and doing nice circles on the 22 foot line.
Grace under saddle was another story altogether. Although her owner had told us that she had shown Grace in western pleasure and had even barrel raced her, Grace didn’t seem to know what to do with leg pressure. Even though she was yielding to pressure in her ground work, when a rider was on her back she would freeze completely at the slightest application of pressure. Since she was going so well on the 22 foot line, we began working her on the line with a rider on her back. Slowly she was beginning to relax and we were making real progress when, Elena, the director of the rescue, found a permanent home for Grace in southern Delaware.
I am always happy when we find a good home for one of our rescue horses but when Elena told me about Grace’s adoption, it hit me hard. I hadn’t realized how fond I had become of the little mare until I learned that she was leaving. I really loved this little horse and while I was happy she had found a good home, I was really sad to see her leave the farm
. We want all of our rescued horses to live happily ever after so it was a shock two weeks ago to learn that Grace had broken a leg while out playing in the snow. She had been kicked in the shoulder by one of her pasture mates and the resulting fracture couldn’t be fixed. At the recommendation of the veterinarian, Grace was humanely destroyed. When I read the e-mail from Elena, I put my head in my hands and cried.
If every horse that comes into our lives is meant to teach us something, then Grace taught me a really important lesson. Working with Grace had shown me how mistaken I had been about mares and as a result of my change in attitude toward them, the mares on the farm seemed to have shifted their attitude toward me. Even Elena’s mare, Bugsy, a aged quarter horse who is the head mare on the farm and has tried to nip me more than once has softened her attitude toward me and will even come over to me occasionally looking for a carrot or a scratch on the neck. This was Grace’s gift to me and for that, I will never forget her.