Tuben’s Story
Our journey together began on the 19th September 2012 when
Tuben came ‘home’ to the livery yard as our first horse in a mother/daughter
share relationship. My daughter
Kate was 14 and had been riding for 2 years and whilst I had horse riding and
loaning experience, I had taken a break from horses for over 20 years but it
felt like the most natural thing in the world to do. Tuben was advertised as an Irish Draught cross, lightweight
hunter, who was 5 rising 6 years i.e.
green but sound with the basics and needing to be ‘brought on’. Whilst I had reservations about a young
horse, bringing one on felt different to training a youngster.
However, once home things began to
unravel. It quickly became
apparent that Tuben was very anxious about most things and struggled to pick
his front feet up for us, he couldn’t stand still to be groomed, tensed if
anyone on the yard raised their voice, didn’t like anyone to be inside the
stable with him and became so anxious whilst being ridden it was unsafe for my
daughter to ride him. The joy at owning a horse morphed into a new reality; had
we done the right thing? My gut
feeling was that we had a really good horse but I felt overwhelmed with the
myriad of problems and I felt that I simply hadn’t the skills to manage this
situation. However, we decided to take him out of
ridden work and establish if the problem was pain, so we had a back, tack and
teeth check and contacted Intelligent Horsemanship for some practical
help.
Our vet quickly established
that he was more like 4½ rather than rising 6yrs, Alison Dochertaigh of
Holistic Horse Help found that he had pain in his poll and neck but it was
completely manageable and was the first person to speak beautiful words of
support and encouragement to us, fortunately his saddle fit well and the lovely
Linda Ruffle of Intelligent Horsemanship began our journey of repair and
learning. Almost 12 months on we have learned so very much, Tuben is a
superstar and it has become blindingly obvious that he hadn’t had much of an
education and simply didn’t understand what was expected of him. He is a really bright boy with a
fabulous future ahead of him and currently Carrie Adams, also of Intelligent
Horsemanship, is re-schooling him and he is coming on in leaps and bounds. Kate and I are so immensely proud of him
and looking forwards to building a ridden relationship with him; we feel like
we are on the edge of something big!
I would not hesitate in recommending Intelligent Horsemanship and
Holistic Horse help as their practical support and words of encouragement have
been invaluable to us.
