Anyone and everyone who knows me can answer the question of what is my favorite animal. If you have just started reading my blog, the answer lies within a majority of the blogs. From a very early age, the first recorded image of me with my favorite animal was before I was two years old, when I was first brought home for adoption. This animal is more than my favorite, it is my passion. The horse of course.
Since I can remember, and by family stories, I have always possess a way with and a love for animals. At the tender age of three, I captured my first pet, a kitty cat. I had gone to the trash landfill with my dad and seen this kitty cat. I asked my dad if I could take the kitty cat home. His answer, “If you can catch the kitty, you can keep the kitty.” He set about transitioning our trash to the landfill, I set about capturing a very wild kitty cat. Before he was done with his task, I had accomplished mine, showing him a growling up happy kitty cat that for some reason never scratched or bit me. My dad was surprised by my accomplishment, and a man who kept his word, we came home with an angry kitty cat in the car. A couple of years later, we were moving to a different state and new home, my mom would not allow me to bring my kitty cat with us. I lost my companion who slept on my pillow with me each night. I have never formed a strong relationship with a cat since. I think somehow the event taught me not to develop a relationship with an animal you are going to lose.
Horses caught my imagination and my heart at an early age. The first ride bareback on the big white gelding my father owned when they first brought me home ignited a spark that would stay lite my whole lifetime. I am adopted, and was brought to my adopted home at about 13 months of age. My dad sold the white gelding a year or two later as the horse became unpredictable and dangerous to people. My dad attributed it to a brain tumor in the horse and disclosed this thought when he sold the horse, although it was not confirmed by a vet.
The next horse to enter my life, I was four years old. One morning I woke up, and looking at me through my bedroom window, was a brown horse. My dad had purchased two horses for hunting season, a brown mare and a buckskin gelding. Instantly, I was in love with the brown mare. She was not very tall, and after my dad rode her, he deemed she was safe for me to sit on while he lead her around the yard. After hunting season, dad sold the buckskin, but kept the brown mare as he could see I really loved her and had named her Tammy. Soon I was riding Tammy around the yard. One day, I am not sure what I did, but Tammy moved in a slow gallop. The gently rocking motion of the gait was pleasant and freeing to this little girl trying to adjust.
Everyone thinks that being adopted is a wonderful event, as the people who adopt have chosen a child to raise. That is not always the true situation. My adoptive parents were unable to have children, and decided to adopt. First, my adopted sister, although a 19 weeks younger, was adopted at birth. Somehow, my dad learned of me being available for adoption. He and my mother fought about adopting me. Dad wanted me and my mother did not.
Dad worked long hours and sometimes away from home during the week, only to be home on weekends. My mother was not always friendly or truthful to me. Although she never physically abused me or neglected me, she was not loving nurturing mother a child should have. I desired to know I was loved and accepted from my mother, when I did not receive what I needed from her, I turned to the horse. I would day dream and fantasize about the lovely animal who would love and accept me for who I was. I watch television shows, mostly westerns, not see the plot, but to watch the horses. I read every book I could find on horses, fiction and non-fiction. I would walk up to any horse I came near, often to my father’s worry I would get hurt. My main conversation topic, horses. I would almost be out of high school before I learned that not everyone wants to talk about horses. Even today, I have to be careful when the topic of horses enters a conversation, as I can go on forever talking about this wonderful animal the impact in my life they have brought.
Eventually we moved to a place where my dad could once again buy and keep a horse, for me to be around. At age nine I brokered the deal to buy my very first horse, one that would be mine. Sure, I traded hay bales from our farm for the four month old bay colt to my fourth grade teacher, and my dad taught me my first lesson in buying a horse. Do not agree to purchase a horse until you have seen the animal first. Ok, so to her horse ranch we went. My teacher and her parents had a horse ranch, raising, training and selling Appaloosas and Quarter Horses. I was in amazement with the various pens and pastures filled with horses. We followed her to see to a pasture of mares and foals to see the young horse she had offered me to buy. For a nine year old girl who dreamed, loved and wanted to be a horse, this was heaven to be surrounded by mares and babies. I had not been around foals, the foals were curious, soft velvet noses, large inquisitive eyes with a touch of uncertainty as to who I was. I was filled with serene joy, watching, letting them smell my face, and excited to just be there yet moving gently as not to frighten away these most wonderful little creatures. For this little girl, she had entered heaven. Even today, many decades later, the memory is heaven. I remember each mare and foal.
The young horse I purchased would the first horse I trained under the guidance of my dad, Berry’s Books on horse training and the book, Black Beauty. I spent hours just watching horses learning their ways of communication and patterns. In truth, one of my wishes, prayers and dreams was to wake up one day, and be a horse. Because of this desire, when it came time to train my horse, I wanted to train the horse with kindness and compassion not like on the television shows I watched of a horse frightened and bucking.
As a teenager, I began training others’ horses without pay or my dad’s knowledge. Someone would ask me to work with a horse, and I would because I loved the horse. It became known that I did magic with a horse, a time before people were called horse whisperers. After the moving came out, I was named a horse whisperer. But there is no secret, it is communication. Horse are the most communicative animal I have ever been around. A horse “talks” all the time and never, ever shuts up. Horses communicate through visual means of moving a tail, eyelid, nostril. A horse whisperer knows how the horse communicates and sees the communication, even the smallest movement. There are rules of communication with the horse, how to greet and so forth. There is always a dominate horse, and all others follow their lead and direction. Learn how to communicate and then become the dominate “leader” and you become known as a horse whisperer.
Horses are affectionate and need each other. A horse alone is not happy. As a child I was alone and not happy. I would go to the pen or pasture of my horse and the other three horses my dad owned and no longer be alone, or unhappy. I was accepted as one of them. They showed me affection and acceptance that I did not receive from my mother. There was no striving for perfection in hopes of being loved, I was just loved.
I continue to own horses. There have been times in my life I did not have a horse. There were times, I was able to raise horse, and have the inquisitive babies around, my most joyful times. Today, I do not raise horses anymore. Two years ago, my mare birthed the last foal I would raise. I was blessed with my favorite color for a horse, a bay with a large blanket and spots. My grandchildren named her, Sparkle Lilly. This foal will be the last horse I train, her riding training starting this spring. Age catches up with us all, and there comes a time when being the first person on a horse’s back is not a wise choice. Horses will always remain my closest friend, my companion and my passion.
Below is a picture of Sparkle Lilly. Along with being my favorite color and pattern for a horse, she has unique spots. How many hearts can you find?
amtolle
Me, Myself and I 