{"id":34,"date":"2010-10-21T08:55:07","date_gmt":"2010-10-21T08:55:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.emeraldsilver.com\/horses\/2010\/10\/21\/bear\/"},"modified":"2010-10-21T08:55:07","modified_gmt":"2010-10-21T08:55:07","slug":"bear","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.emeraldsilver.com\/horses\/2010\/10\/21\/bear\/","title":{"rendered":"Bear"},"content":{"rendered":"
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My last instructor had a single Thoroughbred, in her sea of Quarter Horses and PoAs and miscellaneous whatsits. I actually rode him for quite a while, fell off of him once, and always kind of felt bad for him, sweet horse that he was. I’m not a gelding person, but he was generally a nice guy, and I always felt like he deserved better than being a lesson horse; he needed a little girl of his own to love on him all the time.<\/p>\n

We called him Bear. I haven’t the slightest clue what his registered name was, but I know he had one; he was tattooed with the Jockey Club and had a three-race record. I don’t remember if he won any of them, and I never got confirmation on whether his bum leg was why he didn’t race more, but it seems like a reasonable guess.<\/p>\n

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I can never remember which leg it was that he’d limp on – and he was a clever limper; sometimes he really hurt and sometimes he was clearly just trying to get out of work – but I’m guessing by the funkiness of his left knee, it was probably that one. He was usually a bit thin in comparison to the horses around him, and I think I only saw him get “up” and put on speed once. The rest of the time, he was more than happy to stand around or plod around.<\/p>\n

As for the fall – it was more hilarious than anything else, especially in comparison to previous falls I’d had. He spooked at something<\/i> – neither my instructor nor I saw what it was, but talking later, we figured it was probably a rock thrown up by a passing car – and did a teeny buck and half-bolted. <\/p>\n

The funny part? It wasn’t that bad, but for some reason, I just kind of stopped riding, tried to wrap my arms around his neck, and just kind of came off. Whoops. I landed on my right hip\/thigh, with one arm on the fence; either he accidentally nicked me on the way by, or I whacked my shin pretty hard with my other foot. I think my first words to my instructor after I landed were, “Well, that was stupid.”<\/p>\n

The best (worst?) part was, this was while I was in college – and in the morning before a full afternoon of classes. The fall was around 9 or 10. By the time I got home around 5:30 that night, the outside of my right thigh looked like I’d had an unfortunate encounter with an usually large eggplant: purple from knee to hip. It didn’t hurt that badly, but damn, did it look ugly<\/i>. My shin and upper arm weren’t too much prettier, but had vastly smaller bruises.<\/p>\n

Poor Bear seemed quite embarrassed about the whole thing, to be honest.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My last instructor had a single Thoroughbred, in her sea of Quarter Horses and PoAs and miscellaneous whatsits. I actually rode him for quite a while, fell off of him once, and always kind of felt bad for him, sweet horse that he was. I’m not a gelding…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[10],"class_list":["post-34","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-horses-i-know"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.emeraldsilver.com\/horses\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.emeraldsilver.com\/horses\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.emeraldsilver.com\/horses\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.emeraldsilver.com\/horses\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.emeraldsilver.com\/horses\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.emeraldsilver.com\/horses\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.emeraldsilver.com\/horses\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.emeraldsilver.com\/horses\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.emeraldsilver.com\/horses\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}