In this series, Melissa talks about the horses who have helped shape her career and create Pyrois Media.
Have you ever had a horse you struggled to get along with but who also taught you a lot?
Let me introduce you to “Snickers.” He was that horse for me.
Purchased as my first horse, we were a novice horse buying family who came into the process thinking it was easy to buy a horse and making a few of mistakes in the buying process. Our main one: Not taking my trainer with us.
Fast forward to getting the 15-year-old home … and learning he knew he was big and how to use his size to get what he wanted from a preteen. Working wasn’t something Snickers did overly willingly and he had the uncanny ability to “forget” cues if he didn’t want to do something.
Neck reining? He’d know how to do it perfectly until he didn’t want to go where you wanted him to.
Picking up his hooves to be picked out? Only if he knew there wasn’t a saddle involved after that.
Bucking someone off for the fun of it? Experience level: Expert! You could count on that bucking spree to come in the first 15 minutes or so of your ride and that you’d get launched. But once he got you off and you got back on, he’d often be perfect the rest of the ride.
Snickers enjoying life as a model in 2014.
At this point you’re probably wondering how this horse could have shaped my life … and how much pain he was in to show that behavior.
On the pain part, don’t worry. We had him vetted extensively, all my tack checked, and he had his own chiropractor and dentist. Looking back now with what I know, there were major warning signs that he was probably a bit of a “rebel” before we bought him.
Among those … the girl the seller said she traded him for didn’t have time for him but did have time for the much younger horse she traded him for.
While he definitely wasn’t the right horse for anyone but an experienced rider, many of the things my time riding him taught me were lessons I still use 20 years later.
Number 1 – Ask, don’t tell: That goes against most things I was taught early on when working with horses. “You have to show them who’s boss” is something still said in many barns today and many people still live by. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against “Come to Jesus” meetings with horses when necessary and even had a few with Snickers once I was older. But, I also quickly learned that as a 12-year-old girl against a 16ish hand horse, it was better to ask him for things than to tell him he was doing them.
It helped us get along much better and allowed me to continue riding for the year and a half he was my sole mount. It also taught me a better way to approach both tough horses and everything in business – skills that have come in handy quite a bit over the year.
Snickers doing his favorite thing when being ridden … standing.
Number 2 – Pay attention: Like I said, we were novices in the horse buying game at the time so there were things we probably missed. The story the seller gave us doesn’t make much sense looking back on it and the horse drastically changed once we got him off their property, I probably could read between the lines on both of those things today before ever handing over money.
We spent many hours trying to figure out why he behaved he did, down to the tiny details. While we never fully learned the key to Snickers, it taught me how important the little details are because we did learn some things that let me get along better with him.
Number 3 – It’s okay to change plans: We decided in the end that it was better and safer for everyone if he became a pasture pet that was ridden maybe once a year (a plan he mostly approved of) vs. a horse in consistent work. That proved to be the smartest move we could make. Snickers enjoyed life just getting brushed on and playing companion to horses and cows. An added plus – without me irritating him by riding, he actually became a horse I enjoyed being around!
Life in retirement … 28-year-old Snickers and one of his cow buddies.
While it was disappointing he wasn’t going to be the extremely successful show horse I’d planned on when we bought him, he taught me an important lesson … don’t be so stuck to one plan that you can’t regroup and change direction.
In life, especially in business and with horses, things change so you have to be willing to change with them. Which may be disappointing at the time usually works out even better in the end (after all, if he’d have been that show horse, I wouldn’t have gotten Crystal).
Snickers lived his best life once retired with many people spoiling him. He passed away at 30 years old in early 2017.
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