“left explicit instructions that no one was to enter his stall”
Oh, here’s another horse story from my days working and living at the Arabian training/breeding farm.
I sometimes groomed the horses in the stall which was just my being lazy. There were 12 stallions and about 20 mares, so rather than walking each to the cross tie area and back I’d groom in the stall. The horses like me as their carer, so I wasn’t worried.
Well, one day I was grooming Tiger. A lovely bay with a sweet disposition. There were electric wires running across the walls between the stallions in their area for obvious reason...so they wouldn’t tear the walls down and kill one another! So. I’m in there grooming Tiger and the stallion in the stall next to us was raising holy heck. Like a moron, and with Tiger’s halter in my hand, I smack the wall as if that would shut up the stallion on the other side.
Yeah, you guessed it. Shocked the crap out of myself AND out of Tiger who took to running in tight circles in a panic within that closed stall. Fortunately for me I was able to dive into the corner and didn’t get trample. when he calmed down he stood there and stared at me with the whites of his eyes showing all around. Mine were probably doing the same.
I guess you can tell that was the LAST time I ever groomed a horse in the stall :)
I’m breathing fast just reading that!!!
I know I’m veering off a little from the main topic here (please forgive), but I had a “near trample” experience myself that I still can’t quite believe. My horse was no dummy. When we let him out to graze with the other horses, he always went to the FAAAAAAAR end of the field, I guess thinking he wouldn’t get caught that way. I had to routinely walk through the herd to get to him. One day, I got into the middle of the field, horses all around, and a hot air balloon went by overhead with that sound they make. The horses all stampeded right towards me and I had NO WHERE to hide — I was in the middle of an open field! I KNOW it must have been the Lord because when they got to me, I thought I was dead, and they veered around me on BOTH sides, and not one touched me! And these babies were panicked in the extreme, so it’s not like they were thinking of not killing me! I thank the Lord to this day for that! I just remember an almost calm, resigned feeling of “I’m dead.”