Coming to Versus Coming Through

I had a boss once in college who was a very close talker. He never did it to me, but I often saw the women I worked with leaning out of the way of the guy because he liked to stand too close to them. This man’s behavior was rude, to say the least. But what about when our horses stand too close? What then?

First, I will say that how close you allow your horse to stand to you is a personal decision. I have met people all along the distance spectrum when it comes to horses. I’ve met the never let your horse come toward you at all unless you ask them to people, and then I have no boundaries at all with a thousand-pound animal people. As with everything in life, there must be a middle ground.

Do I like to be close to my horses? Yes. Do I allow them to push into me and shove me over? No. And neither should you. And yet, somehow, I see people on a regular basis get shoved on and stepped on and, indeed, knocked down by their horses.

Indeed, I gave a lesson to a woman probably fifteen years ago or so regarding this very topic. She had two draft horses (the breed of which shall not be named) who she said she was afraid to let her kids out with. The kids were very small, and she feared the horses would run them down. It took me less than five minutes to figure out that the woman was not wrong. The horses were both very pushy and had little to no regard for humans. At one point, the pushier of the mares tried to run into me. I defended myself and asked the horse not to run me over, to absolutely no avail. The horse continued to try to plow through me as though I wasn’t even there.

At the end of the lesson, I advised the woman to never leave her children unattended with those horses. I truly did not know how to help her. Ultimately, she didn’t have me come back because she said I was too hard on her horse when it tried to run me down. Some people are not capable of learning their own lessons. I hope those kids never got run over.

So you need to decide how close is too close for you. What is too close for me may not be too close for you. All I know is that I like my feet, and I would like them to stay where they are: on the end of my legs.

(In the photo attached to this Stack is my friend Lore’s daughter Chloe giving my horse Sam a treat. She is quite young in this photo, but I trusted him not to shove into her space.?

If you enjoyed this article, please share it with your friends. Also, please consider supporting our work by getting a paid subscription. Thank you, Lorri and Ethan