I was talking to my friend who is dating a woman who has lots of horses, and we began discussing all things horse-related. She wanted to know, after hearing a story about her date’s near-trampling, how a horse can just run over you…like they don’t know you’re there…

I told her it was like my dog, Giz, when i go to open the door to let him out–if the cats are in his line of trajectory, he just runs right over them…cats know how to tuck and roll, so they never get hurt by it, and he doesn’t do it on purpose, he’s just oblivious….he has his eye on that door, and nothing else exists for him in that moment…

But imagine if it was a HORSE and a human…quite different…. kind of a “horse of a different color” you might say….you might say that, but i doubt it…that was some kind of metaphor mixing i don’t think they’ve named yet….

anyway, my friend wanted to know if horses rear up and try to pound you with their hooves…i told her not usually, unless the horse was just crazy. That was more like what Moose do. (I was tempted to use Mooses, or Meeses…you know, plural for Moose. But it really is “Moose” in both forms, plural or singular… grammar lesson, over…).

Anyway, (again) A moose is very mean, and they will jump up and pummel you with their hooves. And they’ll try to gore you with their antlers too.

It’s a good thing dogs don’t have hooves. Or antlers for that matter. (Except at Christmas, when we defile their dogness with reindeer head gear). But if dogs did have hooves and antlers, I’m sure no amount of tucking and rolling by cats in the line of trajectory will keep them from getting hurt. I do like to watch this happen, though. Once my cats have been trampled by the dog, and are upright again, they usually have one ear cocked back and are frowning a little. Then they go to the window to watch him watering the tree outside, and they think bad thoughts about him. Probably why they wait at the door to swat him on the rump when he comes in. He ignores them. Once he even ran over one of them again, on his way in. She spent the rest of the night on top of the television, plotting his demise.

So…back to horses…..
I have had my experiences with horses and know that you have to be mindful. They can be dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing. As a kid i was bitten in the neck and between the shoulder blades; i was kicked several times, dragged, bucked off countless other times, trampled, and even had a close call with one falling on me. A bee stung her and she reared up and lost her balance, and then stumbled. I had to kick away, tuck and roll, (just like a cat) and then bear crawl so i wouldn’t get squished. Sometimes it’s helpful to imitate cats and bears.

My life in the country as a child consisted of things like motorcycles, horses, chickens, ducks, cats, dogs, donkeys, coyotes, snakes….i was one with nature, and sometimes that wasn’t such good thing, but i was a kid, so i wasn’t aware of it being unusual. That was my reality.

My favorite horse was “Chico” a brown and white pinto gelding. (I also had a Pinto station wagon, but the two were not related). I always told people that Chico was very polite; when we’d come to a fence, he’d stop and let me go over first.

He did like to buck a lot. He was just ornery. Like me. Often i would wind up on his neck, flailing at his ears while he tried to dethrone me. My mother, (or “Maternal Parental Unit” as i call her now–not because she was ever maternal, but because it sounds distant–which is where i like to keep her) she used to tell people that she’d look out the window into the pasture and see me riding Chico like a banshee, standing up on the saddle. Or I’d be doing that trick riding stuff: running alongside, picking up speed, and then flipping myself up into the saddle. I was usually dressed like an Indian. She was surprised i didn’t go shirtless and wear a loincloth.

My Dad made the newspapers as a young man, by being the first person in a hundred years to be run over by a stagecoach… he and his brothers were in the music business, and they built this stagecoach with their names painted on the side, and they went cross-country pulled by two big horses, to sell their 45 records…one time, my dad was holding the bridle of one of the horses and he got spooked, (not my dad, the horse–i think his name was Old Baldy…not my dad, the horse) and he wound up being run over by the whole thing. It made the newspaper, a picture of him in the hospital bed with a broken bone in his neck. I wish i had a copy of that. The headline was “Man gets run over by a stagecoach for the first time in 100 years.”

He was probably lucky it wasn’t Mooses. Moose. Meese. A Moose.