My Life With Horses by Ed Ames
Now I have a 20-acre ranch in the Santa Ynez Valley in California’s coastal range above Santa Barbara. It is a rolling green countryside, and I love it.
I own four horses now, one a Peruvian paso name Blue. They use them as pacers. You can put a champagne glass on Blue’s back and he can take off and the glass won’t spill. His ride is that smooth. My oldest horse is near 38, she’s a grandma and her name is Blondie because she’s so fair. Her daughter who’s about 18 is Sassy, short for Sassafras, and she has a daughter, too, who is about 5. We call her Pippi after Pippi Longstocking.
My Santa Ynez ranch is named Monte Cristo and I am its “count.” My mother was a romantic Jewish woman who named me after the Count of Monte Cristo who, of course, was named Edmond Dantes. We have a nice stable and a hay barn, and house for the ranch manager. I love it up there; we’re in the hills and its very peaceful.
Blondie came with the Utah ranch. I bought the riding horse, who is half Peruvian and half quarter horse. He’s a real cow horse. He’s been in roundups. He is a steel black so I call him Blue because his color is essentially that.
I’ve only been thrown once, which is up in Utah, when a trash truck came by and blew its horn and spooked the horse. The cinch broke and I came off. I have one bum shoulder from skiing and one bum shoulder from that horse.
Pippi is a paint. I paired grandma with a paint, but Sassy came out without the paint markings. So I paired Sassy with another paint, and that’s how I got Pippi.
Sassy was the first horse I raised myself. Grandma – Blondie – came with the ranch I bought in Utah. But I walked Sassy before she could be ridden and I lunged her around the arena, and looked after her. Today she is like a big over-sized dog. She hears my car at the end of the driveway and she just starts coming towards me galoomph, galoomph. My heart just goes out to her. And she’s a great ride.
When I got Blondie with the ranch, I saw she had been abused. She was left alone and the kids would come and stick things in her ears and pull her mane. I don’t know why people do things like that but they do.
I took her to a trainer in Salt Lake. It was about 100 miles from the ranch. I would drive down every day to see her and ride her. After a week of this, I went down to see her and walked through the stalls and saw this horse with bloody streaks all over it, and it was my Blondie. That’s the way they trained the horses. The guy would put on spurs and just rake them. I put her in a trailer and took her back. But it required years to repair the damage that had been done. She would jump away when anyone went near her. It took a lot of love and care over many years to bring her around. She’s a wonderful horse now.
When I mated her with the paint, the stallion scared her and she took off with a piece of the fence across roads and a freeway and wound up wrapped in fence wire near a lake. We went frantically looking for her. When we brought her back she was covered with wounds. I bathed her wounds, and cared for her, and figured we had bonded again. But the first day she was free she just bounded off. It took me years to win her confidence back.
I felt so bad for that horse. And she’s a wonderful horse. That’s why I’m so inspired by what April is doing with Heart of a Horse. Horses are so vulnerable. They’re gentle creatures, and they vulnerable, and society should do something to protect them.
I had to put a horse down once. He was a chestnut gelding and a playful horse. If you were riding him and he saw other horses coming by he wanted to run off with them. One day he started to limp. The more pronounced the limp became the more concerned I was. I took him to a horse hospital in Salt Lake. They called me later and said he had an infection that went all up and down his leg and he would have to be put down. So I said I’ll take him home, because I couldn’t to think of that. But I saw how much pain he was in, so I had to put him down. It was a very painful experience.
It’s hard for people who don’t know horses to realize how fragile they are. They’re highly susceptible to injury and disease. They are prey animals and their only defense against predators is flight. They have very little peripheral vision so they can’t see behind them, which is where predators are likely to approach. If something comes from behind, they will often spook. They can kick and they can bite, but mainly their defense is to run.
Horses were here when we came to America, descendants of the Spanish horses that came with the conquistadors. To this day there are large herds of wild horses roaming the plains. People, in their ignorance, think that horses are big dumb bulky things and you can’t hurt them. They could not be more wrong. Horses are lovely, good-natured creatures who need our help. It’s heart-breaking to see them badly treated. It’s awful to see them abused. Horse are our oldest partners in civilization as Heart of Horse reminds. They helped us to build this country, and they among God’s most beautiful creatures.