I had a little wreck once when my gelding (now deceased) was a three year old: My husband, Wes and I were going down the road on a walk with our horses (in hand as they were both only three at the time). There was a big dead raccoon on the side of the road that my husband's horse, Lucky was prancing around. He was very leery of it. Wes led him a safe distance from it to let him view it from what Lucky felt was a safe place. I decided to walk Sal over to look at it too and making sure that I wasn't between Sal and Lucky, as I figured that he would bolt towards him for safety if he decided it was something scary.
Well, he did decide it was something SCARY but instead of running towards Lucky he ran towards ME, knocking me down in the middle of the road and then spooking when he saw me lying on the ground. Happily there were no cars coming and I managed to get up before I was run down by anything else (my husband hadn't noticed me fall) but I did learn a good lesson about not assuming what my horse was going to do and making sure that he didn't get close enough to me to knock me down again.
Had I been paying more attention to him and his body language I would have seen him coming and stepped aside or gotten "BIG". I think that is the biggest cause of accidents with horses is not paying enough attention to where the horse is at and assuming that they are going to do one thing when there are lots of other things they might choose to do.
By Jane Greenwood of Zen Cowboys
www.spanishponies.com
