We are not quite a month in, and I am already so, so glad I've sent Disco to Kate.
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| A photo of two stallions hanging out together! |
Kate videos some of her training rides for me, and narrates them, and in watching those, I've realized that it's my first time actually seeing this process of a young horse being started. And there are times where she'll laugh something off that I know I would have taken too seriously, or where she released when she felt him consider the idea of what she wants, when I would have hung on to the ask too long, and it just crystallizes how right the decision was to not do this myself.
It's made me appreciate the trainer as a professional. Kate has done this so many times, she's performing a repeatable process much the same way I do at work, and Disco is benefiting from her experience with the process in the clarity she brings to his training rides, and therefore the relative speed at which he's learning - already doing things at not quite five that Connor was closer to 10 before I stumbled into those skills with him.
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| Baby SI, HI and counter canter loops already! |
It has also put me so at peace with being an amateur. I greatly admire my amateur friends who have started their own horses, but I'm not that kind of amateur. I'm not going to start the number of horses in my lifetime that Kate has, because I spend my days being a professional in other areas, and that's okay!
But no matter how impressed I am with how far he's gotten under saddle already, Kate giving him friends and social situations makes me the happiest.
So far, Disco has been turned out unsupervised with one of her geldings, and has gotten supervised turnout time with another gelding and with his fellow Castleberry Cobs class of 2021 brother from another mother, Oxley, the Warmblood cross that Kate owns, who is also still intact. They haven't seen each other since they were weanlings, and they were so happy to be turned out together.
Disco continues to challenge my preconceived ideas of what a stallion should be and do, and now so does Oxley. That will be a whole post in and of itself someday - I have some half-baked thoughts running around in my head I need to flesh out before I put them on the internet.
But at the end of the day, raising him in a social situation and then insisting on only sending him to trainers who are also willing to keep him in a social situation seems to have been the right call. He is just a horse who likes hanging out with other horses (and being the low man on the totem pole, no less), and he knows no other way.
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| Grooming each other! Don't mind Oxley's little riblets, he's going through a growth spurt. |
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