A Horse of a Different Color

A Horse of a Different Color

Susan Allen
Susan Allen

 

I’m Susan Allen and this is Wednesday’s Open Range.  I ride a horse of a different color, remember the one in the  Wizard of OZ well my mare takes about a week to transform into a new shade.  Right now Miss Indigo is black as coal, by summer’s end she’ll be briefly silver blue, then grey and most winters basic brown.  It’s an odd phenomenon and because of her I’ve learned a lot about judging people. I’ll be back after the commercial to explain. We’ve all heard the old adage never  judge a book by it’s cover, same holds true for horses, and yes people. For the last few years I have been dedicated to retraining a renegade from a rodeo bucking string into a refined creature worthy of the jumper ring. Remember My Fair Lady, I’ve got  “My fair Indi” and like Rex Harrison, I’m the one whose learned the most from this partnership. It’s fascinating to track the comments and the thumbs up I receive while riding a  fancy “silver blue” equine verses a plain brown one. Same horse different color. In her early un-fit days (when she resembled a cave horse drawing) I was often ridiculed for wasting my time on such an unworthy creature when there are so many well-bred horses available. Yet throughout years with horses I have never encountered one with her level of intelligence one of the reasons for our long, sometimes tempestuous training process that has made me reflect on how many gifted individuals, difficult children, and talented horses are overlooked because their of "packaging." We tend  to plug  both the human  and equine species into defined categories that might never utilize their true gifts. I am lucky I look at the world differently now , thanks to a horse of a different color.

 

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