That would be “Stupid Human Stories,” actually. Over at the Corgi forum, some of the enthusiasts are grousing about the overall stupidity of the people who show up at dog parks with their pooches in tow. LOL!
I don’t take my dogs to dog parks, first because of the risk of injury, but also because of the concentration of various doggy pathogens — more than one vet has inveighed, over the years, against visiting these places. As one of the corgistis remarks, though, the biggest risk at dog parks (and just about anywhere else) is not from the dogs but from the idiot dog owners.
No doubt I’ve already told the story here of Anna, the loose mutt, the four-year-old, and the moron father. The child survived, but only by the grace of God. And ahh, yes, we have the moron parents down the street who leave their kid alone in the front yard with their German shepherd, which — quite reasonably — defends its kid from all comers.
So commonplace that they’re beneath mention are the Cheerful Chuckleheads who let their little yappers lunge up to your German shepherd (who privately is thrilled, for reasons both humans and dogoids are too dumb to guess).
“Oh, Fifi wants to say hello!” cries CC.
“You might want to keep your dog back a bit,” the GerShep’s pet human replies.
“She just wants to play.”
Really? My dog wants something, too: to have your dog’s head stuffed and hung as a trophy on the wall over her dog dish…
Gaaaaaaaahhhhh!
But you haven’t seen stupid humans until you’ve seen stupid humans around horses. My god! Horses bring out the most baroque forms of human stupidity.
Case in point: moi.
Back in the Middle Cretaceous, when I was in graduate school, some occasion arose in which my then-husband and I invited the chair of my department, his tartly unhappy wife and their daughter, then about ten, to spend a day at our ranch, a garden spot that resided up a little past lovely Yarnell. Why, I do not remember and I cannot even begin to imagine. But there it was. Chairman Marvin, Mrs. Marvin, and Kid out on a working cattle ranch just below the Mogollon Rim.
If only I could remember what I was smoking…maybe I could get some more of it…
For reasons even more opaque, we somehow suggested that this crew should take a horsie ride.
The Hassayampa River flowed right through our deeded land. It passed by the cluster of buildings that included the house, the foreman’s house and bunkhouse, and the barns. Very, very lovely: riparian high desert, full of birds and little animals and watercress growing in the trickling water beneath vast shady cottonwoods. To die for.
Indeed.
Nothing would do but what we had to saddle up and ride along the cattle trace that follows the Hassayampa easterly toward Crown King. Of course, we’d have to stop at the bob-wire fence between our ranch and the Smoketree, the neighboring ranch. But that was a good thing.
In what at first glance seems amazingly stupid but what turned out to be the one tiny glimmer of sense any of us evinced, I suggested the girl, who’d never been on a horse in her life, should ride with me on our quarterhorse Babe. I proposed we should ride bareback, because a) this is a good first step in learning to sit a horse and b) it meant I could have her in front of me with me hanging on to her, rather than having her perched on a saddle behind me, supposedly hanging onto me. It also meant I could see her and watch her every minute.
So it went.
All right. We’re riding along this narrow trail, single-file, beside the Hassayampa. The river doesn’t flow continuously, nor does any part of it flow all year round. But now and again it does produce ferocious, astonishing, jaw-dropping flash floods. Over the decades, these have excavated a channel that drops the riverbed about three to six feet below the surrounding terrain. We are riding along the edge of the bank that borders this drop-off. Below us, the river bottom is a chaos of rocks, boulders, old shattered tree trunks, washed-away Model T’s, and similar debris.
As we’re going along, Marvin keeps letting his horse come right up on Babe’s rear end. Babe does not like this. Neither do I.
I tell Marvin, imagining (wrongly) that he can figure out how to rein in a horse, to keep his horse back off Babe’s rump. I tell him that Babe will kick if he doesn’t hold his horse back a few feet. Three times I tell him this, and three times he lets the gelding creep up and stick his nose up Babe’s tail.
Finally, Babe loses patience. She picks the psychological moment — just as the trail teeters on the knife-edge of the river’s bank — to haul off and belt Marvin’s nag.
Of course, Marvin’s horse shies. Babe does a little jig and, well, yes: she stumbles off the side and starts to fall.
I drop the reins, wrap both arms around the kid, and throw myself off Babe, hauling the girl with me. With me doing the best I can to protect the child’s head and neck, we hit the ground about five feet from Babe, who tumbles off the riverbank into the dry riverbed.
Shee-ut.
Mercifully, no one was hurt. Babe got up, miraculously uninjured, and allowed me to retrieve her without further incident.
Don’t know when I’ve ever been so furious. The rage didn’t kick in until after I saw that Babe hadn’t, after all, broken a leg (as I assumed she would while the girl and I were rolling away from ruckus).
But of course, Marvin was my boss so I couldn’t tell him what a moron he was.
But of course, the real moron was not on Marvin’s horse. The real moron was on my horse. The one in charge of my horse.
What on earth was I thinking when I asked Marvin “do you know how to ride a horse,” heard him answering tentatively — tentatively swaggering — “oh, sure; oh yeah,” recognized that as a ridiculous exaggeration, and acquiesced to it? What was I thinking when I put a ten-year-old on a cow pony, bareback, and climbed up behind her? Oh, hell: what was I thinking when I invited the effete chair of the department up to the ranch to start with?????
So there you are. Stupid is as stupid does. I account it as some kind of miracle that the child wasn’t hurt, the horse wasn’t hurt, and I wasn’t hurt. God watches over children and fools.
Image: Hassayampa River: Todd’s Desert Hiking Guide. Yes, it looked exactly like that.
Well, my view on this is that hindsight is 20-20. I wouldn’t be so hard on yourself. Things just plain happen sometimes. To me the most irritating part is that you told this man THREE TIMES that his “horse” behavior was not acceptable/safe and he chose to ignore you. Or he chose not to tell you he couldn’t control the horse.
Life is full of events where the wrong circumstances come together to unseat us. (Get the pun?) 😀
LOL!!!
WOW….No saddle??? Might of done that differently….LOL . I grew up with horses, showed and actually had some success in the show ring. I still have fond memories of my “little buckskin” and I trail riding. Once I rode him in belly deep new snow… it was so still… the snow so white….the air so crisp. There was a local quarry that we went to one hot day and he and I went for a “dip”. Not a lot of folks can say they swam with a horse but I did and I’ll never forget it. You’re really lucky, I had a couple of young horses come over on me….you guys could have really been hurt…
Yes. As a girl, I had a horse rear up and fall over backward over me. And Babe tripped in the bottom of the Hassayampa once — barely missed throwing me onto the rocks. That was interesting.
I was trained, in Southern California, to ride bareback first — actually, they were looking for young people to train as stunt riders, so…you get the idea. 🙄
At any rate, the idea was that you would learn to move with the horse and to stay on the horse bareback under a variety of conditions — this actually is not much of a trick. They had us learn to jump off the horse with the horse at a run (and I have jumped off a horse at a fast trot…equally interesting…), from bareback and from a saddle. The idea there was, in fact, to learn to jump away from the direction that a horse might fall, which is what I engaged on this particular day. I felt Babe start to slide to my right, so I jumped to the left as far away from the horse as I could push myself and the kid. Probably would have landed further away if it had just been me, but since Babe slipped off the bank, it didn’t matter. Thank goodness.
Then we learned to ride English and Western styles. Personally, I prefer the Western style, altho’ certainly English has its advantages.
It’s entirely possible that any act that involves mounting a horse contains some element of stupidity. Come to think of it…
I’m come off a horse at a dead run…but it certainly wasn’t my idea…Looking back that experience with horses taught me a lot…At the risk of sounding like a “hoarder”…. I still have my chaps…
Oh, sob! The prerogatives of being male!!! I outgrew my beloved cowboy boots when I got pregnant and never could fit back into them.
I’ll say that I’ve been lucky only to be thrown twice — when the moron instructor whapped my horse across the face with a belt (that caused the rearing incident) and many years later in the Hassayampa riverbed — since I don’t count jumping off Babe as something the horse did but what I did. Falling off a horse at the horse’s instigation was not, repeat NOT a pleasant experience!
Both episodes were the direct result of human stupidity.
The crazy thing is we boarded horses at my folk’s place and one of the owners got behind on the board. So the guy just gave my folks the horse to cover the tab. Aaaand yes the horse’s name was…Babe…Well Babe was certifiable nuts but my Dear Dad saw opportunity. He instructed me to get this mare broke to saddle and “straightened out” so he could sell her to recoup the lost monies. So I started her on the lunge line and then progressed to saddle and so on. For whatever reason every time I cinched up the saddle she would tighten up and then when I would mount…up and over we would go….every time… Then she would be fine… She was 15.3 hands so she was good size and boy it get’s scary quick up there. I worked with her for about 6 months and it became clear she would benefit more from a “shrink” than a cowboy. We traded her for a couple of beef steers and fully disclosed to the new owner she was “impaired”…. I never could figure out what her problem was…previous abuse….claustrophobia? As I recall she lived out her days at the new place and never was under saddle again….
Good grief!
Some horses are just kinda crazy by nature…and really, when you think about it, where does it say a grass-eating ruminant by its nature should incline to ride two-legged omnivores around?
Ha ha! Didn’t you knee her in the ribs when tightening the cinch? Our horses had figured out how to take a deep, deep breath and hold it by way of keeping the saddle lash-up a little looser.
Babe was not very tall, bless her horsie heart. I’ve never been fond of riding tall horses, partly because my legs are short in the French style and so it’s a little difficult for me to get up on a taller horse.
We had a retired race horse — a thoroughbred — that was tall. I never rode Old Stewball, but my best friend rode him all the time…she was a much more experienced rider than I, and even though she was petite, she had a LOT more physical strength.
Babe was superstitious. She was absolutely convinced that all plastic bags were haunted, and NOTHING would change her mind. Clearly something was wrong with the humans that the could not see the ghosts inside those things. That horse would spook if she saw a plastic bag 30 yards away!
LOL! This same friend also boarded horses at her place, many years later. And darned if the same thing didn’t happen: they took in a horse that belonged to a VETERINARIAN who was afraid of horses and never rode her nag. Eventually the woman quit paying and just abandoned the horse to Friend and Husband.
I suggested they take the horse over to the vet’s office along about 6 a.m. and tie it to the front doorknob. They were not amused.
When cinching Babe I tried everything….checked to see if she had a sore or an abrasion where the cinch went….changed saddles….changed how and where I saddled her….even tried mounting from the other side….Nothing worked. The minute you stepped up and got in that saddle….over you went…BUT then she was fine. You could begin schooling her and she was capable and an eager student. It was crazy…After 6 months Dear Dad saw me go over once too often and said …. That’s It! By the way….the cows were delicious…..
See, if you rode bareback, you wouldn’t had that problem.
She probably thought it was very funny (horses got humor!) and just did it as a way to get the day going her way…
My friend KJG has a neighbor (they live on acreage) who raises one grass-fed cow at a time and sells “shares” in the meat.
It really is very delicious. Dare I say it? Tastes like meat used to taste…