Horse accidents

Fortunately for me, Dad was fairly mellow about the possibility of horse accidents. Being raised on a cattle ranch, he grew up riding and driving horses and had his share of the usual accidents. He knew they could happen but my only restriction after I was 10 or 12 years old was that I had to tell someone which direction I was riding and I had to be back before sundown.

Dad's worst accident happened when he was in his teens and driving the Hambletonian stallion the ranch had from the government Remount Service. He was hitched to a buggy, going back to the ranch from town. The stallion was not particularly reliable, spooked and ran, dumping the buggy, and my father, into a barbed wire fence. My father had the scar across the bridge of his nose, under both eyes, where one of the barbed wire strands cut him.

The only real issue he had with horses was the possibility of being dragged by a horse. I wasn't allowed to ride with a saddle until I was about 10 years old, and had grown enough to fit one of the saddles. Even then, he took that saddle and had covered stirrups made so my foot could not go all the way through the stirrup. He told me many times about hearing stories of people getting hung up in a stirrup and killed.

He had also seen one man killed when he was working with the road crew before he married my mother. Road work was still being done with horse teams at the time, in the mid to late 30s, heavy equipment pulled by teams of 12 to 16 head of draft horses. One of the drovers was unhooking a team. The horses spooked and the trace chain whipped and caught him around the legs. Open country at the time, nobody there with a saddle horse to catch them and he was killed.

Ironically, as an adult, I saw a girl killed by being dragged, at a riding stable in Spain. An inexperienced rider, she got out of the arena where she had been, the horse started trotting to catch up to some others. She fell off, her foot went through the stirrup and of course the horse spooked and ran back to the stable.

I had accidents, some of which I never told my parents about, but although I can think of half a dozen times I should have been seriously injured, if not killed, I was lucky and never had a broken bone or an injury that required a doctor's attention until I was in my mid-20s. Then it was a badly wrenched ankle caused, embarassingly enough, by the pony I had for the children, although after a number of X-rays the doctor announced that although nothing seemed to be where it should be in my ankle and foot, he couldn't see anything broken.

Broken ribs in my late 30s convinced me maybe I should quit training unbroke horses but I avoided serious injuries until I was in my 60s, when the law of averages did finally catch up to me, although I still have horses.