Skeeter has a different sort of pedigree. Her sire is a halter horse. Her dam is a Jackie Bee bred mare who also has some halter horse, western pleasure, and cowhorse thrown in for good measure. She has a lot of really good lines, and is a great looking horse that really can do just about everything. Skeeter looks a bit different. She's very modern looking and is pretty heavily muscled. She does move really well for a halter-bred horse, and her niche was Western Pleasure and Showmanship in addition to halter.
When Skeeter was two, I took her to college with me to break her at the college's facilities. She was only there about a week and a half when there was a bad lightning storm, combined with a bunch of kids partying down at the barns. Something freaked her out enough, that she tried to jump out of her stall. Here's the damage to the gate:
Now imagine what that did to a two-year-old horse. Skeeter apparently had hit the gate full frontal. Remember that movie White Men Can't Jump? Same concept. She flipped over the gate and landed on her back. She managed to get up, and we thought nothing was broken. She went to vet who was more concerned with the humongous hematoma between her forelegs and the muscle damage to the left side of her chest. I thought her halter career was over. We never thought to do spinal x-rays or anything. The vet palpated her spine and hips and thought they were fine.
Amazingly enough, after a few months of stall rest, handwalking, and eventually longeing, she came back. Skeeter went from taking short, limping steps to a free moving walk. The vet okay-ed her to start riding. Skeeter was trained and really excelled in Western Pleasure, so that is what she did, and did well.
Cut to my junior year of college. I had Skeeter at school with me. My goal was to get her flying lead changes more solid and start campaigning her. During mid-February, I had a bunch of exams and projects piled up one on top of the other. I didn't really have the time to ride, so I had taken to turning Skeeter out.
On Valentine's Day, I came out to the barn to find Skeeter with her feed bucket hanging off the front of her blanket, crushed. Her bedding was disturbed, and the front of her stall had hoof marks where it looked like she had been trapped. She had somehow gotten cast in her stall and managed to get up. I pulled her blanket, and everything looked okay. I walked her around and she was moving just fine.
Stupidly, I decided to ride. I saddled up and took her out to one of the outdoor arenas. When she jogged, she was just ever-so-slightly off on one side. Skeeter just wasn't taking as long a stride on the right as she was on the left. I thought she was maybe stiff from not being worked, and when I asked her to extend her jog the short-stride went away. When asked to lope, Skeeter did something she had never done before. This is a horse that never bucked, never ran off, and was so easy to get going under saddle she's probably spoiled me for life.
Instead of stepping off into a lope like she normally would, she stopped and dropped her head, and wouldn't move. I hopped off, pulled my saddle and was in tears by the time I was on the phone with my mother. Around her lumbar vertebrae, she was swelling up.
I thought she was just really, really out of alignment. I had my chiro out, and he found the problem. An old fracture on her lumbar had been aggravated and knocked when she was cast. Show career? Possibly over. The only thing to do was let it heal.
I used an ointment with Arnica to ease her comfort, and hauled her home. At the advice of a friend of my mother's whose horse overcame a broken wither, I turned her out to pasture to let her start to heal up on her own.
It's been a little over a year. Now, it's time to assess where we are at. If riding is out of the question, so be it. This year's goal is to see where we are soundness-wise and see where we can go.
The Goal: Fit her up for halter and start showing again. She loves it too much to cut it out completely. We'll just have to see where we can go.
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