Wild Horses And Black Swans

August 3, 2011 by John Myers



It seems we are all living on a razor’s edge. In Barack Obama we have an ineffective President and a Congress that seems unable or unwilling to get its act together. The Muslim threat has not disappeared after the death of Osama bin Laden, and America seems headed toward either a financial or energy crisis or perhaps both.

These are the things we suspect might go wrong. What really worries me about our future is the unknown that might jump up and bite us. Things that are not only unpredictable but are counter to anything we might expect.

I grew up on a small farm where we harvested a bit of grain, planted a lot of trees and even raised some livestock. But the understated purpose of our little operation was always horses.

My dad grew up where horses provided the power, and he loved them. He took my older sister under his wing at a very young age, and by her early 20s she was on the Canadian Olympic Stadium Jumping Team — no small accomplishment.

My two older brothers also rode. And we had a hired man, Jonesy, who was good with horses.

I tell you this not to brag, but to underscore just how much experience and horse sense we had at our little operation. Yet despite all of it, a bolt out of the blue happened one morning in the early 1960s.

We kept a stallion in an 8-foot fenced private paddock. Each year, we would breed him to one of the mares. One spring, a mare had a foal, a sprightly chestnut colt.

There was also a fenced pasture that ran parallel to the stallions and held the mixture of our other mares and geldings. Both pastures led down to a pond at the bottom of the slope.

One morning, my dad and sister decided it was time for the colt to stretch his legs. With mother in halter, they were taken into the common pasture and walked down to the pond to drink.

Now, horse people know that you can’t keep a strange stallion around a colt; he will kill it. I suspect that knowledge goes back to Mongol times or even before.

What was also known (or thought to be known) is that a gelding, having been castrated, would lose the stallion within him — the compulsion to kill a colt. Colts are thought to be safe around geldings.

That holds true, but not for a gelding named Redskin. He snorted, pawed at the ground and made loud huffing noises. Then he sprang, charging down the pasture and straight toward the colt.

I can still hear that broadside crash of Redskin driving the colt into the water. And despite protests from my dad, my sister and even the trainer, Redskin had only one thing on his mind — to drown that colt. Its mother bayed and tried to block the charges but was brushed aside by the bigger horse.

The colt was shaky and weak. The end came quickly. Something that should never happen had just happened — a gelding had purposefully killed a newborn.

There were a lot of tears that morning, but what I remember most was my dad’s consternation. “Damn it, Jonesy, what we just saw shouldn’t have happened.â€