Butt Bubbles for Riders

The strangest thing about trail etiquette for horseback riders is that most of it is completely unspoken. Fearful equestrians expect brave horseback riders, bikers, dog walkers and everyone else to approach them at a snail’s pace and treat them as though they are sitting on a lit firecracker.  God forbid if someone were to exercise or at a quick pace, for that may scare their horse…

The part that they don’t realize is that the horse has extremely sensitive hearing and will hear someone approaching long before the rider is aware, which also means that if the horse were to spook from this stimuli, that it would have occurred at that time. 99% of the time that does not happen.  What really happens when a horse “spooks” at the sight of an offending party is that the rider gets startled and tenses by the stranger’s sudden approach.  The horse, who is quite in tune to the rider’s fear, reads the rider’s tension as “oh my God! There’s a monster!” The horse, ever a prey animal, then believes that the rider is cuing for him to flea the situation; which he generally obliges.  The fearful rider then blames his horse for “spooking.”

I am an endurance horseback rider and local hooligan.  I race through the woods and stop when I see horses.  If I come up behind them quickly, I get attacked by the offended party for scaring their horse; several ladies have begun to call me “the hooligan”, the namesake for this blog.  But I just smile, because I know the truth.