I need to put a coda on the Eva story.
It's interesting. I have had the opportunity to work with three very different, wonderfully bred Welsh Cobs on a loan basis over the past few years, Aeres, Encore and Eva. Two of them taught me a lot about training and riding. but Eva taught me a lot about myself.
Eva taught me that I can, but I don't want to, bounce like I used to. It had been well over fifteen years since I fell off a horse when I fell off of her in August. It was a "good" fall, but I'm still dealing with some lingering (and thankfully, slowly subsiding) pain a few months later from my arm and leg hyperextending as I whiplashed them into the ground. With the way my mental health is built upon CrossFit, and the way our co-op is built around us all being able to perform manual labor, nothing scares me more than being injured.
She taught me that I don't naturally think like a horse trainer. I missed some subtle signs that there were small holes in her foundation, which turned into bigger holes later on. Ones which I thankfully had time to fix, but still, we could have avoided the fixing.
But - she also taught me that I can learn to think like a horse trainer. Especially when I rely on my friends, like Kate, Mary and Leah.
I'm going to try not to generalize an entire gender, but Eva taught me that I don't know how to speak mare. If I had had the time to really develop a partnership with her, I think she would be dynamite, but it's a whole different ball game from geldings and stallions, one that I am not used to playing.
She taught me that I can teach a level of subtlety I never thought I was capable of. That mare, no joke, steers off your seat and weight aids basically alone, in a rope halter, thanks to the way Kate had me start her. I'm looking forward to using that knowledge on Disco.
And she validated my opinion that some horses need to be started young for reasons that have entirely to do with the mind. I do not mean started hard, but I do mean that they need to understand the concepts of "work" and "submission" when they're still impressionable. Eva is a wonderful mare with a sweet personality, but we never really found anything she enjoyed, work-wise. I can't help but wonder if her work ethic would be different if she was started younger.
Ultimately, unlike Encore and Aeres, Eva wasn't really with me to be sold, and she is now back home, perhaps to be bred next spring. I'm so grateful for the opportunity to play with her and for the perspective that she gave me.