February/March 2013 - Page 20
About The Author - Katie Haggath
Katie Haggath (20) loves writing and horses. She lives in NZ on 10 acres with her parents and a petting zoo's worth of animals. When
Katie's article dropped into the email in-box in the office it was one of those `can't stop reading this' moments. Here was a young rider
and writer who publically admitted that she knew very little about handling a young horse, yet has the desire to learn and can see the
humorous side of this learning experience. All horsemen and women have had to go through the learning process at some stage in their
lives...but not everyone has the writing ability, humour and guts to share this journey with readers of a national equestrian magazine.
Katie has recently taken on a young horse, with the aim being to train him (from scratch) and to break him in herself next year so, be
prepared to share all the errors and the successes as we follow Katie and Felix over the next twelve months in their journey of learning
horsemanship.
INTRODUCING Illustrator Kay Thornton, a very talented artist who was one of the many who responded to our Facebook enquiries for
someone to illustrate this series. See more of Kay's horse illustrations at her Funny-Horse-Cartoons page on Facebook.
pull away and tear off up the road for example so I
always took my parents with me.
Felix's first encounter with traffic was a ute with a
trailer. He hid behind me. His second encounter was
a motorbike, which didn't slow down nearly enough
and came from behind, to make matters worse. Felix
nearly twisted my arm off trying to get behind me,
but otherwise didn't attempt to get away. His third
encounter was with the livestock truck. At this point
I gave up on his walk and went home, because that
one walk had more or less covered it all. I would like
to think that Felix's response to frightening stimuli is
due to my excellent training, his bond with me, and
his trust in me to look after him as boss.
Alas, I suspect he is just employing the `sacrifice'
survival tactic.
I will add that Felix still does this, some three months
later, when something worries him. He is no longer
worried about the deer at all, having discovered
a very personable mare in the field just past them,
and he doesn't even blink at trucks, motorbikes or
trailers. Nothing I do can convince him to accept the
neighbour's peacocks, however, and the daft birds
don't respond to `shoo'. We have to cross the road
and walk around them, which is highly amusing to
anyone watching.
Felix is very well-behaved for the farrier now, his
only vice is a tendency to chew on the ropes when
tied up. This is mainly because he has discovered that
pulling them can sometimes get him free.
I blame the donkey, personally. Murphy has
successfully undone a wide variety of Dad's sailor's
knots, and has been known to walk down a line of
horses and untie every one of them.
Clearly a bad influence.
He attempted to hide behind me, which mostly just resulted in his shoving me out into the road.