Natural horsemanship has a lot to answer for. After a cross country event the other day, I rode back to my trailer to find the two women parked next to me doing some very strange things as they loaded their horse.
One woman led the pony up the ramp quite efficiently, flicking it with the rope to stop it hesitating and then shut it inside. Whereupon her friend shouted: ‘No! Get him back off, quickly!’ And she lowered the ramp, untied the pony and pushed him back down the ramp.
‘He’s got to choose to load,’ said the woman, who I now noticed was a little hair-brained looking. ‘He’s got to chooooooose to load.’ A conversation then ensued between the loony woman and the sane woman in which the loony woman insisted that horses must be allowed to ‘self-load’ on to trailers.
The loony woman then started to lead the poor pony around in circles, waving a rope in the air and making cattle herding noises.
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