God Bless the Mares

My sanity as a trainer had been called into question numerous times. The reason is because I love mares. Most trainers-- perhaps possessing better judgement than myself-- prefer to work with geldings for the simple fact that they are easier to work with. Much easier.

With mares, you get unpredictable moods, sometimes erratic work ethics, alpha issues, etc. Basically, you need to spend twice as much time to accomplish the same thing with a mare that you do with a gelding. But as lacking in reason as it is, the fact remains that I love them.

I blame my affection for mares on my father. Put a bitchy mare in front of my dad and he goes all soft and mushy. He still denies it, but the doey look in his eye when a mare is trying to kick him or bite his arm off is indisputable.

My father belongs to the small percentage of the horse world that lacks enough self-preservation to compete in Combined Driving Events. To the unacquainted, these events include hurling a horse and carriage through death-defying obstacles at the speed of sound. For these competitions, my father was well-known for always driving an ornery mare that no other trainer in his right mind would hitch to a carriage.

At one competition in Gladstone, New Jersey, my dad galloped out of an obstacle, his mare kicking apart his carriage until pieces began to fall off. The crowd gasped. The mare squealed and charged, champing on the bit. My Dad could be heard softly uttering "Adda girl, git up. Good girl." I think he may have actually been smiling as his carriage fell to pieces around him.

Somehow, he managed to finish the course in a record-setting time and win the competition. Afterwards, he sponged down his mare like a proud father. The rest of us wanted to kill her for any number of reasons: public humiliation, financial loss of broken harness and carriage, knowing the next competition would be a repeat of the same, etc. My father, though, gently patted her and went to collect his blue ribbon.

Over the years, he drove numerous feisty mares to unlikely victories. Once, a mare he was conditioning at home took off in a full gallop headed straight down a busy road. The fact that his life was in jeopardy seemed not to phase my Dad, who decided his best option was to stop fighting with her to slow down. Instead, he stood up in the cart and pronounced, "Okay, you wanna run, girl? Then, let's run!" We heard her thundering hooves against the road from miles away. Next thing we knew, she streaked past our farm like a race horse with my Dad standing upright in the carriage, chariot-style, holding on to the reins to keep from flying over the back of his seat.

When I began training professionally on my own, I quickly realized that I, too, was cursed with this affection for mares. While sane enough to avoid Combined Driving Events, I'm still askew enough to always have a far greater number of mares in my barn than geldings. And when their moodiness impedes my day, I blame not them but my father!