Gray the Crazy Gelding
By Reyana Zuber

I’ve been around horses all my life, so I’ve known plenty with strange habits and odd behaviors. There was the stocky red roan gelding that liked to scrape his teeth along the length of the bars on his stall window. There was the Appaloosa gelding that had the best camel impersonation act I’ve ever seen. There was the chestnut mare that would wave her head in time to country music (and only country, not classical, pop, or anything else). However, by far the oddest horse I’ve ever seen was Gray, the dapple grey Thoroughbred gelding.

My mom and I are into dog agility, and one of the women in our club was helping us decorate N.A.T.C.H. trophy poles. Her name was Theresa, and as we worked she talked about the antics of her orphaned gelding. She had adopted him without knowing what a project he would be.

The first thing she noticed about him was his inability to communicate properly with other horses. His mother had not been able to teach him proper horse etequitte, and he didn’t understand the warnings the other horses in the pasture were giving him. The next thing that came to her attention was his lack of fear around unfamiliar objects. One of his favorite toys was traffic cones. He’s grab them by the tip and throw them around the pasture, and when they landed on their sides he’d stick his muzzle into them and then walk around with them hanging off of his face. He also loved to swing tarps around, waving his head in a circle and playing with them for hours.

Seeing his love of tarps, Theresa and a few friends of hers taught him to swing jump ropes. She brought a tape of it over on another occasion. There was one woman on one end of the rope, one jumping in the middle, and a horse on the other end matter-of-factly swinging it in a circle. When the women got tired from swinging the rope and jumping in sawdust, Gray stayed where he was with the jump rope hanging from his mouth, waiting for them to come back and play some more.

One of the not-so-entertaining things the Thoroughbred did took place at a Parelli test (I can’t remember what they’re called precicely). Theresa was riding him around an arena, along with a large group of other people and their horses, with only a halter and lead rope to guide him. He somehow fell behind the other horses, and in a desperate attempt to catch up to the group cut across the arena in a gallop. Theresa thought he would stay in the same direction as the other horses and made sure her weight was balance correctly to cope with the sharp turn, but at the last minute he veered to the other direction and she was in the dust.

Even more interestingly, apparently the wiring between Gray’s ears is contageous. He made friends with a young Friesian stallion that belonged to a woman that boarded at the same stable as Theresa. One day, they were turned out in an arena together and the stallion decided he wanted to jump the gate out of the arena to be with a few geldings that were turned out in a nearby pasture. Friesians being built the way they are (hardly suitable for jumping arena gates), he only managed to get his front legs over, and the gate was so high that his back legs were just hanging uselessly from the other side when his owner found him. Luckily, they were able to fix the situation without hurting the stallion in any way.

Although Gray will never be an entirely normal horse, his communication skills are getting better every day, and it’s been a long time since Theresa last went from his back to the dust. He’s getting plenty of social time with people as well; all the little girls around the stable love to jump ropes with him and watch him play.