The amazing story of how spirit the carriage horse overcame his fear of the nasty, big, red fire truck.
Spirit is an unusual horse. He is a twin, and both survived birth. His father, grandfather and grandmother were all grand champion Percheron registered horses. Spirit is a Spotted American Draft Horse: a paint mixed with, in this case, a Percheron.
He has always been very friendly and curious and prone to befriend the bigger horses.
But some things scare the dickens out of him.
One day I was with John, our Polish horse trainer, and Spirit. We were training the horse Spirit on the streets of Chicago. Whereupon a hugh fire truck just moseyed down next to us at a red light, with all its gears grinding as it stopped. Spirit freaked out incredibly. Quickly I handed the lines to John and he said some magic words to calm Spirit down.
So, I said: “John we have to do something to overcome his fear of fire trucks. There are lots of fire trucks out here. He can’t be a carriage horse for us if he’s afraid of fire trucks around all the time!” And John agreed.
So, two days later I engineered a plan to take Spirit over to a big Firehouse at Grand and Dearborn in Chicago. Luckily, the truck was just returning from a call and backing into the garage. So, I directed Spirt to follow the truck nose to nose into the garage. The firemen were very gentle and understood apparently what I was doing. After they stopped the truck and came out to say “Hello” to Spirit they brought him a large, 20 gallon pan of water. Whereupon Spirit drank half of it. So now Spirit has never been afraid of a fire trucks again. They are good to you: they bring you water.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could just take our children and give them one lesson and they would remember it for life? When’s the last time we remember that happening? These horses are just amazing at how they want to figure things out then make everything work safely so nobody gets hurt. Thank you Spirit for being our wonderful horse.
© 2020, HorsesEveryOne, Inc. and/or the author, Donald J Geldernick
Maybe be reused with noted credits.
