Petrie the baby dragon is turning into a juvenile dragon. Still fiery, bigger now, with fewer tantrums and more willingness to think and work together. I can see glimpses of the proud and pretty mare she’ll be one day.
What started out as Petrie-paint-eater (she’s given my nice white car a zebra striped look, grrrrr), Petrie-panel-pusher (for the time she stuck her head through a panel, panicked and moved the whole pen before she got loose,… yeah, baby horses are great) and Petrie-pain-in-the-neck (opening doors and breaker boxes, knocking on walls in the middle of the night, pulling everything she could reach out of the tack room and spreading it through the yard… so cute. Not) is slowly turning into something that’s beginning to resemble a partnership. And my little ugly duckling is becoming a less little, more visually pleasing young mare.
She’s going to be 3 this year and is what I’d consider a ‘young’ 3yo. Both physically and mentally, she has a lot of growing up still to do, and I want to bring her along slowly so she can be mentally and physically prepared for a career as a pack and riding horse. She’s got big hoof prints to fill, with Littlefoot gone and Lacy’s return to full work still being a big question mark.
I often talk about the difference between getting a horse to do something and them actually owning and understanding what they’re doing, settling into it and doing it well. One could call one “manageable” and the other “competent”. Petrie, who came to Wild Horse Outreach & Advocacy unhandled as part of our first load of Sale Authority Devil’s Garden Mustangs from the Double Devil Wild Horse Corrals last summer, is starting to get there.
We have a lot of fine-tuning left to do and with her being so young, I haven’t pushed her hard. But catching out in the field, saddling, ponying through all sorts of terrain, daylight or dark, tying, hobbling, loading and hauling, ground driving, packing a load (tires) for the first time, me sitting on her from the fence, Dustin the heeler sitting on her, standing for her first partial angle grinder trim… It’s all starting to come together nicely and I have hope that she’ll have a good first season as a pack horse with a light load this year. It feels less like having a snuffy little gangly baby wild horse out with the herd and more like interacting with a smart, curious, sassy and opinionated yet friendly and polite young Mustang mare. I’m excited for this summer with the not-so-little punk who’s been exactly what I needed to keep me on my toes.
