Hey, This Looks Familiar...



I had a horse do this once, with a couple of differences. First, he wasn't as athletic -- which means he didn't jump as far up in the air while coming over, but also that he weighed a lot more. Second, he landed right on me, crushing all the ribs on my right side. I guess that would have been about 2006. Still hurts sometimes.

8 comments:

DL Sly said...

I would have thought it to have been several more years before you voluntarily brought up the "Impromptu Lazy Boy" moment.
0>;~}

Texan99 said...

I had a mare roll over backwards about 15 years ago, but she didn't leap in the air and do a backflip like that! She sort of did it in slow motion, giving me time to fall off and roll away before I got squished. Later her owner told me the mare had killed herself running into a fence. Except for those two incidents, she seemed like a sane, well-broken horse. We never figured out what set her off. One minute she was perfectly calm, letting her owner adjust one of my stirrups, and the next she was rolling over backwards. Bad messages from outer space, I guess.

Grim said...

It would have been, Sly, except that I've never seen a video of a horse doing this before. It was kind of interesting to see it from the outside (so to speak).

DL Sly said...

Yeah, I can understand that. When I blew my ankle playing college volleyball, the coach just happened to be taping the game. He asked me if I was interested in seeing it when he was visiting me after surgery. I guess my morbid curiosity wasn't strong enough, given that I had literally peeled every tendon from my foot. (The surgeon said he'd never seen such clean ends on torn tendons, like someone had peeled them off with a scraper.) I really didn't feel like seeing my ankle go through the contortions I felt when I landed on my teammate's foot, and to this day, whenever I see a serious ankle injury during a game, I *feel* it. It's rather like the automatic reaction men have when seeing a groin shot.
0>;~}

Anonymous said...

I had one go over backwards with me, but like Texan, I had time to slide off the back and get out of the way. We wore working on an exercise where the horse stepped around some concrete blocks and Rodrigo decided to step into the block. Then he spooked and came up and over. And proceeded to get up and act as if nothing had happened. He's odd like that.

LittleRed1

tyree said...

Ouch, I was leading a horse downhill when I was a kid and it started walking faster than I was. That was enough to scare me silly. Horses are huge when you are 15. Looking at the video no wonder your ribs still hurt.

Anonymous said...

Jose
Happened to me but the horse had more "hang time". Enough for me to crab straight away behind him before he landed. He broke the saddle tree.

There was a hunt in the area and I guess he could hear it, though it was miles away. It was enough to get him excited. He was always undependable - named Dummy.

Anonymous said...

In my experience the few horses that will flip backwards on their rider might as well be retired or put down. You can't give that kind of slack to an animal with that size and power.

They are noble and grand but they are livestock not pets.