Horses For Sale

How-To Get Your Spouse Crazy About Horses!
By Bonnie Marlewski-Probert

In this month’s column, I want to talk about what you do when one spouse is horse crazy and the other one thinks they are just plain crazy!

We’ve all met those couples. The wife is horse crazy and the husband thinks the whole sport is nutty or it is the husband who spends all his free time in the barn and the wife doesn’t understand the attraction to smelly animals that slobber on you every chance they get!

When I first met my husband, I knew that he had no experience around horses and didn’t have any particular feelings about them, one way or the other. I saw that as an advantage because he didn’t hate them yet. In order to encourage his interest, I invested in a secret weapon (mint flavored Tic Tacs). I had little boxes of those things all over my house so that when he came for a visit, I was ready. I would invite him down to the fence line and ask him to shake the plastic box that the tic tacs come in. Since all the horses knew what that was, he could stand safely outside the field fence, shake the little plastic container and a whole herd of horses would come charging to see him and they would happily stay at that fence line as long as he was willing to provide the little mint treats. Of course, I taught him first how to feed with a flat hand (last thing you want to do is have him lose some fingers!)

Doing this allowed him to stay out of harm’s way, he loved it, the horses loved it and it lit the fire in him. While he is not an avid rider (only because we travel all the time and there is rarely enough time to really focus on getting him up to speed as a rider), he could happily spend all day just hanging out with these wonderful, large buddies.

If there were one piece of advice I could give to anyone who has a spouse that hates horses, I would say this: Remember that we tend to hate most, that which scares us the most (terrorists, spiders, IRS agents!). The trick is to eliminate the fear factor first and that is done by making certain that you bend over backwards to never allow that person to feel the need to be afraid. For example, if you are 10 years old and trying to teach your little sister to love horses, you don’t put her on the back of a hot headed Polo Pony and go for a hand gallop across an open field (been there, done that and she now hates horses). If I had kept her in a riding arena, selected an older, quiet, kind hearted horse and kept her at a walk for an hour, she probably would be an avid horseman today. As it is, at almost 50 years of age, she still wants nothing to do with them. That is why I know so much about how to do it right – because I saw what the price was when you do it wrong and I have spent the last 20 years focused on getting it right.

If you are trying to introduce your spouse to riding for the first time, spending the weekend in a State Park camping out is not the place to go. Not only will your spouse be head-bobbing-lame by the end of a few days of hard riding, but you can’t control the environment in the woods and that means just about anything bad could happen.