What was the craziest horse you ever had to you to ride?

What was the craziest/misbehaved horse ever sent to you to ride and what did you have to do to get the job done?

Or even a horse of your own that had a "quirk" that you had to get by?

Well so far I would say my boy has been the 'craziest' when I met him he had no brakes, would bolt every chance he got, reared and pulled back extremly bad when saddling and if someone held him while the rider mounted he would also rear.
It took me a bit to establish breaks but I did put him back in a snaffle and (we still have those days where he reverts) but I would do hours of walk stop back walk trot stop back and so on haha. The bolting well he learned one rein stops and just consitency as well has correcting him before he gets worked up enough to bolt. The saddling well haha not something anybody would agree with but I would carry a crop in my back pocket and when he would set back i'd give him a tap if he didn't move forward he would get another pop, now he doesn't set back or rear he is a little wiggly but getting better each time I work with him. The mounting well a lot of patience and hoping around on one leg with his nose turned to me till he stood still long enough for me to swing up and he now 90% of the time stands perfectly :].

When I was a teenager, I worked at training/riding stable. The owner would come back from a sale with a trailer load full of horses, us "assistants" (hah, more like suckers!) would ride & train them under the owner & his trainer daughter supervision. Several were wacko, wonder I wasn't killed. There was one so bad I had just got on, two peops were still holding the horse & up he went, I bailed off to the side & it went over backwards. The saddle stabbed the ground, could've been my chest. It went back on the trailer to the next sale. As I got older I got more selective about the horses I train and even more selective about the horses I will own. No crazies allowed.

Waresbear- that is sort of what we do where I ride. We have to ride out all the kinks on the horses out there we each have our own specific lease and then on any given day we work whatever horse needs it.

Whew, the first one that pops into my mind wasn't "crazy" persay, but she was one of the ones that made me the most nervous riding her. People say that it is a terrifying experience to have a horse run off with you. I say you don't know what terror is until they are running off with you.....in reverse.

She had already been through one trainer that supposedly spent 30 days on her. Well, when I got her, pretty much all she knew how to do was go backward. If you applied leg, she would go backward, if you whopped her on the butt, she would go backward, if you sat still, she would go backward. If you put any kind of pressure on her at all, she would speed up to an unsafe backward speed.

I found out later that the "trainer" she had been to trained his horses to go backward with leg pressure....and apparently one of the most common complaints was not being able to stop the reverse when you needed to.:roll:

Any time she got spooked or stubborn or irritated or confused, her very first instinct was to just take off running backward. That is a gut-wrenching experience knowing the horse you're riding is running backward up the bank of a creek with deep cow-trails in it and there's nothing you can do to stop her .

During one ride, she damn near flipped over backward with me several times while I was trying to get her to cross a creek. After the last time, I got off and we had a pretty extended "come to jesus" meeting. By the time I was done, I was sucking air almost as hard as she was....but I got on and was able to coax her across the creek without a single episode of running off backward.

I don't know exactly what I did, but it worked. She only had a couple of relapses and they weren't bad at all. Now, she's back with her owner and she adores this little mare. She said that "It's so nice when she sees something that scares her, she just looks and then goes on".

Saddle bronc horse I bought one time was a runaway!

He would randomly bolt and run for unknown reasons. Until him, I was always able to turn a horse. Not this one. He was hard as a rock muscle everywhere. Even when I got his head turned, I'd pull him around until we was looking eye-to-eye and he'd still be running off. My job was to make a pickup horse. He never made it. Tried to pasture rope on him. FAILED. When I swung a loop he hit passing gear and made 4 laps around 100 acres of hilly, rocky ground. My buddy had the bull caught by the neck after I made the 4th circle, so as I came by them I pointed my runaway toward him and the bull and threw a big ole wild cow loop at his feet. The bull jumped at the right time and I dallied at full speed. The rest was not pretty, but we did stop. And amazingly my saddle tree didn't bust. I diagnosed him as a schitzophreniac. The only thing he was good at was pulling heavy livestock in the trailer. But there's a limited market for horses like that

I took him to a sale at St. Clair and was loping circles.(If you ever see me with a horse at a sale, you don't want him) He didn't ride bad until those voices in his head told him to run off. This family came up with a girl, probly 13 or 14 and wanted him for her a barrel horse. I told em no, they don't need to do that. This little girl starts arguing with me and says, "You never seen me ride before". I said "Little lady, if this horse was a human, he'd be serving 10 consecutive life sentences for attempted murder".

All of them. :P

The craziest wasnt really crazy he just had the good beat out of him. When I met this 16 hand 6 year old paint I fell in love he was gorgeous. The guy who owned him said that one day he just wasnt the same, spooky of hats, scared of the round pen rails and was super jumpy once you got a saddle near him, and felt that the previous trainer had been rough with him.
It took me weeks just to get him comfortable with the sound of the round pen rails. Another couple weeks of just putting a saddle on him, and once I trusted him I started laying over his back, starting slow with his head tight to one side. And once I could get him to stand quietly I did a full mount he did fine. I did three more then BAM! I was on my back and he was running frantically around the pen bucking. This happened for several weeks, I got good at bailing and landing on my feet. But I never trusted him enough to keep my feet in the stirrups or to even ask him to move. ...He was the first horse I ever gave up on. I told the owner He was going to be alot of work, and that I just couldnt do it not with a two times a week lesson. He gave up on him to after that.. three months later he called said he couldnt sell him and that he was getting worse, an offered to give him to me.. I said no thanks.

Later I was talking to a guy who claimed to be a trainer, said that he had worked with a horse that ended up being the paint. He said that when he asked the young horse into a canter he bucked a couple time so he pulled him to the inside, pulling the horse over into the rails, He then began to tell me how enraged he was at this and ended up using his hat to "work" the horse. I flipped out on him and called the paints owner and encouraged him to press charges, he said that he wasnt there when it happened so he felt that he didnt have a case.... I was once again shocked

Another horse I had was a big blue roan stud with a notched ear and 9 brands. Brands everywhere. He was mean and I can't emphasize that enough. Had to wire his mouth shut or else he'd bite plugs out of our pickup horses. He was bred to buck and had been around the world. I bucked him for a couple years, then I woke up one day and decided I'd break him to ride. He was about 15 or 16 years old, and he had his mind made up he didn't want any part of it. I tied him to my stock trailer and went to shoe him. He ended up on top of it and since it seemed like he'd be very hard to shoe up there, I left him barefoot. He wasn't scared of people at all, so I had him loose in the yard with a pile of grain to munch on so I could easily catch him. Started saddling and bridling him and my headstall needed patched, so I was standing maybe 10 or 15 feet from him fixing my bridle and he attacked me. Bit me on the chest and slammed me to the ground. I'm not making this up, I swear. Luckily there was a feed bucket beside where he put me and I started hittin him in the face with it while he was grazing on my abdomen. He got off of me, but not before he stepped on me once or twice and bit some plugs out of my belly.

I rode him but he had a habit of jumping high in the air unexpectedly. You might ride him 20 miles and be trottin down the fence pretty as can be, then BAM!! He'd go straight up. When he landed, he'd be right back in that nice trot. Everybody knew how mean that old stud was, and nobody would ride with me. They wouldn't even get out of their truck at my house if I had him out. One day I had him tied up and I wondered what he'd do if I rolled a tire at him. So I rolled it toward him and he kicked it right back at me and layed me down flat. I let him off for a week and put him right back in the buckin string. That's the thing about bred to buck horses, you can break them to ride then lay em off for a week or 2, and they buck just as good as they ever did.

I shall continue with more crazy horse stories tomorrow, I have many more

I went down to St Thomas in the Virgin Islands to do a three day clinic and pony club testing. While there, the other DC asked if I would ride a mare of hers that she was having trouble with.

I agreed ans she brought me a STUNNINGLY beautiful mare. All was going well, but suddenly she went into a type of "fit" and started bashing herself, and me, into every tree, building, fence with absonlutely no sense of her own (or my) well being. She would do this a couple of times each hour. At one point the horse almost threw us off a cliff.

I handed her back to the owner convinced that this horse was either insane or had a brain tumor. I sadly told her that she needed to consider euthanasia as the horse was truly dangerous. She looked at me and said "well, I can always BREED HER!!"