Auction horse transformation ~ What a change! ❤️Little Gus's Story❤️

I'm always on the lookout for

horse

auction

s that need a

little

help, at one sale in particular I saw a super cute

little

mule, Pony. I had a friend who I knew would be very interested in it, so of course I bought it for a few hundred off of her. It was definitely worth the risk. I knew this little girl was going to be difficult, so her new owner brought in an experienced pony

horse

to help this little girl open up just a couple of days after a little refinement for this little girl. She was ready to head to her new home at that same sale.

I saw a horse I had seen months before being sold in the catalog after her quarantine. He became best friends with little Stewie. I was able to talk to the owners who had left this horse. loose in the sale, they weren't actually the people who had bought him from the catalog months before, so this horse had been around for quite some time, it didn't take me long to figure out why this guy was having a hard time staying on one. At home I really like to give my new horses the benefit of the doubt, so I proceeded to try to figure out

what

was going on with this guy.

I was really nervous and frantic before I decided to ride this horse. I thought I could do it too. Well, I checked that the steering worked and that it stopped when I asked it to. I really like driving horses on dirt and this guy caught on relatively quickly. He was actually much better at this than a normal lunge. I felt pretty safe. At my $800 purchase at the time it was cute as a button and would fit right in with the rest of my little brown cow ponies I was collecting, but after a while it became apparent that it was going to need more than a trim each time.

The time I went to work with this horse, he resisted and resisted and resisted. I tried several different saddles that fit him quite well. I had a chiropractor come out and check his back. I also had an osteopath come out and adjust it. He had a little back pain, but other than that we couldn't find a reason for all the bucking. I looked at the original ad that was placed in the catalog when it was sold a year ago and they said he was a wonderful horse who saddled the same thing every day, which I guess was true because he did, in fact, Buck every day.

The easiest way for me to find out how this guy moves was to crawl on him myself, so I opened my brain cube and took him for a spin, he had some really strange reactions, his ears were stuck the whole ride, I also had no idea

what

to make of all the petting I was doing to him, he was constantly coming closer and actually biting my legs afterwards. On this short test ride, it was pretty evident that this guy was in severe pain. He was very sensitive when I put my legs on him and extremely reluctant to move forward.

At the end of the tour, I decided he was just going to go. go ahead and treat him pretty aggressively for ulcers, he had a lot of signs that were textbook for this condition, it was a bit of an impulse so I ended up keeping that mule company in the trailer, so I really didn't have any plans to him at this point, there was no real reason for me to continue riding him if he was in so much pain and so angry that it looked like he'd had a really rough couple of months, in the end I decided that would be it.

Well, if he had a whole year off to reset, he could hang out with the other horses in the herd and although he seemed to be calming down, I observed a lot of strange behavior from him, he would spend hours outside. In the grass playing with different objects. I saw him playing with the haets more often and at first I thought he was really cute, but then I realized that in the end he did this for hours and hours. It was very similar to how they find zoo animals. something and repeatedly playing with him when they are bored, anxious or stressed, the other horses really had no idea what he was doing, it honestly scared them a little, if you only watched a few seconds you would think he was just playing. but he did this every day, day after day, just to try to calm his nerves.

I bought him other toys to try to pacify his busy mind, but as the months went by he continued to do this while the other horses ate dinner. he would stand in a corner and spin his hay at that time. He had had it for about 6 months. He had been receiving treatment for the ulcer for approximately three of those months. He was also extremely aggressive with food during the winter. I continued to work with him for a bit. Little by little, while I couldn't afford the amount of body work he needed, I decided to learn to do it myself with this new knowledge.

I could take care of his needs daily and hopefully get him better faster and in about a year. After first purchasing this horse, he finally started to relax when it was time to saddle him again. I thought he was well prepared. He no longer had back pain. All of his muscles were nice and loose. He had stopped stretching. biting me when I sat down I fought him but on his first day back he continued to attack quite seriously, in an instant he was back to the horse I met a year ago, he was anxious and tense and just couldn't find the strength to stop attacking once .

He started to resist, it was like his brain was in a totally different place, all the improvements we had made over the last year disappeared. I remember very vividly how upset I was that day. He just so happened to have a storm coming up, so I took him into the barn and left him tied up for about 20 minutes when the storm let up. I decided to take it out again. I was really racking my brain while we waited for the storm to pass. It seemed like the time he had spent standing still. The barn allowed him to realize that just because he gave him a chair didn't mean he was going to treat him like people before.

Sometimes people called these horses cold-backed horses, they need time to warm up and calm down, but I think what Gus had been experiencing was something totally different before the storm, his brain was completely shut down and after the storm he had a much more open and willing mind. I felt like he was much more in tune with what I was asking him. He also didn't seem fearful, anxious or stressed. I walked back in and all the things he used to get mad about with the chair he didn't seem to care about. He had the feeling that, since he had been bounced so many times, he had never done it.

I really got a fair deal, so I decided to go back to the beginning with this guy. It was very important for me to establish that anything he asked of her would never cause him harm or pain, given the magnitude of his ulcer problems and the number of them. From the stress he felt during the first few months he was with me, this was a big step despite how serious he was about resisting. I never really felt unsafe with him as I continued to train him. I did a lot of things at Liberty, including getting on and off of him, as long as I kept his fear, anxiety and stress down, he took to the training quite well when I started walking along with the horse I now called Little Gus.

He had received an update on this super cute little mule that had been purchased at the same sale, she had begun her training as the cutest pack mule as she progressed in training little Gus, he became best friends with Pete and Big Gus, every time he had a free minute, undermined Gus' training since he could be a volatile little horse. I kept everything pretty discreet. He had to understand that he was allowed to relax. The time riding him didn't have to be a stressful situation due to previous handling of him. He had a pretty big aversion to all kinds of things. bits since I reintroduced him he really had a great understanding of all the cues so I had no problem putting him in a halter even when it came time to start walking this guy I decided to just put him in a halter with one.

This was something I was a little nervous about. He was so athletic with his bucking right on the lunge line that the thought of me being catapulted off of him was pretty intense at first, but as of now he had a pretty pretty face. Strong base I felt good asking him to walk away with just a halter and rope like any other green horse or young colt. I allowed him to move forward and move freely. It was even pretty good at slowing down right next to my seat. Well, I think little Gus probably has a very similar

story

to many

auction

horses.

His original owner brought him up for sale when he was picked up by a horse dealer. The merchant took him to another sale where he was sold under false pretenses. The new owner. couldn't drive it so they sold it again that owner couldn't drive it either So eventually they took it in to sell it loose I was the fifth owner of little Gus in a little over a year and if you've been watching my channel for a while, I know Gus has a particularly mischievous personality, but it's very hard for me to get mad at him when he does things like this because the horse I brought home from the sale was a completely different animal.

I hope this video has given you an idea. A better idea of ​​why I keep some of these horses for so long and why I sometimes have a hard time letting them go, and in case you're wondering, that super cute mule at the beginning is a mountaineering baling machine, now many thanks to all. To watch and stay tuned for the next video.