The first thing to know about horses is where you should stand. So said Tammy Candlin, owner of the Tullin Ranch — a riding school focused on beginners along Route 32 in Saugerties.
In a long barn hallway, she bade me approach a large, tethered chestnut horse waiting at the end of a row of stalls. His coat was a sort of a reddish brown color. He wore three stockings, that is, he had white colorations up to his knees on three of his legs. There was a strip of white from his forehead to his nose. His mane was tawny-colored, as was his tail.
“So, this horse is Pompeii,” said Candlin. “He’s a retired jumper.”
Touching between a horse’s shoulder and jowl, you’re in the safe zone. It’s not a good idea to touch a horse from the girth, which is the belly of the horse just behind the front legs back to the flank, just in front of the back legs. Standing just in front of a horse’s head is not the best, either.
“He can’t really see you. There’s a little blind spot. It’s intimidating for him if he doesn’t know you,” Candlin said. “You’re a stranger, and you’re just going up to some horse you don’t know. He’s not gonna like that.”
Worst of all is to try to pet a horse on the hindquarters.
“This horse is very sweet,” continued Candlin, “But I’m gonna tell you how a horse would think. If they live in a herd, there’s always somebody biting the other one in the butt. ‘Hey,’ you know, ‘that’s my haypile.’ So if the horse is walking by, the last thing you want to do,” she points to the girth, “is reach out and touch him anywhere from here back. He could be daydreaming and if it was a high-spirited horse he could be like, That’s the dude that bites me every day, and he might throw a kick because he’s always been bitten by that bully in the field.”
Pompeii is what’s called a warmblood. They think differently from the coldbloods, the thoroughbreds, that think faster and react quicker.
Candlin brushes Pompeii with a curry comb, and he swings his head around to nuzzle. “You ever seen the movies with the old dogs on the porch? He’s kind of like an old dog on the porch, he wants to hang out.”
Candlin grew up in Kingston, but her life’s career started when she went clear across the country to California, holy land at the end of the westward expansion, the place of sunlight and palm trees and crashing waves, alive in the imagination of all those who’ve never actually been there.
Then just 18 years old, Candlin ended up south of Solana Beach and found work at the Del Mar racetrack, “Where the surf meets the turf.”
“I set my sights on getting involved in that industry as an exercise rider because as a child I knew how to ride horses,” she said.
While Candlin knew horses, she didn’t know the industry.
“I couldn’t get a break because I was young and the horses are so valuable out there,” she said. “That was one of the top tracks in the nation. I couldn’t even be a groom at that point. I was a hot walker.”
Racehorses are pampered like prizefighters. After the exercise rider comes back in the morning from exercising a horse, somebody, a hot walker, walks the horse and cools it down.
Everybody’s got to start somewhere. Candlin ended up racing the horses as a jockey. During her 20s, she raced in over 3500 races, and worked for the top trainer in the nation.
“Right now we’re on what’s called the off side, kind of like your left hand is a little awkward if you’re right-handed. If you ever have to walk around behind them, shorter is safer because if he ever had to make a kick the contact would be back here.”
As in fistfighting, if you’re too far outside your adversary can get at you full strength. Fighting closer in cheats the opponent of the range necessary to haul back and land a blockbuster.
“I haven’t done a lot of fistfighting,” Candlin admitted. “When I was a jockey, after another jockey had cut me off on the backside of the race, my agent told me that I gotta go kick his ass. I didn’t really know how to fight. He goes, ‘Take your helmet off and use your helmet and just go ballistic.’
The other jockey was cocky, says Candlin. Always had the best horses. He had cut her off and cost her a first-place showing.
“I think I sucker-punched him,” confessed Candlin. “He walked past me and I said, ‘Hey, Nice win,’ and then as soon as he went past me I popped him. We fell into this tall metal laundry basket. I fell in first, but I had him by his gold chain. I was in the laundry basket throwing kicks, throwing jabs. And my girlfriend jumped in and broke it up. She was another girl jockey in the room. We watched out for each other.
I said, What are you doing!
She said, Saving your ass!’
I said, I had him right where I wanted him.”
Candlin was fined $1000 and suspended for a week.
“But when I went to the next track,” said Candlin, “I got a standing ovation.”
Forelocks, witherbone, mane and flanks. Swishing tail and large, large eyes. A horse’s height is measured in hands from the top of their witherbone at the saddle to the ground, each hand four inches. Pompeii stood a little above 16 hands, and clambering up into the saddle puts the rider around five feet off the ground. A long way to fall.
“Usually when accidents happen around these animals, they don’t mean to hurt us,” said Candlin. “They just don’t know how big and powerful they are. You don’t want to end up underneath them getting dragged.”
Most accidents occur when climbing on or off a horse. There are signals. Where the ears are pointing. The noises the horse makes, the snorts, The way they carry their heads.
These are all signals.
“Notice his ears are always with us,” Candlin said. “If his ears are completely forward, his attention is out there. It could be something like a new dog in his space. Could be a kid walking into the barn with a balloon or an umbrella, something that’s out of the norm. And you want to be prepared because the natural instinct of a horse is to bolt. So you always watch their ears. and if the head goes up and the horse gives a sharp whooshing breath, that’s an excited snort, you don’t want to get on that horse. Licking and chewing, that’s a good sign. ”
Before the hour was through, I would clamber up onto Pompeii, into the saddle, and sit up straight, completing the picture of an unlikely centaur. Half-city, half-country.
With his horsey grass-clipping teeth, Pompeii did bite me when I first took the reins to lead him into the training pen.
Horses are playful, Candlin assured me, and he did not draw blood.
Later, after I had ridden Pompeii, he tried to nuzzle me with his enormous head. I was expecting another nip and probably confused him with my standoffishness. Or maybe he was going to bite again, a sign of camaraderie, like a friendly punch to the sternum.
Horses are devious, too, something like big dogs. Something more calculating is also going on in their equine minds. If they sense you don’t know their ways, like a representative of any tight-knit clan they will hustle you if they can.
They will walk the unsure rider where they wish, jerk their horsey heads forward to pull the reins from your hands, ignore you when attempt to whoa them to a stop. They will treat with contempt the rider who implies contradictory directions, pulls too hard on the reins, kicks too hard into the sides of their bellies, sits badly in the saddle. All these things will a horse do, so I was told.
Except for the bite Pompeii, weighing about 1100 pounds, accepted me onto his back with grace. Horses respect those who don’t overdo it. I did not pull the reins hard, I did not kick him in his ribs.
“Part of the experience I want people to understand more is that these are live animals,” said Candlin. “It’s not a machine you can just come and turn on.”
Once out of the barn in the fresh air, trotting along the racetrack under sky and clouds, trying to imitate a passable horseman, it’s hard to imagine how anyone could forget the horse underneath the saddle is anything but a vital, living, feeling and dreaming earthbound creature, as surprised as ourselves to be here and making the best of a not always but oftentime staggeringly beautiful situation.
As with bears, otters, fisher cats and every other creature under the sun, Native Americans famously saw kindred spirits in horses. They recognized in them brothers and sisters. Possibly cousins.
Try hanging around any animal without the skeptical prejudices taught by the modern scientific establishment, one apprehends the obvious- if we have souls, so too do animals.
Rats laugh. Pigs cry. Some dogs, like some people, are foul-tempered jerks. Like us, horses mourn their dead.
But when they’re not oppressed by existential vagaries, besides gamboling about with other horses and cropping grass, what horses really like to do is put their four-legged equine form to use and run. In this way, an inexperienced rider is a disappointment to a horse feeling the cold air with a wide open field and rolling hills laid out in front of it.
Lucky for them, then, as a consolation prize to their historical tradition of criss-crossing the continent in wild herds, harems of mares and foals led by individual stallions, as is their preference, there persist humans still who discover in themselves a bond with horses, can’t get enough of riding them, folks who romanticize them, breed them, house them, protect them, and revel in their increase.
Candlin is one of these.
“People don’t have farms the way they had when I was growing up,” she said regretfully. “Everybody you knew had five, ten acres and a little barn in their back yard. We don’t have that any more. Now most people got to board their horse somewhere, $1000 a month. You’re not even allowed to go ride the horse on your own. You have to be monitored by a trainer.”
Which is anathema to the bond.
“I grew up in the Seventies and there was still rodeos around here and I wanted be a rodeo cowgirl but I was never in the right path. The rodeo girls and the racetrack girls,” Candlin recalls them happily. “It’s ‘balls to the wall, let’s go,’ that’s their attitude. You know who looks down on the racers and the rodeo girls… the equestrians, because we just have too much fun. We’re letting that horse do whatever they want, we’re just going for it and they’re all into like, performance. Dressage.”
Equestrians. Those girls. The ones with the black helmets and tall, laced boots.
Candlin does give the ones doing the show jumping some credit, though.
“Starts with the same foundations as the more risky riding,” she said. “Maybe out west, you’re gonna meet a lot of horsemen and kids that know how to ride, kids that know how to act around horses, but not here on the Eastern Seaboard. There’s less and less. There’s not going to be ranches any more where people can go learn to ride. It’s going to be a lost art in in decades to come.”
It’s a wistful thought, even for someone from the city to consider, like being told about a kind of music, knowing it used to be played everywhere, and louder, but soon, you won’t ever be able to hear it again, not the way it was really played.
“All right, let’s get a saddle on and get you on a horse, teach you something about riding.”
While you can learn to ride over at the Tullin Ranch and she’d be happy to teach you, Candlin specifically wanted this article to be about all the ranches in Ulster County and anyway, she doesn’t specialize in large groups. Expert, intermediate or beginner, looking to tide a horse or just looking to bliss out and walk alongside one, Candlin’s got 32 acres that says you can.
Check out the website for details and prices. https://www.tullinranch.com/
A few of the other places to go horseback riding in Ulster County are Horses for a Change at Frog Hollow Farm in Esopus, Nichols Field Riding Club in Kerhonkson, Lucky C Stables in New Paltz, and Ashokan Riding Club.
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