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Southern Strides - Equine Services

Warning: might need tissues to read this blog post!

Yesterday, was a bittersweet day, but if I am being honest, it feels more like a punch in the gut! We said goodbye to Armor as he left to go to his next job!

In April 2021, one of the sweetest souls landed in my driveway in terrible condition. As the hauler handed me his lead rope, Armor dropped his head into my arms, putting as much weight as I could hold in my hands. At that moment, I truly didn’t think he’d make it as he was so weak. As I looked him over I felt anger build because I couldn’t believe someone could be so cruel. Armor was so weak he couldn’t even cross his legs barely when walking to make turn, he had swelling in the chest area, open wounds, extremely thin and scars all over him that resembled whip marks. He even had scarring on his tongue that is just to difficult to even write about. There was no time to give into anger because we had a job to do. We got him settled in and it felt like we had a newborn baby again because we checked on him every hour through the night for quite a few nights. Much to my surprise, Armor got stronger everyday and his sweet personality began to come alive again.

After several months, we began training Armor and allowing students to work with him. It didn’t take long for him to become a favorite among the students as he was incredible at building their confidence levels during ground work and mounted sessions. Armor is patient, tolerant, and extremely easy going. He is the rock that many client’s wrapped their arms around and cried their pain out to. Armor is very intuitive and always seem to know when someone needed him to be strong. It was quite something watching him educate students and be the pillar of strength for those that needed him.

We chose to let Armor go work for a larger therapeutic riding center that needs a horse with the personality and skills that Armor possesses. The center had been looking for a horse that could allow riders who are not all able bodied, be able to handle the motorized lift and assistive devices, and be physically and mentally strong for such a challenging job. It is very difficult to find great horses that can handle the job of being a therapeutic riding horse. As I said before, this has been gut wrenching hard and find myself in tears often wondering did I make the right decision because I swore that we were Armor’s forever home. Eventually, the humbling realization set in that keeping Armor here would be for selfish reasons.

As a trainer and horse owner, I am truly blessed to have been given skill that could help rehabilitate Armor in his time of need and watch him transform into the amazing horse that he is. As a human, I have learned so much about life from Armor particularly about trust and forgiveness. It still leaves me in awe that he could endure the trauma that he did, still trust a human and even receive love. Equine Facilitated Learning is all about relating experiences with horses to our own lives. Many of my clients have said it gets harder to trust and forgive as you get older. I’ve wondered what their individual reasons are for that perspective and surely each client has different reasons. As a facilitator, one reason I see often surrounds the complexity of old “un-dealt with” trauma colliding with newer trauma making it impossible for those client’s to navigate through the whirlwind of emotions leading to many giving up. For humans, it is just so hard to trust again and forgive, but for Armor, he simplified it by just choosing to trust me when he had no reason to ever trust another human. He made trust and forgiveness look so easy to do that even some of us around here got brave and examined our own hearts. There are numerous life lessons he taught me, but the most impactful was his example of forgiveness. Our family and team will miss him terribly. We are so glad we were able to prepare him for his next job, but more importantly, be students in his class on conquering trauma with mercy and forgiveness.

-Christina