Horses I’ve Known (And Wish I Hadn’t)

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214 – January/February, 2026

By M.J. Nelson

The American Kennel Club has numerous programs designed to test dogs in the field, chief among them being field trials and hunt tests for retrievers, pointing breeds, and flushing spaniels. Since pointers tend to run big, judges for these events do their judging from horseback, or else the judges would likely be tripping on their tongues after the second brace (pair) of dogs had run. And therein lies the problem. While some judges bring their own horses, the sponsoring club also provides horses for the judges and the marshal. Bringing my own horse was not an option for me because we couldn’t make him “bomb proof”. If he’d been a dog, we’d have labeled him “gun shy.”

So, I was stuck with whatever the club managed to dig up for horses, and while some of them were very pleasant mounts–a pleasure to ride–others would have needed an upgrade to be classified as holy terrors. It was those animals that convinced me that there is a corral somewhere filled with outlaw horses that only get trotted out for dog trials. I had more rodeos with stock at dog trials than I ever experienced with the most fractious two-year-old racehorses that I often exercised for friend of mine.

To mention just a few of the horror stories, let’s start with a horse I was assigned at a national specialty. Whatever breeding this horse possessed, it was the wrong part of it. After two braces, I tied a red ribbon in his tail because he had managed to kick and had tried to bite both my co-judges’ and the marshal’s horses. He wouldn’t stand; walking was a gait he didn’t recognize. And if you tried to throttle him down, he demonstrated his proficiency at spinning.

Click here to read the complete article
214 – January/February, 2026