Bobby was a rig

Our story about proud cut geldings and rigs exhibiting stallion type behavior.

I remember being in an advanced Bowen training for for horses when the vet that was training us called out “Bring the rig over here”. I looked up to see who he was talking to and it was me with Bobby who wasn’t famous back then. 🙂

“He’s not a rig” I replied. And as he disagreed I told him about my friend the British Horse Society trained stud person who had held all the bits in her hands when he was gelded. I did have to have my attention on him when we were out in company though. His penis could get hard and I’d seen him mount a mare. I knew cows would mount each other and they aren’t bulls – I thought that behavior was just young horse stuff.

Some time later, old Carlos had an accident that required multiple vet visits over a period of months and I mentioned this rig thing the other vet had said about Bobby – who was standing politely on the other side of the yard keeping Carlos company.

This vet was a specialist and very experienced equine vet.

He explained that there’s three types of rig:

One is learned behavior. One solution was to put them in a paddock full of pregnant mares and let them teach him some manners.

Second is that they’re not gelded properly. He explained that there’s no way a vet doesn’t know when that’s happened and it’s MUCH rarer than the stories would suggest.

Third is that while their body is being formed in utero, some of their testosterone making cells gravitate to other glands. (I’m thinking from what I’ve learned about humans all these years later that that’s always the case, but hey clearly some horses have more testosterone being produced outside the testicles than others.)

He said that what people call “proud cut” is more commonly the third option.

It turned out that Bobby had more testosterone than most serving stallions. Back in those days we were using alpha horse dominance type training and rightly been taught to be afraid of stallions in that way of working. Some stallions when challenged with dominance and no Feel or communication will give a dangerous and very hard “no!”

So I took Bobby to a homeopath, who gave him (of all things) homeopathic Tarantula. The stallion behavior disappeared over the few days of administering the meds.

Years later after he’d taught me how to hear / feel horses communication he let me know he was sad at losing his stallion. We had a confidence in our communication together and by then I was a homeopath myself (and many other modalities too), so I was comfortable to reverse what we’d done all those years earlier.

Photo is dear Bobby, jumping Nar Nar Goon pony clubs cross country course completely at liberty. And that funny little comment at the beginning about Bobby not being famous back then? 🙂 He became well known in at least 14 different countries when he guided me oh so clearly to write “Bobby’s Diaries – Straight from the horse’s mouth to you.” and then kicked me to the curb for a short time while Matt, Sunny, little Blondie and others gave me the refined version “Zen Connection with Horses”.

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