I watched a short piece on television the other night about a horse that laid down as soon as someone tried to ride him. It was pretty funny. If the rider was able to get into the saddle before the horse, that made no difference, he still went down and of course the rider got dumped off. The tag line was something like "Lazy horse won't be ridden."

I don't know a lot about horses - I've driven and ridden them on the farm when I was growing up - but I think that horse had been trained to do that stunt. It's like a lot of the videos shown on Pinterest - carefully trained, staged, photo-shopped or whatever. Sure, it's funny sometimes, and other times pretty stupid, but to each his own.

I had good and bad experiences with horses growing up. One of my jobs on the farm was leading the horse planting corn. It was a one-row-at-a-time horse-drawn corn planter that required one horse, someone to lead the horse in a straight line across the prepared field, and someone to hold the handlers of the planter to balance it and keep it from riding too far into or  out of the soil. That job fell to my Uncle Bob. It was hot and dusty and any field my Grandfather Bolton decided to plant with corn was at least twenty or thirty acres. Divide that into rows four-feet apart and you'll  come up with approximately how many miles we walked. The horse I led was pretty smart. After only a few trips, I think she would have been ok without me, but each row would have been just a little shorter than the last. She had a habit of wanting to turn around short of the end of the row. My grandfather wanted the corn planted right to the very edge, so the horse and I had to be in the bushes or weeds at the end of the row and then turn to start the next row right at the edge of the prepared piece. That was where I was needed - the rest of the time I was merely walking ahead of the horse.

Another task that was mine was leading the horse to pull up the hay fork used to unload hay in the barn. It was a big grapple fork that took massive amounts of hay off the truck and the horse was needed to pull it up to the track that ran the length of our big barn and when it got where it was going to be stored, the man on the load of hay yelled to me to stop and pulled a rope that released the mound of hay into the mow. The horse and I then returned as the fork was brought back to the truck and the process was repeated until the load of hay was deposited in the mow.

Most of the horses we used over the years were good at that job, but there was one white mare that apparently either didn't like the job or didn't like me, because she would wait until we were starting down the drive, pulling up the forkful of hay and she would bring her chin down hard on my shoulder. She seemed to know it hurt- she was just plain mean. She was also inclined to go her own way. Once when I was riding her, she took me under a low branch so I was swept off. She would not let me get back on but headed for the barn and I'd have to walk home. Another time she wouldn't stop at the barn door and I was nearly knocked off her back again. I don't know what happened to her, but she was a challenge. She was a good, strong work horse, but had a mind of her own. Horses are like that.