Bucking Radar

One of the stranger things that  has happened to me was a kind of psychic ability to know when a horse would buck.  The last time I was bucked off, however, I had no premonition of it.  So, again, not sure what makes it kick in, but there it is.

A few years back a horse trainer I was apprenticed with took me to see a client with a horse she wanted us to ride for her.  The  horse was half Andalusian/Lipizzaner or some similar cross.  This really excited me, being into dressage, and I asked if I could ride her.  The trainer, who I'll call Billie, told me she thought the horse would be very good as she had done the original breaking.  She told me the horse had never bucked or done anything difficult and she thought I would have an uneventful ride.  We arrived and the owner got the horse out and I began to lunge her.  She was fine, but I kept getting this really strong feeling that she would buck.  She never bucked on the lunge line, but the feeling stayed with me. 

I whispered my premonition to Billie and she told me to put it in the back of my mind.  She told me to prepare but not to let it overpower me.  I mounted up and rode the horse for a good 45 minutes without incident.  The owner got on her other horse and we started to canter laps around the pasture.  Nothing happened.  I felt totally relaxed and had by then forgotten my premonition.  Suddenly, the horse stopped dead and bucked hard once.  I came off onto my back.  I laughed and laughed though in the fall I had popped a tendon in my hip and it killed me to walk. 
Billie came over to help me up and we just looked at each other.  If I hadn't told her my premonition she wouldn't have believed it. 

Another time, I was riding horses across from where I boarded my own horse Bella.  I also trained some of the horses over at that place too, and I had planned on riding one of them after I finished the one I was on.  He was a draft horse who tended to buck on occasion, but in such a way that you never fell off.  Once I had the thought to go over to ride him, I got a strong premonition that a horse would buck.  I couldn't shake this feeling, and after my last experience I figured I should pay attention to it.  So, instead of riding the draft horse, I decided to ride Bella.  That way I could have a nice, enjoying ride.

We began our ride with some easy warming up exercises and then moved on to ground poles.  She was doing well, so I raised the ground poles a little to do some cavaletti and small jumps.  The jumps were made out of plastic tubes about 4" across and were very light.  They wouldn't hurt the horse if they knocked one.  We went over a small jump, barely a foot high which Bella could have stepped over, she got her feet caught in the pole and in order to get it clear of her legs, she bucked and kicked out in back.  I flew right over her head, landing stunned in the sand. 

My premonition had come true!