Some people like to jump off cliffs or buildings with a parachute, but I prefer to get my kicks with a chemical–Capsicum! It’s what makes chili peppers spicy. It’s the soul of the chili pod! In Texas, and in New Mexico it’s almost a religion, right along with riding bucking cayuses and roping doggies. One of our favorite recipes is stolen from a woman who is one of my mentors, and we believe the world’s greatest cook of Mexican food. It’s called, “Camarones a la Diabla”, or “she devil shrimp!” We fix it in one pot, so it adapts well to Dutch oven cooking. Do it her way if you like the “heat” (picoso) or you can use chilies of lower octane if you want to tame it down.
Melt a stick of butter in a Dutch oven, then sauté about two or three pounds of peeled shrimp. Add a tablespoon of chopped garlic,and when the shrimps are pink, cover with about a cup of chicken broth. Now simmer this in the open pot while you put ten guajillo chiles and five chiles de arbol in a blender and make a red paste. Put this into the pot, with two bay leaves, four cloves, and one more clove of garlic. Simmer this while you make a pot of rice, and pour the shrimp over the rice. Watch out for the chile de arbol, but if you need to crank up the “heat” use ten of them instead of five. But even when it’s done with mild chiles it’s Del-yow-shuss! Or as we say ¡Muy Rico!
Monthly Archives: August 2016
Putting Buttons on a Horse
The concept of putting “spots “or “buttons” on a horse stems from understanding horse learning behavior. Inherently lazy (or in their opinion, efficient) they tend to lean into turns, short circuit corners, and egg shape circles, doing things the “easy way. “ Since we can’t yell corrections at horses in a Russian accent like a ballet master, we have had to come up with a method of communication that does make sense to them. One such method is to “take apart a horse” and work one piece at a time, until we perfect the response, then put him back together. Part one is the head and neck, which is controlled by the reins. Part two is the shoulder, Controlled by both the reins and the legs, at the cinch. Part three is the barrel or body, controlled by legs and seat bones of the rider. Finally the fourth part is the hindquarter, controlled the rider’s legs farther back, and the stick, as in the “move over” spot. One French cavalry officer was inclined to say “If You turn the head you might turn the horse, and if you turn the shoulders you’ll probably turn the horse, but control the hindquarters and you control the horse!” A big problem is that, being human we are more comfortable with using our hands, so we in turn have to discipline ourselves to focus more on the (less natural) use of our legs. Like a recipe for making a delicious meal, we have learned to study the parts that make the whole, but when we feast we put it all together. Like the old timers used to say, “keep it simple, make it fun”, both for you and for your horse. When you’re smiling, your whole horse smiles with you!
How to Train Your Horse for the Sidepass
Spots on the side of your horse and doing gates are on my mind today. No, I’m not talking about gaited Appalooskies! I want to do some straightforward talk about moving sideways. Ranch work requires frequent opening and closing of gates a’horseback, and I’ve seen hundreds of ways to do that. My favorite is the way it’s done in working equitation trials. There, the horse side passes to the gate putting the rider in position to undo the latch, then he sidepasses the gate open. After he changes sides he sidepasses it closed, then again with the latch and he leaves. All very calm and smooth. There’s no leaning out, taking hands off reins or gate, no muss, no fuss, no bother. The secret to this apparently effortless act is that there is no secret at all. It is the result of methodical use of seat and legs of the rider to ask the horse to do sideways movement. In training a horse to do this I prefer to start from the ground. Holding the halter closely in one hand, and a stick in the other, I find a place along the horse’s side where I can touch or tap him, and he will step away with a hind foot. I do this on both sides and repeat it until I barely touch a place on his ribs that will correspond to where my leg will be if I move it backward a ways from its resting position when I’m sitting in the saddle. After working from the ground I get on and repeat the procedure from the saddle, placing my leg at the “hip move over” spot, then if nothing happens “reminding” the horse to move over using the stick. I repeat this until by moving my leg into that position, he responds by stepping over in front of his other leg. I don’t want to kick, I only want to position my leg. The stick does any necessary reinforcing. This is called the turn on the forehand. This simple command will put the horse in position to unfasten, open and close the gate. You have now put a “spot” on your horse’s side, that is a “push button” for moving the hindquarters sideways.
The Equestrian Mind
When I was young we didn’t have personal computers, we would play pinball machines in diners. They were our computer games. You would fire a steel ball from a spring launcher to the top of a ramp, and on its way back down it would hit and bounce off various pins and flippers. The ball’s bouncing path reminds me of the way a horse’s brain responds to its environment. As a vegetarian who historically is food for carnivores, his survival depends on split second decision making, while in flight. These decisions are built into the horse’s brain, in other words, instincts. He doesn’t think, he reacts. The results of patterns of action/reaction get recorded in his incredible indelible memory. Whereas we think our way through a problem, the horse reacts or “bounces” through, much like the pinball. Then he records the result in his memory for future reference.
When we train a horse we are working to load that horse’s memory with useful patterns of behavior. A simple example would be teaching a horse to respond to pressure on the bit by lowering his head and neck. We take ahold of the reins and maintain moderate, steady pressure, enough for the horse to feel slight discomfort and to want to escape. Like the pinball, he bounces right, tries to twist left, he even raises his neck, but only when by random trial he goes downward, even a little bit, do we release the pressure. Now he will load into his memory groove “feel pressure on bit – go down to get away from it.” After 100 repetitions this pattern will become increasingly fixed. It will become a habitual response. You helped him get there by “visualizing ” a desired result. He found it by making multiple random choices, driven by the instinct to escape pressure. In the end his “steel trap” memory now has loaded a useful behavior.