Saying Good Bye to Jakes

The problem with raising horses is that you cannot keep them all.
Normally we try to sell our babies when they are ready to be weaned from their mother, at about 7 to 8 months old. You don’t get as much money for them, but then again – you don’t really put a lot of work into them either.
And, you don’t get attached.
Jakes was different. Is different.
He was our first boy from The Golden Stallion – a chunky, beautiful baby colt. He wasn’t as trusting as his older brother in the beginning and actually gave us hell in the beginning. But, he changed. We started working with him in the time that I was still a waitress so I had quite a lot of time to put into him.
I worked with him, I saw his potential and I liked him. At that stage of course, I knew that we would sell him so I managed to keep my distance emotionally. But, time passed and it began clear that people weren’t really interested. I started hatching a plan, an idea.
I’d keep Jakes for myself. I’d only be able to ride him properly in four years, roughly in the time that I would have to start thinking of retiring Basjan.
The timing was perfect and it felt like fate because we couldn’t find an owner for him.
But then one crawled out of the woodwork and my riding companion (and the actual owner of the horse) insisted that we sell him.
I argued. And pleaded. And begged but it was to be as she had her heart set on selling him. And, it was a good sale. The truth is that I’m quite proud of Jakes. Perhaps because of all the time that we had put into him, he had become an amazing horse. We have a quiet way of working with our animals. We insist on obedience naturally. But, we never shout, never hit. Never pull on them or do anything hard.
I like to think of the ones that we rear as pure. The one that we trained last year was so tame that we literally just put a saddle on him and started riding him (with work naturally). He never protested. Never reared or bucked or showed any signs of fear.
He was unspoiled, just as Jakes is.
They came to load him today and bitterness of it is that we didn’t even have trouble boxing him. He trusted us so much that he did this without protest, even though he had never done it before. He trusted us, and we let him go and that hurts.
His new owner is great. And, she has a lot of time and a lot of money to invest into him. More than we do.
But, it still hurts, because in my heart I had already seen him as mine.