Vegas was given the name Vegas by one of his owners in the succession of owners that ended with me. If I understood the lineage correctly she was the owner before the owner from which the proprietor purchased him. Aside from knowing that he was originally owned by whomever organized his breeding, how many owners in between is lost knowledge. But counting the ones I know of, including me, there were at least six. When I met him his age was said to be 18. If six owners were all there were, Vegas’ average time with each owner was around three years. That’s a lot of handoffs.
The impetus for tracking down any of those who came before me was to learn about Vegas in any detail that might help me understand his personality and physical history. I figured that the more I knew, the more I could help him regain his glory. Occasionally I would daydream about him as an innocent colt, springy and gangly, full of curiosity and spirit, before he was broken by human desire.
It was the proprietor or another ranch regular who was able to connect me with the woman who named him. When we spoke on the phone she told the story that she had found him abandoned at some barn in a starved and unsound state and that she called him Vegas because he was flashy and cost a lot of money to rehabilitate. When I expectantly asked if she remembered his name before she named him, or if she knew his registered name, she didn’t. She hadn’t bothered to investigate his Thoroughbred lineage, nor did she recall how he came to be abandoned. I don’t remember why she had sold him to the next person, who was the one who sold him to the proprietor. The proprietor did tell me that those people had used withholding of food as a tactic to coerce the horse to perform. I had no way to verify that, and it seems counterintuitive that anyone would admit to such treatment. On the other hand, from what I have seen over the years of exposure to the equestrian industrial complex, that someone would indeed take pride in such coercion isn’t all that surprising.
That Vegas was flashy was a fact. A flashy horse is one with eye-catching coloring or markings. He was black with a star and a snip as well as four white hooves topped with either a pastern sock or a coronet band. Many horses have an overall darker body coat with white facial markings along with one or more white hooves and white coloring on the legs, but all four hooves and lower legs so pigmented is not so common. The length of the white above the hoof increases the level of flashiness. A stocking would be the greatest amount of white on the leg reaching up to or even over the hock or carpal joints and four of those could be denoted by the slang term chrome, as in, “that horse has a lot of chrome”. Vegas was less flashy than that with simple socks and coronets, though the black coat accentuated the white with elegance.
For a long time I thought about giving Vegas a different name, one that stood for his dignity, one that symbolized the elegance and nobility of horseness, one that transcended the trauma he had endured, but no other name came to mind that didn’t feel contrived or underwhelming. Perhaps his name did evoke flash and cash from one point of view, but translation of the Spanish vegas to the English meadows brought to my mind the peaceful beauty of a vibrant field, the state of the city of Las Vegas before it was turned into Sin City, when horses perhaps roamed freely around there. So the name Vegas remained and I learned over time who he truly was beyond that.
Standing at 16 hands he conformed to the typical Thoroughbred type of long legs, lean build with elegant refined features. Registered Thoroughbreds who race received identifying tattoos inside of their upper lip (there is a digital technology used nowadays). With this alphanumeric code I could ostensibly find his birth and racing records along with his registered name. It could be seen that Vegas had such a tattoo, though it had faded and blurred over time making it impossible to read it definitively. Even using a black light to accentuate it, as was suggested by experts, didn’t help. I came up with a couple of possible sequences, but neither of my guesses matched with any male horse with his markings in the Jockey Club records. And so it was that I never knew anything more about Vegas than the short history I had pulled together. (By the way, The Jockey Club does not recognize black as a coat color, so he would have been officially listed as Dark Bay.)
Horses, like all animals, are subject to nearly every folly man can imagine including as objects of grand romantic gestures. As I heard it told to me privately by one of the “secret garden” ranch boarders, such was the case with Vegas. The story went that the proprietor became romantically involved with a woman who participated in his ranch operation. She found Vegas for sale, trained in a discipline in which she desired to partake, and convinced the proprietor to buy the horse for her. He did. However, she didn’t have success or satisfaction with the horse (he proved to be too much for her to handle, they said), which in turn soured the relationship with the proprietor. She left, but the horse stayed, a living casualty and surely a constant painful reminder of the divergence. While I can attest to the heartache of failure to secure love by relying on it to come from another, especially if one sacrifices oneself in expectation of reciprocation, it was hard to see an innocent bystander suffering for the experience.
It’s unclear to me if the proprietor benefited by keeping Vegas around as he didn’t include him in his rotation of lesson horses. Before I came along the horse was being ridden occasionally by a girlfriend of one of the proprietor’s favorite disciples, so perhaps that was one reason. Perhaps too, there hadn’t been that much time between Vegas arriving at the “secret garden” and my arrival. Who knows, maybe the proprietor was holding out hope for the return of his lost love and she might want the horse again too? (Or maybe he was just waiting for someone like me to want to take the horse off his hands.)
Until I took ownership Vegas was fed twice a day as the other horses were, but at a ration that the proprietor had deemed sufficient for all horses. His string of quarter horses and mustangs managed well on the given amount, but the Thoroughbred metabolism required more. The daily deficit left Vegas well underweight. His plea for food was acted out in a deep head bobbing behavior. When my attraction to the horse, in spite of these issues, turned to devotion I inquired about feeding him more, even at my own expense, but the proprietor said that the horse was his and as such he could care for him as he saw fit. I hadn’t finished my preparations to make an offer to buy the horse then, so I didn’t fight it to avoid ruining my chances at eventually getting the horse. (I do admit to rounding his ration up as much as could be done without notice.)
Before he was legally mine, my daily visits to the ranch included letting Vegas out of his paddock while I did chores. The horse immediately trotted down the long driveway to the valley flat and grazed until I brought him back up for routine feeding or some activity in which I wanted to engage him. This grazing didn’t do a whole lot for adding more calories, especially during the dry season, but he benefited psychologically from the opportunity to eat freely and I assume he did feel fuller at least to some degree. He came to count on my arrival and I felt endeared by his anticipation of my opening of his enclosure gate.
Most of the activity that I tried with Vegas was in the form of the popular natural horsemanship techniques that were embraced at the ranch. One of my friends there had an affinity for Native American culture and she favored Gawani Pony Boy’s version. It was appealing to feel like one was tapping into an indigenous ancestral vein of horse-human relationships. In truth, the principles behind the techniques of each brand variation were the same. My naivete about what it really meant to be in a relationship with a horse, (and what I know now was not being fully addressed), had me thinking that I understood more than I did and that success was when the horse told you what you wanted to hear, (even it it wasn’t the truth).
He withstood my directions to move out in the round pen motivated by a swish of a long lunge whip, as I looked for engagement between us that I ultimately expected to manifest as his willing respect of my leadership (a mantra of natural horsemanship), but he mostly looked emotionally resigned and checked out and physically braced for punishment.
The English or Western question was eventually answered for me by Vegas himself when I learned that his experience and training after the track was for one or more of English sports.The disciple’s girlfriend was also accustomed to riding English making it the primary reason that she even rode Vegas, I think, using her own saddle since the ranch tack room had only Western gear. I stuck to bareback on the rare occasions I did get on his back. At most the girlfriend came out on one of the weekend days so that was a day I stayed away. Otherwise I showed up at the ranch daily to help with the feeding and mucking in general, but specifically to pay attention to Vegas.
Finally, with my basic educational preparations met and heartfelt desire for a horse of my own still burning I broached the subject of buying Vegas. The proprietor was gruff, if not down right mean about it, maybe feeling that my move was to save the horse from him as much as it was for me to have my own horse. We agreed on a price that wasn’t too much, really, though my friends felt that the proprietor should have just given the horse to me for how much he didn’t want him and the poor condition into which he had fallen.
In a short time after the deal was done I was able to feed the horse to his needs and his appearance quickly improved. I had his teeth floated and examinations by a veterinarian that set his return to health in motion. When asked what I did to achieve the rapid improvement in appearance, the honest answer was that I simply fed him more. With that it was clear to others that the proprietor had been negligent in this regard and our interactions sunk into discord. I was saddened by this, but my responsibility was to the horse.
As soon as I had made arrangements for new accommodations, I had an uncomfortable discussion with the proprietor about how I couldn’t stay there, a sentiment he shared. I chose to leave with the horse when the proprietor was not around. I left a note of sincere gratitude to him before I drove out the gate with a horse of my own.