When I was an undergraduate, I attended a country university in northern NSW. I lived in a farmhouse on 22 acres about 15km from the university. I had one horse named Luke, a Percheron/Arab gelding. Each month, I attended the local show jumping club in town with Luke for some friendly competition and training days.
Some people were breeding Percheron horses in a town about 40km away. They were very interested in the competition success I was having with my Percheron cross. But times were hard because we were in the 6th year of what was going to be an 8-year drought. The Percheron breeder contacted me and asked if I could temporarily home one of their mares that was pregnant and had a foal at foot. I had expressed an interest in the mare the year before. My new friends offered me the choice of the foal at foot or the foal in utero in return for looking after the mare and foal. I accepted and said I really liked the foal at foot. It was an 8-month-old pure Percheron colt.
Eventually, the drought broke, and the owners could take the mare home with the younger foal. I kept the 2-year-old that I had gelding by this stage. I named him China because he was my best mate and, as everybody knows in Australia, describing somebody as “China plate” is rhyming slang for mate. So China was my best mate.
I did not own a horse trailer, so each month, I would ride the 15 km into town on Luke for the show jumping day, and China would come along with me. He would follow behind and stay in the yards at the grounds until I was ready to ride home again. China grew big and cumbersome. He had legs like tree trunks and shoulders like a bodybuilder. But the biggest of all was his head. It was enormous, like a moose. China was no centrefold.
Some of the people at the club would joke about China and how ugly he was. It was a running joke that he would never be able to heave his huge bulk off the ground to jump a cavaletti, let alone an oxer.
Eventually, I broke him in and started riding him around the property and in the bush. He was rising 4 when I woke up one day and decided to get serious about training China for dressage and jumping. I knew he would be very limited in his capacity to compete in dressage, but I was not so sure about jumping because I had seen how athletic he could be. The first day I tried to catch him as a yearling, he had jumped out of the round yard without touching the 6-foot fence. I worked on his flat work training nearly every day. He was smart and quick to learn. I was having a ball training him.
Finally, at around 5 years of age, I decided to make a jumping lane in the paddock and see what he could do. I had already lunged China over some small jumps, so I knew he was not afraid. I just wanted to see what sort of scope he had. I started the jumps at only about 2 feet high. After a couple of repetitions, I gradually made them higher. He was doing so well with no sign of worry or tension or stopping, that for the last round I raised the last jumps to around 5 feet. He cleared them easily.
Within a year, China was showing people at the jumping club how it should be done. We even did a demonstration at the local show, which was a big deal but a whole other story.
The interesting thing to me is that suddenly, people stopped calling him ugly. They stopped making jokes about The Titanic and about ploughing through jumps rather than going over them. I heard comments about what a beautiful horse China had grown. I was told how China had the perfect conformation for a show jumper. People asked me about his stud lines and whether the breeder would agree to them putting their mare to China’s sire.
To me, China was the same ugly duck he had always been. I knew he was no oil painting and his conformation was very far from perfect. I also knew that if he fell over the jumps instead of clearing them so easily, people would have continued their jokes. But from the day I first saw him as a yearling, I knew something nobody else at the jumping club knew. I knew what an amazing mind he had. I knew he was smart, brave, and curious. I knew he had the right amount of sensitivity and boldness to make him highly trainable.
I can’t do much about the way a horse is built. His conformation is his business. But I can do a lot with a horse with a good mind. A good mind allows a horse the potential to make the best of his conformation. And a difficult mind almost makes brilliant conformation irrelevant. A horse’s mind and the way it is educated have far more influence on the final result than a horse’s body.
China didn’t live long. He died at 14 of cancer. But when people ask me about the best horse I have had in my life, I can't help but let my thoughts drift back to that little 17hh Percheron who was my best mate.
China as a yearling, shortly after he became mine