A Lesson In Clumsy Horses

So, I don’t know how many of you know this or not, but I found out recently that when someone is barrel racing with a horse, rodeo stylee, and the horse falls down or runs into a barrel or throws the rider, it is known as a “horse wreck.”

I’m not kidding. In rodeo-land, horses actually wreck.

I can’t stop giggling about this one.

I have seen plenty of animals fall down in my lifetime. I have personally spent at least 80 hours of my life trying to find a way to trip a dog. I’ve seen ducks fall down, penguins, goats, sheep, dogs, cats, even a bird once. NEVER did I say to myself, “Wow, I just watched a goat wreck.”

Apparently I was watching the wrong animals if I wanted to see a wreck.

And before you start thinking I am making this shit up, I got it from 2 sources (both rodeo barrel riders) in different conversations about what happens when you fall off the horse. You are in a horse wreck, naturally, you silly ass bastard.

So I promised them that I would come up with a better term for them to use the next time their horse is involved in an “incident” because, honestly, the word ‘wreck’ has a connotation that REQUIRES metal to be involved in it as far as I am concerned. Cars wreck, motorcycles wreck, boats wreck, bicycles wreck. Horses DO NOT wreck.

The problem I am running into right now is that I am drawing a blank on what term should be used instead of wreck. I looked up some synonyms but none of them quite do justice to the video in my head of a horse falling down.

I thought I might try to go with a celebrity name, i.e. “I’m in the hospital because my horse Oprah’ed on me and there were limbs twisted everywhere.” Or, “Holy shit, did you see that Rosie at the Kentucky Derby? It was like a 7 horse pileup.”

But I don’t think so. I think this one is going to have to be a completely new, never-before-seen type of word, mostly because I don’t want Oprah suing me and the thought of Rosie O’Donnell kind of makes me want to poop on myself or on people next to me.

So here are some choices I have come up with. Please, help me out and vote for your favorite, or add your own candidate, because I told the barrel racers who keep “wrecking” their horses that I would have a better word for them by this Friday:

dernk brangle gord smalmatation dobble
briange blat chingle trammterfuge boof
charkle stintch carntock mantelflam trink

Oh, and for those who care about tripping a dog, the consensus on this maneuver is that you need to be laying on the floor and the dog has to be running past you and not paying attention to you while you stick both of your arms out, catching both the front and the back legs at EXACTLY the same instant.

Sure it’s kind of mean, but the laughter that results will MORE than make up for any guilt you might have about tripping your dog.

Oh, and cats deserve to be tripped. And so do ducks.

B!