Kelly and I were introduced to the Mounted Shooting sport in 2020 and we signed up super last minute to attend a clinic for beginner’s in July of 2020. We took Spur and Wrangler, Ronnie was 4 months old. (Read my blog post about that experience here!)
I was drawn to Mounted Shooting for a few reasons:
- I love shooting. I have no desire to hunt, but I enjoy target practicing.
- Mounted Shooting puts a huge emphasis on horsemanship. Their are 80+ patterns (or “stages”) so your horse has to be with you the entire time, there is no auto pilot.
- Every person I have encountered in the sport has been kind and welcoming.
But it’s also pretty cost prohibitive to get started, because you need so much specialized gear/equipment. Then add in the fact that it’s pretty intimidating to introduce your horse to gunfire OR costly to purchase a horse already trained.
However, I haven’t given up on being enamored with it and hoping that someday I would have the opportunity to pursue it further.
When I saw a beginner’s clinic in my neck of the woods, I didn’t hesitate to sign up. Ronnie is 5 this year and at the time I signed up, I figured I would have a couple months to fine tune some things and really get us prepared to go learn something new and have some fun. Then all the sudden the clinic was next week and I was… terrified. We had been working pretty diligently on refinement but we were still having good days and bad days and I was still not super confident in my leadership to get us through something like MOUNTED SHOOTING.
The day of the clinic, my alarm went off earlier than normal so I would have time to do my morning chores and get on the road and my first thought was “I would rather stay in bed where it’s safe than go do something scary”. And that’s hard to admit, but it’s true. However, Ronnie didn’t know what was in store for the day so he happily shoved his nose in the halter and loaded up to go on an adventure and I love him for that.
I was surprised to learn that the clinic was being held in an indoor arena and I was surprised to search my brain and realize I had never taken Ronnie to an arena of any kind before, indoor or outdoor, let alone one full of balloons, cones, barrels, and gunfire. But here we were, ready to take on the day.
Unlike the last clinic I attended, this clinic focused on horsemanship for the first part of the day. The instructor would give us drills and we would do them, one at a time, while everyone else watched and he called out advice and critiques and sometimes encouragement, and I somehow was selected to go first in all of these drills and yes, this was very much my worst nightmare come to life. But also – I loved it. For someone who hasn’t had riding lessons, it was oddly refreshing to have someone knowledgeable tell me what to do, when to do it, how to correct something, etc. Something I have struggled with Ronnie with, is keeping his attention in busy situations and it was nice to have someone bolster my confidence in that regard. During all of these drills, the clinicians were blowing up and popping balloons randomly from all over the arena.
After lunch, they brought out the guns and we had a quick lesson on the holsters, loading and unloading. Then everyone held their horses on the ground, facing the rest of the arena, and one by one we handed our horse off to someone else to hold and we shot five balloons on foot so we got a feel for the guns and our horses got to see and hear the gunfire.
Then it was time to put it all together and shoot off of our horses.
One by one we were asked to work our horses around the arena until the clinician told us to bring them in to the 5 balloons that were set up and shoot them. For most of us, it took multiple trips around to get all 5 of our shots off – but perhaps nobody got more circles in than Ronnie. I am pretty sure he was the youngest horse there and he definitely had the most energy he was willing to use. Ha!
I was pretty well past nervous by this point, so I was the last person to shoot off my horse in that first go-round. I had seen another gal get bucked off and I felt like Ronnie was a candidate for doing the same thing to me and I was scared to shoot off my horse.
When it was finally our turn, he surpassed my expectations. He didn’t LOVE it, but he wasn’t nearly as worked up as I was about it and he improved so much between our first shot and our tenth shot. I never quit riding or gave in and he put on his big boy cinch and we actually did it!
*Note: The only two times I came close to dying were when his ear plugs popped out and dangled by his eye and he thought the world was ending. After the second time that happened, one of the clinicians let me borrow his own personal horse’s ear plugs that he made himself and those worked SO much better, it was a big relief for both me and Ronnie. (Photo above: so mad about ear plugs!)
Note: This video doesn’t show all of our shots, but it does show our first one and a few subsequent ones so you can see the progression.
One Comment
Thanks for sharing! I’m getting back to riding and this is my dream. Ten years ago I met a fellow nurse who just happened to be a world class mounted shooter….after watching her I was hooked.