Stella

Stella’s Fairytale

Stella came to us as a shell of the horse she is today. I found an ad for Stella on Kijiji, she was the height and build of horse that I am always drawn to for trail horses. She was backed (that is to say someone had sat on her before) but I definitely would not have called her broke to ride (fully trained). It was obvious that Stella had some trauma from her past, she was very nervous around men at the beginning of our lives together. Stella needed some time to learn how to trust people before we could work on training her to be ridden.

Stella took a long time to coax onto the trailer that day in July of 2023 when I picked her up from her rescuers place in Orangeville. After two hours of trying to load her I promised Stella if she would just get on the trailer a better life was waiting for her and she would never have to go on the trailer again. I have kept that promise to this day and I hope that Stella would agree that getting on that trailer was the best decision she ever made.

From the moment Stella stepped off the trailer at Tranquil Woods Trail Rides Diesel was incredibly interested in her. My plan was to give Stella a couple days in the small field by herself to adjust to life in a new home before slowly introducing her to the rest of the herd. Unfortunately for me and the fence Diesel had his own plan. When I arrived back at the farm early the next morning I found the fence between the large paddock and small field completely annihilated. Diesel apparently could not contain himself for even a few hours without getting to know this beautiful girl. He went right through the wire fence breaking off three fence posts at the ground. Fortunately Diesel did not hurt himself doing this and he and Stella have been inseparable ever since.

I believe that Diesel is the reason that Stella learned to trust me as quickly as she did, not that the process could be considered fast by any stretch of the imagination. Stella, like all trauma survivors, had to process things at her own pace. The hardest part of training Stella was the amount of patience required to let her do that. Stella had found someone to trust, but it wasn’t me for a long time, it was Diesel. He became her emotional support horse and showed her what it was to be loved and cared for by kind humans. I took full advantage of the bond between Diesel and Stella to progress through Stella’s training. Stella would follow Diesel to the ends of the earth so if Diesel was going for a ride I made sure that Stella and I were going too. At first it was the only way that Stella would leave the farm to walk on the trails. Slowly Stella got used to the trails that are now familiar to her, then she was able to be ridden by certain confident riders other than myself.

It was the summer of 2024 before Stella was hitting the trails regularly. She was given time to settle into the follower role that is still her preference. I then started asking Stella to go on the trails without her emotional support “Husband” as Diesel was by then known as. It was a hard sell but by that point she was much more trusting of me and begrudgingly did as I asked. Today Stella is a calm, confident, independent woman.