buck
(There’s a cameo from Robert Redford in which he is supremely annoying. But otherwise, this is a film that you can safely take your non-horsy significant other to, in the happy expectation of having a long talk about horses afterwards.)
I liked the handsome cowboy fine, and his half-passes on his pretty bay 6yo were good. But I didn’t love him until the terrible, terrible woman who raised her orphan colt with no respect and no boundaries, keeping it IN HER HOUSE, had finally agreed that it was too psychotic to live.
She thought of herself as a kind person but she is not.
We owe horses. We take away their agency, and in return, we are required to look after them. Kind and physically intuitive as they are (and they are kinder and more physically intuitive than you can imagine), domestic horses have to be taught how not to hurt people. An adult horse weighs a thousand pounds, give or take. Neglecting to train horses to be safe around people is morally equivalent to leaving loaded guns around the house.
The cowboy had to get the poor violent horse back onto the truck. The horse knew that it wasn’t going anywhere good. It hated all people. It had every reason. Its owner kept bugging the horse and bugging it, and the cowboy told her to leave it alone.
He stood there in the pen with the mad colt. He didn’t get angry. He didn’t get impatient. He waited until the horse was ready to walk onto the truck. He waited as if there were all the time in the world.
It was one of the few kindnesses anyone had ever shown that colt, and quite possibly the last.
