Crow Hopping

So if you’re not an avid horse lover, you may not know what Crow Hopping is when dealing with horse terms.

Crow Hop – A style of bucking where a horse arches its back and takes short, stiff hops. All four legs come off the ground, but usually not very far; with some horses the back legs barely clear the ground. When a horse crow hops all four legs hang straight down, i.e., the horse does not kick up high with the back legs.
Crow hopping is usually considered a milder form of bucking. For example: “My horse didn’t buck hard today, he just crow hopped a little.” However, it can still be dangerous and many riders have been bucked off by crow hopping horses.

Earlier this summer my dad had the unfortunate incident happen.  Normally crow hopping is ride able, you just dig in and hang on.  Sadly though he was working Mini Me and I guess Mini Me just decided he’d had enough and wasn’t going to work anymore for dad.  The even sadder part was dad was about ready to quit.  One last move because he wanted to end the day on a high note.

Let’s just say that didn’t happen.  Now my dad has been riding horses since he was walking so knowing how to ride a horse isn’t out of his realm, but something happened and Mini Me caught dad off guard.  Dad wound up on the ground as the result.

We also sadly learned that my dad doesn’t bounce like he used to and wound up having to have surgery to put his collar bone back together; it was broken in 3 pieces.  OUCH!

So last night I was looking through my emails trying to get them out of my inbox (some days they stack up)  and I ran across this email my dad sent to me that was between him and his co-worker around the time this happened.  First he explained to Steve what Crow Hopping was and Steve came back with this:

And a disclaimer: I promise, No horses were harmed in the making of this blog post… only dad’s collar bone was affected 🙂  I promise, Mini Me is doing just fine!

Happy Friday y’all!