This week, Jazz showed some maturity in being able to handle indoor-arena traffic, especially when we were cut off by a young rider on a pony. Even a few weeks ago, that sort of pressure would have triggered a buck so fast that he would leave his shoes behind.
Sometimes I wonder, if Jazz is a little immature on the account that he had EPM during the years when he should have been mentally maturing. I'll never really know for sure. [I used to call him my "five-year-old nine-year-old."] One thing is for certain, he has a lot of catching up to do.
I do massage work on another horse that had a difficult upbringing, with some gnarly scars to prove it. Though he's middle-aged, he exhibits some young horse behavior, mostly silly mouthiness, and has a slight, immature-looking build for a registered quarter horse, enough so that I thought of Jazz and made a mental note to find out if others have come across this phenomenon.