Carolyn Richens’ once-in-a-lifetime horse, Monas Little Guy, better known as Moses, has not only given her years of affection and joy, he also gave her a new lease on life.

This article originally appeared in the April 29, 2009, issue of Barrel Horse News Regional Report.

   Just about everyone who owns a horse, believes that their horse is special, but the truly special ones are exceedingly rare. Those horses that seem to have a sense about them most ordinary animals don’t are few and far between. They are old souls, with an intelligence and sense about them that is unlike 99.9 percent of their kind. If you’re lucky, you get to see a horse like that in action, maybe even meet it in person. If you’re luckier still, you own such a horse, and that horse changes the course of your life.
   For Carolyn Richens, her relationship with recent Silver Spur Award runner-up Monas Little Guy (“Moses”) gave her the strength to overcome her own adversity and to inspire and touch the lives of others.
“I just thought it was a regular relationship anyone would have with one of their regular horses,” she says. “Then I had my major relapse with MS, and that’s when I realized, after what we went through, that all the years I’ve loved him, he has loved me right back.”
   Richens, 41, of Pittsfield, Maine, was diagnosed in 1995 with Multiple Sclerosis (MS), a disease in which the nerves of the brain and spinal cord are attacked by the body’s immune system, causing the electrical signals the brain and spinal cord transmit to be disrupted or stopped altogether and resulting in loss of muscle control, vision, balance and sensation.
   After recovering from the initial assault of the disease, which had left her temporarily blinded, Richens set out to purchase a barrel horse as a gift to herself.
   “I had just been diagnosed with MS, so I wanted to treat myself to something,” she says. “I had just about given up on finding a horse, and someone gave me the name of Dale Baker, who lives in Ohio, and I called Dale, and he found Mo for me.”
   Baker bought Moses, a former racehorse gelding by Jet View and out of Shesas Credit, by Bugged Credit, for Richens without her having met either of them.
   “He came off the track, and then he sat in the pasture,” she says of the then 6-year-old. “He didn’t know anything, and that’s where we began, from scratch.”
   The purchase was made in the middle of winter, and since Richens lived in Maine, Moses spent five months with Baker, until Spring came and she was able to pick him up.
   “Dale was breeding barrel horses, and I couldn’t have stumbled onto a better person to come into contact with,” Richens says. “I can’t say enough about him. He taught me about barrel racing and about pole bending, and he just mentored me.”
   In the beginning the relationship between Richens and Moses wasn’t perfect by any means. They spent their first few years together running races, but fighting against each other.
   “He’s a very flighty horse,” she says. “He was afraid of everything. So many times I was ready to give up on him and sell him.”
   One day, after someone asked her why she didn’t go ahead and sell Moses because she had ruined him as a barrel horse, her outlook on Moses changed.
   “Instead of me trying to make him fit my mold, I decided I was going to fit into what he wanted me to be as a rider,” she says.
   It was a decision that opened the door to their relationship and brought about their first round of successes.
   “I didn’t try to make Mo run barrels like everyone else did,” Richens says. “Mo couldn’t seem to wrap a barrel. He would turn, dart at the barrel and spin around on his back legs and take off, and I took advantage of that. I thought ‘I’m not going to change this horse. I’ll let him do that,’ and the more I let him do everything on his own, the more trust we built in each other. I think, now, I was starting to have fun barrel racing, instead of it being such a chore because we just kept pulling back and forth at each other.”

The Horse of a Lifetime

   In 2002, Richens suffered a major relapse with her MS. She could barely walk was at her lowest point emotionally because the thought of never riding Moses again terrified her.
   “I remember thinking I would never be able to ride again because nothing I did in life was very good,” she says. “I wasn’t a standout at anything, but I could ride Moses. I was known as ‘Moses and Carolyn,’ that I could ride barrel horses, and now I couldn’t do anything.”
   After starting a new treatment regimen, the worst of the relapse began to recede, and she slowly started to feel better and stronger, enough so that when her husband, Steve, finally went back to work, she took the opportunity to sneak down to the barn.
   It was a decision that changed the course of her life.
   “And there was Moses,” she says, a hint of awe in her voice even today. “He was all excited. It had been a long time since I’d been out to the barn.
   “I remember taking him out of his stall, and at that moment, everything seemed to stop. While I was brushing him, I could smell everything in the barn; the leather, the hay, the sawdust. I could hear the birds; things that I had taken for granted. I realized then I would never let that happen again.”
   Giving in to the thrill of the moment, Richens decided to saddle him up and walk him around outside.
   “As I was walking out, I could feel my heart pounding, and Mo started dancing and just doing everything he could to show me how excited he was,” she says. “He thought he was going for a ride.
   “I realized then, if I put my foot in that stirrup, he’s going to take off, and there’s no way I’m going to be able to hang onto this horse,” she says.
   Taking off the second a rider’s foot hit the stirrup, whether the rider was ready or not, was a habit Moses had developed early on, and it was something Richens had never been able to break him of.
   “I started crying,” she says, “and I went to put him back in his stall, and I saw that long path back to the house, and I thought ‘I made it all the way out here, what do I have to lose?’ Because at that point, I had lost everything, so I said ‘you know what, if something happens it doesn’t matter. I’m with my horse.’”
   Standing there, she devised a plan to hold on to the horn as she slid her foot in the stirrup and, as fast as she could, whip her leg over the side and just keep holding on to the horn as Moses took off.
   But plans rarely go the way they are intended.
   “I grabbed the horn, and I lifted myself up, and instead of that leg swinging over like it was supposed to, instead I just flopped over the side of his back,” she says, laughing. “You know when you have that absolute terror, and you’re so terrified, you know, your heart is in your throat. You know something bad is going to happen. I thought ‘he’s going to take off, and I’m going to die.’”
   That’s when Richens says Moses made his move. Instead of taking off like he had done his entire life, he simply stood there, gently rocking from side to side.
   “It was almost like he was trying to push my limp leg back into the other side of the stirrup,” she says, “and as I’m trying to go with the rock, I’m not realizing what he’s trying to do. I’m just thinking he’s going to take off.
   “I remember, I finally got my foot in the stirrup, and I’m still holding on to the horn with one hand, and now I’m gripping it with both hands, and I take a deep breath, and all he did after that was make this huge knicker, and he walked off, which is something he never did,” Richens says. “Moses doesn’t walk.
   “I tell people that’s when I realized he had loved me all those years just like I loved him,” she says. “I never thought I had that special horse. My horse was my horse. He was my pet, and I loved him, but I didn’t think animals did things like that.”
For about a month, it was hard for her to get Moses, who rarely slowed down enough to walk anywhere, to do anything else. As she got stronger, he slowly began to let himself go more, until he finally ran again.

Back in the Saddle

   Her eventual return to competition elicited astonishment from some, concern from others, but Richens and Moses were on a mission to run at the 2002 American Quarter Horse Congress.
   Richens’ early runs at the event were disastrous, from simply running poorly to inadvertently sitting in the stands when her number was called to race. She wasn’t on her game, and she was letting it affect her.
   “I felt sorry for myself, and I felt like I didn’t belong,” she says. “And I remember my husband saying ‘just remember why you’re here. It’s not because you have MS. It’s because you’re afraid of what MS might do to you someday. This is what finally got you to a place you should have been a long time ago.’ And he was right.”
   Richens and Moses’ Senior Pole Bending run of 20.405 landed them an 8th place finish, and cemented them as one of the top pole bending teams in the country.
   “We ran the fastest we ever did because I finally let my horse do his job instead of me worrying about everything else,” Richens says. “He went on the very next year, and he won the Maine State National Barrel Horse Association championship (in barrel racing) in 2003, in 2004-2006, he was third place in the 1D in barrel racing.”
   Today, Richens uses her success riding Moses, and the motivation he gave her to fight to recover from the effects of MS, to motivate others as an MS Ambassador. She tells her story to groups around the country to inspire and give hope to others with MS.
   “People don’t know pole bending, but people know what barrel racing is, and when they see the pictures I flash up on the screen, and they see the power that Mo has. There are patients in the audience and they could have been newly diagnosed or had it for 10 or 20 years, and they can see this girl is still riding. She’s still doing things, and it really inspires a lot of people, and that’s how he got nominated (for the Silver Spur).
   “Moses has a big fan base,” she says. “He inspired a lot of people, knowing that a horse of that caliber could take care of you. I go around the country telling people about him, and Moses is the whole story behind it because people can relate to animals and what they do.”
   Now 19 years old, Moses no longer races.
   “He’s fully retired, fat and happy,” Richens says. “He earned his spot on my farm forever. He will never leave. That is my obligation. I owe him that for everything he’s done for me.”
   While she freely admits that she is lucky to own Moses, she hopes that people don’t wait for adversity to see the special creatures that are right there in front of them.
   “It’s not just my horse, or these other horses we hear about,” she says. “We all have that special horse right inside our barn. Sometimes we just seem to have a blind eye to it until something bad happens. All of us have that special horse. It’s sitting there in our barn right now.”

Michael Mahaffey is associate editor of Barrel Horse News. E-mail comments on this article to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

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