I am very ashamed to admit to you that I grew up in Arizona and Texas wearing cowboy hats and boots and never in my life had I ever heard of what the kids are calling “horse drifting,” which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like.
No, I am not talking about the infamous Bollywood classic, Alluda Majaaka!, where the guy slides a horse under a truck. Instead, it’s this tweet I saw a couple of weeks ago that I have not been able to stop thinking about:
This tweet has changed my life.
I can’t help but feel that every decision I’ve made up to this point has been a horrible mistake. There is an entire community of people out there at rodeos, which I have heard of, getting a damn horse to slide like the silly end of a horribly tuned RX-7 on a drift circuit.
Here’s the original clip from the Charra Int’l De Las Americas Facebook page with over 2.2 million views:
Here’s another one from that same page:
Here’s a really good one:
As incredible as it is to see all these horses’ training and hard work pay off in front of a crowd as they try to slide their hinds as far as possible, I’m a little wary of how much physical strain this puts on the horse.
And before Raphael Orlove’s eyes burst of his head at me referring to this as drifting, I only am because that’s what the kids on social media are calling it. It’s a meme thing. Clearly this is more like horse-emergency-braking.
Here’s just one more video of the horses practicing:
And if you want to see what I would consider legitimate horse drifting, there are videos of horse-and-buggy slides out there: