@johnbishop Oh my.... snorting and prancing would be the first clue not to get on that horse unless you are a jockey in a race..... oh the dangerous things we do when we're young. You want a horse that is calm and drops his head and even licks his lips. That's when they are happy and relaxed. You need a healthy respect for horses, but they need to respect you. If they don't, you will be getting onto an animal that is unsafe and bigger and stronger and you run the risk of an injury. A horse is a prey animal and if spooked, it will run first and ask questions later, so you need to be prepared to stay balanced if that should happen. It's happened to me when a speeding semi truck barreled past us in a residential area when I was riding with my sister. Our horses took off at a gallop and we steered them away from the road and then circled them to stop them in someone's front yard. You can't stop them when they are reacting because they won't be thinking about their training when they panic. The guy should not have put you up there. He may not have understood horses and safety and he should have been able to figure out your skill level by looking at you and your confidence level, and I bet that horse ran around that track a lot. They develop habits and will often guess what they think you want because of what they did last time. I hope that didn't ruin horses for you. The reason it works at all is respect, and you have to demonstrate you are in charge and the horse will accept you as a leader. You do that by giving correct signals when riding and not allowing the horse to avoid your requests, and praising desired behavior. When I was a kid in riding class, another horse passed me which they were not supposed to do because some of the horses would kick. That made my horse bolt, and then come to a sudden stop, and on an English saddle with nothing to grab, I went over his head. What I grabbed was the horse's neck, and my legs flew up and around and I found myself hanging underneath his neck right behind his head. My feet didn't touch the ground and I let go and dropped a few inches to the dirt. That might seem like a funny thing to a bunch of kids and you were lucky. Did you tell your parents or was that one of your secrets?