Like a Dog, Only Bigger

It's six-thirty am and my horse is bugling at the house. I, the antithesis of a morning person, am thinking dark thoughts about glue factories and horse steaks.

Bleary-eyed, I tromp out to to the barn, where the Wonder Horse awaits, stamping, snorting, and registering his displeasure over a marginally late breakfast. I fumble around in the barn, find his fly mask and enter the paddock. Just as I finish dressing him for another fly-ridden day, I notice something black and disheveled by the fence.

He follows, clearly pleased with himself, as I investigate. The lump turns out to be the remains of a roll of landscape fabric. My neighbor had left it by the fence, and the WH yank it through and shredded it like tissue paper.

Wonder Horse, now bored, flits off, tail in the air, toward his feeder. Hint, hint, hint. I stuff the remains back under the fence and head off to get the beast his breakfast. Hey. It's not my problem. The neighbor should know better than to leave anything within WH's reach.

Non-horse people tend to think of horses as big, dull-witted, docile creatures that stand in fields, placidly munching hay. In truth, they are a lot more like destructive dogs. Twelve-hundred pound, destructive dogs.

Equine Pedicure 101

Accomplished today:

Both lawns mowed and the horse's feed are trimmed. The latter accomplished with no bloodshed on the part of human or equine.

Usually, the Wonder Horse squirms, the nippers or knife slips and somebody--me usually--bleeds.

Today when he started squirming, I said, "Keep it up and I'm painting your hooves with sparkly, purple nail polish and putting matching bows in your mane and tail."

He stopped squirming. (For a second.)

The real trick. I filled his feeder with hay, chopped carrots and alfalfa pellets. He ate. I hacked away at his feet.

Most horse trainers would probably grumble that I was bribing my horse for good behavior. Whot-evah! I could waste hours dealing with a training issue in the hot, sticky heat. Or I could do this.

Pick your battles.

Sympathetic Pains

I’m in the midst of sympathetic pains. For horse colic.

Think sympathetic pregnancy pains, then cut out the cute infant at the end of the process, and substitute a really sick horse.

This morning, while I was out watering the garden and squashing squash bugs, I noticed my neighbors were walking their horse. Around and around their property.

And my own stomach is tied up in little knots.

Every horse owner knows the scenario. You come out to find your horse is down and won’t get up. Or he’s yo-yo-ing up and down, intersperses with frantic bouts of rolling. Either way, you know it’s time to call the vet. And wait.

In the meantime, you put a halter on your horse and march him around the grounds, because sometimes–rarely, really–all this continuous walking cures the colic. More likely, it was a bad case of gas colic and it cures itself. But let the forced marching begin.

The vet arrives. She listens to the horse’s stomach, sometimes shoves a gloved hand up his rear, or a tube down his nose and to his stomach. Gives the horse a shot of a pain killer. She then shrugs and hands you a bill for a few hundred bucks and leaves.

At which point, your beloved equine friend gets better quickly or things get really ugly, expensive or fatal, really fast.

I nearly lost the Wonder Horse to a bad colic several years ago. To this day, the poor beast can’t take a nap without me running out and asking, “Are you all right?"