Building Character

There are some behaviors in horses that I just can't stand.   One of them is food-fussiness, whether it's pacing the fenceline, pawing the ground, rattling buckets, charging the feeder, or what have you -- essentially when the horses get incredibly obnoxious around feeding time.  For this reason, I mix up the little barn's feeding times regularly, sometimes shifting them around as much as a few hours.  The average feeding times are 9AM and 5PM, but I've fed breakfast as early as 5AM when I needed to drive out of state for the day, and as late as noon when I had a day off and REALLY needed to sleep in.  Dinner can be anywhere from 3 to 8PM, depending on the day and when they were fed in the morning.  Everyone lives outside, on grass, and gets more than enough hay to see them from one feeding to the next, so no one is in danger of starving or sitting around without anything to keep their mouths and guts busy.  Meals stop being such an event, and there's less drama in general when the grain cart comes around.

I'm not above letting a horse go hungry (read: without a grain dinner) for the night... They don't quite see the world in cause-and-effect the way we do, but they do catch on pretty quickly that they only get fed when they can be caught, for instance.  Since I'm usually feeding by myself, I demand that all the horses act safely when I'm handling them -- it's better for me, and better for the adoptables and sale horses when they go on to their next homes.  Since I don't usually have hours and hours to spend walking a horse down in the pasture, I give them a small window in which to come around.  Like I said, they generally figure it out.

Willie is your typical food-motivated gelding, but after seven years with me he knows the deal.   He knows he will never miss a meal, but he also knows he won't get his food a second before I say so.  No pushing, no shoving, no pawing or pacing or rattling.  Instead he usually quivers his nostrils off and sometimes, on the days when I'm really slow, we get the Standardbred Head Flip.  He doesn't get unruly or distracted when everyone else on the farm is eating and he still has to work.  

Jabby, on the other hand... Jabby still has some learning to do. 

My boys were out in the pony pen for an hour or so while I finished up chores, since it was still too warm to put their blankets on and it's the only place on the farm that still has any respectable grass.  The last thing I needed to do before heading home was feed my two, so I figured I would dump their dinners in their feed pans, then grab blankets and toss them back out to eat -- they stay at their own buckets without fighting or swapping, which is handy for me.  I had to walk past them to get to their field, so of course I was followed by a chorus of nickers and four hungry eyes. I threw on Jabby's blankets first, since he had a liner under his sheet, but as soon as I tossed the sheet over his back, I knew some naughtiness was about to unfold. I stepped back as he squealed, whirled, and power-trotted off, sending the sheet sliding over his butt and kicking out at it in indignation.  (This, my friends, is why you never buckle the leg straps first.  Also, why you tie your horses to blanket them.  Ahem.)

I stood in the middle of the pen and let him run and buck.  After about five minutes, I grabbed Willie, who had been trying to avoid the drama as best as possible, and removed him from the enclosure.   I went to catch Jabby, but he was still having his tizzy.  So I sent him on his way again, grabbed the camera, and made him work it out.  When he stood quietly at the gate for a few more minutes, I called him over, and when he walked up calmly and dropped his head for the lead rope, I tied him to the fence and finished blanketing.   Then we took a long walk around the farm, retrieved his brother, and brought them both out to pasture. When I unhaltered Jabby, I asked him to stand next to me a moment more before letting him go to his dinner.

It's a long road to being a Good Citizen Pony, and I'm a heartless taskmaster... But it's worth it in the end.  Eventually maybe Jabby will grow up to be Willie, who falls asleep in the Invisible Crossties while being clipped.

One can hope, anyway.