Out of Order

Not as in broken, but as in not in chronological order. I'm so far behind on the blog that I am just trying to post things as I remember them. I post most stuff "in real time" (sort of) on our FB page.

Back in April, when I was looking to take Skeeter to our 40-hour Spring Training for the Posse (which didn't happen), I wanted to give her as much of an advantage as I could. I know that balloons and kids and fairs all go hand-in-hand, so I thought it would be a good idea to torture desensitize the horses to balloons.

On April 16, I set off to the store to buy a dozen, not thinking about how icky I would feel once they were loaded in my car. I'd just started re-reading IT and the night before just read the passage about the thousands of balloons lined up under the bridge. I put the balloons in the car, sat in the driver's seat and had a "moment".

No, Pennywise was not with these balloons. I had to keep telling myself that.

On the way home, I plotted how I was going to handle the introduction. If I just tied them to the fence, the horses would simply go to the other side of the pen and ignore the scary things. If there were going to be fireworks, I didn't want to be in the pen with them initially, so I had to come up with some way to lure them *to* the balloons.

Having food-motivated horses sometimes makes things very easy. I decided to tie the balloons to their big feed tub and put goodies in there that they couldn't live without (black oil sunflower seeds and grandma cookies).


In case you don't have 13 minutes and change to watch the horses figure out the balloons, here are some stills. Skeeter, being so food motivated, was the first to approach, followed closely by Pearl. Only when Copper was certain the balloons weren't horse-eating ghosties did he approach.

I was thankful for the breeze, as it caused the balloons to move erratically - sometimes the horses got bonked in the face by the colorful ghosties and they didn't die.

Eventually the balloons became a complete non-issue, so I tied them to the fence just to keep them in the horses' minds.

You can see how concerned they were.

I ended up having to take the balloons down the next day because someone (I don't know which) had started to pop them and I worried about them inhaling pieces of balloon. When I took them down, I stood by the fence and popped every single one of the remaining ghosties with my pocket knife while the horses looked on, very disappointed that I was taking their toys away.

I'm going to call balloon training a success.

Goofing Around (Picture heavy)

There are some really cute videos of horses playing with toys floating around Facebook. There's the one of the horse playing with the squeaky toy and then there's this one of a horse playing with a giant stuffed animal. The videos are great fun to watch, and it gave me ideas for more desensitizing, so a few weeks ago I headed to the toy store.

I picked out a couple of squeaky dog toys at one store, and when the cashier was checking me out, he asked what kind of dog I had. He was a bit surprised when I told him the toys were for our horses and asked if they liked dog toys. Who knows? They've been playing with a milk jug full of rocks, maybe they'll appreciate the dog toys.

The first store I went to didn't have giant stuffed animals, so I went to a different store. There were some amazingly huge stuffed animals, but I had no intention of going broke for a toy that was going to get dragged through horse poop.

Horse toys

Allie-bird asked nicely for one of the toys. I caved.

Impatiently, I waited for Jay to come home from work so we could go play with the horses. I wanted to see what they would do. Skeeter is usually very curious and brave, so I expected that she would be the first to play with the new toys. Oh boy, was I wrong! Miss Pearl and Copper were the brave ones. Skeeter took a sniff and then went away.

It really wasn't too terribly exciting. We could have caught the horses and forced the issue, but I prefer to let them explore on their own. We played with the toys for a while, then L.E. came over and played for a bit as well. As much as Skeeter pretends she doesn't want to play with the monkey, she claimed it when L.E. was playing with her.

Copper claimed the giant bunny and will allow the others to sniff, but if they thought about playing with it, he moved them away from it. Eventually the new wore off, so we tied the toys to the sacrificial post just to see what they would do.

The sacrificial post amused us two-leggeds a lot more than it amused the four-leggeds. We got bored of watching them do nothing with the critters and went back in the house. A bit later, I looked out the window just in time to see Skeeter rip the monkey's face clean off. She had taken him off of the pole, had one foot on his belly and his face in her mouth. Game over for the monkey.

RIP Sad Monkey

I fetched the monkey from the pen, along with the guts I didn't want them snuffling up. Poor Skeeter looked so forlorn about the fact I took her monkey away that I felt bad and finished gutting it, so she could have the 'hide' back to play with.

About an hour later, Jay looked out the window to see the rabbit carnage strewn about the pen. The rabbit was much larger than the monkey and had a lot more guts for us to clean up. A lot more.

RIP Floppy Bunny. You were a good bunny.

I'm going to pat ourselves on our backs for doing a reasonably good job of desensitizing the horses - these were scary things and they didn't care one whit. They were just boring to watch with them. No fun crazy horse videos from our place, that's for sure.