Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Lots of little things...

Over the past week and a half we have been cleaning our corral out. There are over 1ft of wet, soggy manure that we didn't want there. It was awful!! We were supposed to get a guy with a tractor to come clean it out but with all the rain we had the guy said that his tractor would get stuck..... so started the process of cleaning it out....... by hand. It was a HUGE job but we finally finished it on Monday. I was so happy!!!

Anyways the point of me telling you all that was that while we were cleaning the corral out I got to spend some wonderful time with the horses!!! Prince and I had some fun playing at Liberty and just hanging out. Twosox and I were able to just spend some time with each other. It really paid off because I have NEVER seen Twosox so relaxed when he is around me!! It was wonderful!

I also got to play around a lot with the horses feet. I carried my hoof pick out with me each day just in case I got the chance to pick up any of the horses feet. It was really interesting because on one of the days we were working in there I had to ask Prince to move out of the way so we could take a wheel barrel load of manure out, so I asked him to go sideways over..... well earlier that day my mom had to move him and so she asked him to move his hind quarters over and he just walked off but since he moved out of her way she let it go. I think it happened a couple other times also so when I asked him to move over sideways Prince was like "Yeah right!" and he walked off..... well I couldn't just leave it there right?? So I followed through with what I was asking. We ended up going all the way out of the corral, up the hill, back down the hill, into the corral again, and then finally Prince disengaged his hind quarters. Then I asked him to go back over to where he was before he ran off and then I asked him to go sideways... but not just normal sideways.... I asked for quicker, snappy sideways!!!! This time Prince responded and went sideways really nicely!!! I then relaxed and went back to shoveling...... It was so funny to see the look on Prince's face when I left!! 

The horses were really curios about us. It was really neat. Knightly would come and stand right side you and want you to scratch him, and he wouldn't leave until you did. He is funny!! One day I was cleaning out around the manger and of course I couldn't exactly have four horses there or else I would have been taking the ground from under them. So I sent them all away. It was interesting to see how each horse dealt with it. Prince I hardly had to do anything, he didn't even try coming back!! Ruffy moved but tried to get back to the manger a couple times but then he went over to Prince and they slept together. Knightly was positive that I had sent the other horses away so that he could eat. Every time I moved even a little bit away from the manger Knightly wouldn't start to move in. Finally he got the idea that he couldn't eat either so he went and stood in the shelter. Then there was Twosox..... my sweet RBI boy. He figured out that if he was really really sweet and softly came in and moved when ever I asked him to that he was fine and could eat. I have a soft spot for RBI ;)

It was funny because on that same day when I had to climb out of the corral for a minute, as soon as I was gone all of the horses came right back in and when I came in they all left. I guess they figured out who was the Alpha mare ;) hehe

So yeah, even though it wasn't the best of jobs it was great to be able to hang around with the horses!!

~K

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