Responibility & Compassion

It's been two and a half weeks since Aeolae was euthanized and I still miss her. It's not like I'm going to forget her but I mourn for the lost potential and the fact that she was a good horse. The only consolation is the fact that she was in pain that we couldn't do anything about and we had the responsibility to make sure she had a good life. We couldn't reasonably assure that would happen even with another family; in fact there was a decent chance that she would suffer worse in somebody else's hands. This raised the question of our responsibility to her and to ourselves. I am convinced after months of wrangling with the issues that we did the right thing and released her spirit to run and play without the pain of daily living.

A lot of work

I heard once in an interview done by Pat Parelli that many horse owners don't make it through the first five years of ownership. Those that do tend to be hooked in for the long haul. I'd like to be one of the latter but I can understand why people give up on them. They are an awful lot of work especially when one is getting set up. One of the things that I hope to get done, actually need to get done if I'm going to get real training done and the horses are going to quit being lawn ornaments, is to get a round pen built. That means at this point removing the tree stumps from the designated area since our 58 acres is mostly covered in trees, pounding in the poles and attaching the fencing - I'm thinking of using some orange snow fencing we have for that. I try not to think too much about it since it is aan awful amount of work on top of just taking care of the equines. I am gradually feeling better though and with the beautiful weather we've been having hopefully I'll be up to tackling the project. As it is I am resolved to assist more in the daily care of the horses after a winter of not feeling a good at all and conseqently cutting back on doing everything.

They Do Learn

I found a new way of feeding the horses their beet mash this weekend. They used to scare the living daylights out of me with the way they come at me with such enthusiasm when I'm coming out of the tack room into their shelter with the bowl of beets; they like to start eating from it even before I have put the bowl down. This is something that we definately need to work on with training but that's going to take a while. According to our friend and trainer clicker training should work well for this but I still don't wrap my head around how that works to keep a critter away from you.

The other day though they left their bowl in a very convenient spot for me to dish out their beets in the shelter where I could turn my back to them and they couldn't get at the beets although I had 2 horses very interested in what I was doing. A couple of slaps on the nose each with the spatula and they seem to have gotten the message to give me some space since the last couple of days they've minded their manners and given me the space I need when dishing out their beets.