My pocket smells like carrots
Yes, those are carrots and I am happy to see you. When Mikki and I let our horses out of their stalls each morning, we use a few carrots to coax them out of the barn and into the pasture. I don’t know if we’re helping them develop a bad habit but I often don’t have the time or patience to wait 10 minutes while they inhale leftover hay bits from the barn floor before moseying on out to pasture for the day. Our horses just don’t seem to care if we’re in a hurry or not. But they do care about carrots. So our daily routine has me shoving a pair of carrots in my back pocket and heading for the fence and Mikki heading for the barn where she opens up the gate and horse stalls while I shout tempting statements about how yummy these carrots are and how I’m gonna start eating them myself if the horses don’t come to the fence soon (I’m usually bluffing). This works every time, of course. Carrots disposed of, I sneak a kiss onto Moonshine’s long face while she’s still chewing and head off to do whatever I do each day. And I am not surprised when animals I sometimes encounter follow me and show a keen interest in my rear. This would embarrass some but I know they’re just looking for carrots.
By the way, horses seem to have a good memory. One a few occasions when I’ve had to let them out on my own, they both know exactly where those carrots are sitting. I’ll turn around to open a gate or something and a half-second later feel a carrot or two leaving my back pocket. They really like carrots.
A little side note – we were recently watching Iron Chef on Food Network and the “secret ingredient” was citrus. One of the citrus fruits was something called “Buddha fingers”, a strange little food that actually looked like a small hand with fingers. And you can eat the whole thing. This is one fruit we will never introduce to our horses. Finger-shaped carrots are bad enough but goodies shaped like an entire hand would be going too far.
When we first started talking about buying a horse, we sought out advice on the internet and from people we knew with horses. It was universally suggested that we should purchase an older horse, 15-20 years old, especially if we we’re mostly interested in pleasure riding. It is reasoned that older horses are generally more gentle and usually have more riding experience. This made perfect sense to us, even though we ignored it to buy the horse (now horses) we have now. As regular readers will know, we have two horses, 6 and 8 years old. That’s pretty young even in “horse years”. One benefit to their youth, however, is that we probably have many years to look forward to, if we keep them (and we plan on keeping them). Just how long could that be? In my quest to answer that question, here’s what I discovered:
This may seem like an odd post when clearly the 4th of July is both a long time ago and a long time coming, but we have this new tradition of setting off fireworks to celebrate the new year, so this post seems relevant.