Our First Horse

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.