Whose been sleeping in my bed?

Somebody slept last night. From the size of the form and the fact that it was somewhere that I haven't seen a form made before, I think it was Tia. That's good news because it means she's happy in the barn at night. She still has the appetite of a sparrow, but I'm hoping she'll pick up a bit. Luckily it's not a bad time of year to lose a bit of weight and she'll soon get it back again in the spring.

Superhubby deserves another medal. He has spent the morning making a new door for Smartie's stable. When he took the old one off its hinges to fix it, it fell into two halves. Can I be any more in his debt? Blimey I'll have to iron some shirts to repay all this!! :-)

Smartie was very quiet this morning. Not that I did anything with them as I was off to have breakfast at MacDonald's before work, but he was steady to pick out his feet and spoke to me at his stable door and didn't try and run away from me out on the yard before I opened the gate. He has stopped all suckling behaviour with Tia.

I have had three horses here before - most of last year when Casper was with me. It was always "two's company three's a crowd", with Casper out on a limb. We even laughed about their "racial prejudice", since Casper was coloured. With this three, they are standing very close together in the field, no-one is left out, and no-one is fighting about who is friends with who. Tetley is jealous of his food and makes sure he gets food before the other two do, but everything is remarkably friendly. I hope it lasts. I do think that this has been more successful than bringing in another gelding. Tetley seems to find her completely unthreatening, presumably because she is female. But at the same time he is completely uninterested in the fact that she is female and he is mostly male. Smartie has gone from suckling to courting in three days and it will be interesting to see where that goes over the spring. If he shows too much male behaviour then I will test him for male hormones, because being a rig would possibly explain some more of his behaviour, though it would be more likely to have made him aggressive than a nervous wreck. He and Tia call to each other when separated, but both of them follow Tetley, not each other, which I find interesting.

Talking of spring, I expect Smartie's behaviour to be completely haywire from about now until June when the new grass dies down a bit. I'm warning myself not to get disappointed if we can do nothing with him during that time. And it will be a big bonus if we can. If he isn't safe to handle then I will try tryptophan.

While I'm here without too much to say for myself today, I'll tell you that I've been musing on why I have, three times, got to a stage of riding him around the barn (the first time getting to trot!) and now can hardly get him to walk safely for more than a few yards. It fits with my whole experience of breaking horses. I have found that both for unbroken horses and the rehabilitiations I have done, it takes a horse between 3 and 4 months to develop its true character. In the early weeks with you, they are a little shell shocked by the change of home, and it is possible to get them to happily accept things that, if you waited, they might have more trouble with. This happened with Smartie, and was why I could ride him at the end of November (when I firmly expected to be hacking out by Christmas), but I can't now.

This also fits with how successful professional horse breakers are at starting horses in about 3 weeks. They usually take the horse into their own yard, and use that "window of uncertainty" to back the horse. The owner is often amazed at the skill of the trainer, when half the key is simply that the horse has been removed from its comfort zone. The only horse that I didn't own that I have ever backed, I insisted that it came to me even though it lived only half a mile away. She was perfect - until her owner came to see her, when she got cocky and overconfident the moment that she heard her "mother's" voice, and promptly bucked me off!

I can see that some people might feel uncomfortable about taking advantage of a horse's uncertainty to train it. I don't feel that way, because of the horses that I have done, all of them have seemed totally happy and at ease with what was happening to them (except one, who hated the girth but loved being ridden once we had cracked that problem). In common with much else about him, Smartie is the exception to the rule that he has regressed totally after another 3 months. And that is probably as much to do with my fear as his feeling that he has his feet under the table.

An interesting point, maybe, and one worth discussing?

C