Yesterday's post
Second post
Start at the beginning
Every morning, I’d step lightly on my way to the Babies’ stable because I didn’t want to scare them. It took a while for them to get used to their new home and the sounds from their new companions, not to mention getting used to us. The first day I found them lying down in their stable was a real milestone. Beforehand, one or the other would stand watch as the other lay down. That’s instinct, but when they both felt comfortable enough to lie down, Bev and I knew they were settling in for real.
As soon as they were comfortable with my arrival every morning and became curious to see me, I’d go quietly to their stable door and blow on their noses. Kind of a ‘P..P..P..P..P’ action. They didn’t jerk back and I kept it up, every morning.
We’d take them out into the top paddock to get them used to us and their surroundings. They were still nervous and flighty, and keeping hold of their lead ropes was sometimes a struggle. I mentioned before, they’re strong for their size. Historically, their ancestors carried grown men across the Welsh hillsides.
The carrot issue was still a conundrum for me, I was determined to let them know how tasty and delicious the strange orange things were.
I tried lots of daft things. Think about it, the foals usually looked to their mother for advice on what’s good to eat, but these Babies had been taken away from their mothers and so only had each other and their instincts. They preferred grass to hay and often left some of their feed in preference to the hay. I needed to think about this.
Working on the premise that their sense of smell would tell them what was good and what wasn’t, I took a packet of mints to the stable. An age-old favourite of every pony I’d ever met.
Nope!
I tried licking the mint first to release some of the minty smell.
Nope! Although they sniffed close to the mint, they weren’t tempted to taste them.
I tried holding a carrot in my mouth and offering it to them.
Still Nope! Not interested, don’t want to know, never gonna!
I had a brainwave! Sliced carrots!
At home, I thinly sliced a few carrots and took them up to the stables. Filled with enthusiasm, I tipped the slices onto the top of the Babies’ feed and took the feed bucket.
The expressions of bemusement on the foals’ faces should have prepared me… but it didn’t. I went to sort out the rest with a feeling of hopefulness.
When I came back, the feed was gone and the carrot slices were scattered around the feed bucket. Equines have such dextrous lips.
Moving on from the sliced carrot experiment, I went one better – or finer. I shredded the carrots. Same as before, I grated a few carrots and took them up to the yard.
I wasn’t quite as enthusiastic as the previous day, but when I watched them, they took a suspicious nibble at what I offered and their heads nodded frantically as the taste permeated through.
When they nod, I came to realise, it’s because they’re encountering something new and strange and making their minds up whether or not they like it.
They liked it!
Carrots are good for us humans and give horses a tasty treat as well. They have so many benefits, including help with digestion and gut issues (such as worms). Carrots!
One more milestone for the Babies!
The next milestone was far more worrying! Letting them out into the paddock and hoping they didn’t escape and that they’d come back to us when we’d let them go.
They’re only tiny, I’m sure they can’t get out, the fences are quite high… no matter how much I tried to reassure myself, it wasn’t working.
Hubby and Son were set with the task of making a more robust fence out of pallets lying around in the paddock.
We had a limited amount of fence posts, but that didn’t matter because the ground was rock-solid just a few inches down. We knew this because Hubby and Son had already repaired the fence between the stable yard and the parking lot when Aramis and Maverick decided to go exploring and they destroyed the fence and then destroyed any attempt we made at repairing it. No amount of baling twine could keep those two out when they had a mind to be naughty.
Hubby also put up a set of new lights for us. LED lights, one shining onto the parking lot and cabins, one into the main stable yard where the Babies live and another, bigger, brighter light, shining into the fields. He made it so we could turn off the big light, to save the battery, otherwise, the battery ran out in less than 20 minutes.
We’d take the battery home and re-charge it every night.
The design of the fence was ingenious, a triangle, two pallets leaned against each other and two of those triangles set side by side, with one pallet at right-angles between each set of two. The one pallet gave the rest a good bit of stability and it looked robust and pony-proof!
There’s a bit of scrubland off to the side of the paddock and it’s not pony-friendly. We didn’t want the babies to go exploring and hurt themselves, so that’s the part we fenced off. Also, it meant the Babies couldn’t get onto the gardens.
I was convinced the little chaps wouldn’t be able to get past the triangulated fence. Bev shook her head and smiled. She knew better.
