Equine Ghost? No, Just Sneaky

Rags has twice appeared where he hadn’t been seen, and has several times been missed while standing in the shade in summer.  You would not think a nice round (small but round) splashy-patterned black and white horse could disappear in broad, or even lean daylight, but…he does.  Tonight at feeding time, I looked (thought I looked), saw Tigger down the pasture, saw nothing in the south barn lot or…when I walked into the barn…in the barn, and then walked over and shut the west gate before Tigger got in.  Aha.  Ready to start the feeding process.  And then heard the hoofbeats *behind* me.

That was Ragtime back in April; the attitude is still the same, though his mane and tail have grown out.   “I’m not invisible,” he says.  “I wasn’t hiding, but I was just…um…waiting until I had your full attention.”

“You’re a sneak,” I said.   “You hurt my feelings,” he said.  “I’m just HUNGRY.  See how LEAN I am?  Hardly a single ounce of meat on my bones…”    “You’re plump,” I said, checking as I do at least twice a week.  Firm muscle and an acceptable but definite amount of fat.”  “It’s my winter coat,” he said.  “I’m so hungry I could eat your shirt.”    “NO TEETH ON HUMANS.”   “I didn’t MEAN anything…”

He has wonderfully soft, furry ears.  Plushy.  He doesn’t mind having his ears handled, and I like feeling the soft plush.  His winter coat this year (unlike when I bought him last February) is plushy, soft, and healthy-feeling all over, unless he’s just rolled in mud.   Due to his being between me and the gate out to where Tigger waited (impatiently), he got fed first.

Tigger’s response to his supper was a sorrowful look, and a resigned sound that clearly meant “You put that horrible stuff in my feed again and I TOLD you…”   “If your plate’s clean when I come back then you can come into the barn,” I said.  “The horrible stuff is good for you.”  (Remembering clearly the time when I was about three and threw a fit in a hotel dining room after being told to eat the peas on the plate, vegetables were good for me.  I hated English peas.  I didn’t WANT the English peas.  I had finished the chicken and mashed potatoes and wanted dessert….which I said, loudly and firmly.  What I got was a far less pleasant experience.  Hauled outside and swatted and no dessert.)  I don’t, of course, spank Tigger for not eating his supplement.  If he absolutely would not eat it, I’d give it to my trainer to give to another horse (no sense wasting it) and try something else.  But he’s eaten it several times now, each time with slightly less resistance, so I’m expecting that within a week he’ll just eat it from the moment I put it down for him.   I will need more molasses for awhile.  Then I hope to decrease the molasses bit by bit, because I’d rather save the sweets for training treats.  But we’ll see.

8 thoughts on “Equine Ghost? No, Just Sneaky

  1. Poor Tigger. I am vividly reminded of Monday lunches at my primary school – cold meat, an enormous baked potato with a tiny cube of margarine to go on it, and endless slices of revolting pickled beetroot. I choked it down somehow, but imagine having to eat pickled beetroot, every single Monday in term-time for six years! And we had to clean our plates, too (too soon post-rationing not to) – no small helpings unless someone else was willing to take some of yours, and as everybody loathed pickled beetroot, nobody ever was! So I empathise.

    1. SO grateful not to have been required to eat pickled beetroot every Monday for six years!!! We could bring a lunch, and I usually did, though in high school I often ate in the school cafeteria, profiting from the cheap half-pints of milk. A pint of milk would get me through the afternoon, hungry but not TOO hungry, and then I had the money I saved from lunch…enough to buy a couple of paperbacks a week from the place across the street from the school…disreputable but they had some paperbacks I wanted…or I could stop at Herb’s Grocery on the walk home, and buy a FLYING or ANALOG magazine. Lunch was thirty-five cents (IIRC) and the milk alone was three cents a carton. All the food served in the school cafeterias included a hot food, but not particularly good, and though the staff complained about the food thrown away, they didn’t complain to the students.

  2. I HAD A SMALL TORTOISE SHELL CAT SHE WOULD HIDE ON BARE GROUND IN THE SHADE OF A TREE AND YOU COULD STARE STREIGHT AT HER AND NOT SEE HER TILL SHE MOVED.

  3. Our current German Shepherd is all black which makes it all too easy for him to hide on winter evening walks or just lying on a floor before the lights have gone on. Sometimes he’ll get up, sometimes he won’t and then be most put out that you stepped on him. It wouldn’t happen at all if he always lay in the same place in a room especially the hall, but he doesn’t, sometimes he’ll lie in the doorway to the front room, sometimes right by the front door, sometimes right in the middle of the fairly narrow hall so there is no way you will miss him if you don’t realise he is there. And yes he does have beds he could lie on, but he’s only really started using them recently, only some of the time at that, and he’s ten.

  4. My late mother as a child evidently had a battle of wills with her London-born-mother over English mushy peas. I don’t know which of them won, but my mother resolved not to have such battles with us kids. She perhaps indulged us a bit too much, but we recovered over the years. Maybe that means that we won.

  5. William, your comment makes me chuckle. I’m an only child and my father spent the first 6 years of his life in a turbulent household until his father didn’t come home one weekend. (He was with another woman). My grandmother went to her uncle who telegraphed her brothers, they came and got her and her 8 children. That would have been about 1935; a ride in a model A roadster of three adults, and 8 kids from St Louis, MO to southern OK. I have no idea how many days they were on the road but dad always said they tied a mattress on the back for grandma to sleep on by the side of the road and the older boys stood on the running boards. All that to say that Dad was determined to have a peaceful household, he just wouldn’t argue. He truly loved my mother and she pretty much had her way about how things went unless it was something he really cared about and then he was a solid wall. NOTHING would change his mind. Mom was 27 and dad was 30 when I was born, they had both taught Sunday School from their teenage years then had gone to college (first generation of either of their families) and were teachers. No child was going to rule that household. Mom’s doctor was old and wise and told her that as I was introduced to solid foods to not give me sweet stuff first, she says my first baby foods were spinach and liver, not fruit, not cereal! After that, and I remember her telling me, that I didn’t have to eat everything that was put on my plate but I had to at least try one bite. But she never expected me to eat Menudo! 🙂

  6. Happy New Year! Col. Potter had it right, may she be a (darn) sight better than the last. I’m glad Tigger is eating the supplement (grudgingly). Echo has been known to turn her nose up at any food change (without supplements) and go on a hunger strike for 2-3 days. My dog growing up was bad to pill … Wirehair fox terriers have strong jaws and wills … she could (and did) get pills out of grapes, peanut butter, crunchy peanut butter, and marshmellows. We were so happy when they invented the chewable heartworm pills (it became here is the tasty pill, you have to take it before you get dinner). She later took other meds before getting a cookie.

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