The setup:\u00a0 We have a small barn with a 30 x 30 space in it for horses (one end is the feed\/tack room and a tool & supplies for non-horse stuff room).\u00a0\u00a0 On each side of the barn is a fenced area 30 x 40 feet (in other words, the full length of the barn, not just the horse end) and the south side of the horse are is open.\u00a0 Horses go in and out through an 8 foot wide gate and door on the west, and once in they can always get into the south barn lot, and can get into the north barn lot by one of the two stalls that back on the north wall…it has a 6 foot wide gate and door.\u00a0 That west door leads directly into a field of almost an acre (south) and through a gate into a slightly smaller field to the north.\u00a0 At feeding time, if the horses are out in one of the fields, I close the west gate so I can prepare their feeds, clean the water tubs and start filling them, sweep the part of the barn floor that’s covered with stall mats, without a nosy horse getting in my way, and then let them in.<\/p>\n
Yesterday late-afternoon, they were already in the barn when I came out: Where’s supper???\u00a0 I picked up a couple of flakes of hay from the aisle between feed room and tool room, and headed out to the north.\u00a0 They could see me out the north door and quickly came through a stall into the north barn lot, walking along its north fence as I walked past it to the west.\u00a0\u00a0 Sometimes horses will get hung up on which way they’re going, and be unwilling to backtrack to find a gate.\u00a0 Rags and Tigger surged back and forth once but then stopped, close to the corner of the barn lot and watching me…and I thought I might have to go lure them back through the barn and out after putting the hay out.\u00a0\u00a0 But….they stopped staring at me and looked around.\u00a0 Thought balloons hovered over their heads.\u00a0 “Can’t get over this fence.\u00a0 No gate here.\u00a0 Gate to the north on this fence…closed.\u00a0 But…if we just went *away* from the hay first….”\u00a0 Rags looked back at the barn door, back at me, then turned and started into the barn, picking up a trot.\u00a0 Tigger was right behind him.\u00a0\u00a0 The thunder of hooves grew and they came out of the west door of the barn FAST, both happy and smug (Tigger doing that thing with his head that Arabs do when they are feeling triumphant.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Soon they were munching away on the hay I threw over the fence.\u00a0 I was also feeling happy and smug, because I made it back around to the east side of the barn, through the aisle, and across to the west door before Tigger (naturally Tigger…Rags does not leave a food source until it’s ALL gone)\u00a0 could react to the sound of the gate chain in the aisle and come to see what was happening.<\/p>\n
Of course they’ve been in and out of that north barn lot many times, including making the turn inside the barn to go out the west door.\u00a0 But turning away from the sight of a desired food source (albeit moving slowly farther away) is often claimed to be against horse sense.\u00a0 They had to make a 180 to the barn gate gate, then a 90 in the barn, and then a turn back to the fence between the two fields (not another 90, because I was far enough west and also back in view.\u00a0\u00a0 Clever ponies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The setup:\u00a0 We have a small barn with a 30 x 30 space in it for horses (one end is the feed\/tack room and a tool & supplies for non-horse stuff room).\u00a0\u00a0 On each side of the barn is a fenced area 30 x 40 feet (in other words, the full length of the barn, Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-574","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-beyond-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/574"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=574"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/574\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":575,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/574\/revisions\/575"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=574"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=574"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=574"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}