Last night we had a super big electrical storm – right overhead. The horse barn, which has a concrete tile roof, was quiet and calm. The other sheds have tin roofs and it was hard to hear anything but the rattling of heavy rain and hailstones!

George came straight in when the clouds burst right overhead, but the three Arabs-! Sometimes I wonder about the legendary intelligence of the Arabs, because those three daft critters just faced tails to wind, hung their heads down and looked miserable until I yelled at them, at which point they came straight towards me until they reached the fence – then turned tails to wind, hung their noses to the ground and looked miserable again! George meanwhile was standing in the barn with me, dry and snug, stuffing on hay. At least the Arabs weren’t scared by lightning and thunder crashing so hard around us that the house seemed to vibrate at times, even if they haven’t the sense to come in out of the rain – literally!

None of the other animals was worried by the storm either, so that’s great. Even Rocket, who can be quite jumpy about fireworks, simply burrowed under my duvet and slept through it.

This morning when I got up the air had that amazing post-storm clarity, though it wore off by lunchtime and turned muggy again.

I’ve spent most of today strimming, on and off, and I think I might be winning – for the moment. There are less docks! It’s given me renewed energy to go out tomorrow and smite more of ’em.

I’ve set up one of the trail cams covering the cat food dish for tonight – I think someone’s been in and eaten some of the food, but I’m not sure who or what! It’ll be interesting to see if there’s anything on the SD card in the morning.

I still can’t make up my mind where to put the hen house! I know which bit of land I want to turn into poultry paddocks, but where to put the house and how to rotate the paddocks properly for the hens… that still has me scratching my head. There’s also the fact that silkies are not waterproof and need more shelter than other breeds, so I have to bear that in mind…

I’ll keep thinking about it, standing in various spots and asking ‘is this the right place?’

I went out to do a late-night check of the hay in the barn last night about ten o’clock and as I walked into the horse barn, there was an explosive flurry of motion near the ferrets. I froze, then spotted a frozen cat staring back at me. After a second, he had a spirited go at scaling the wall to get out through the roof so I backed hurriedly away to the other end of the horse barn, whereupon he shot towards the exit into the stable shed, carooming off the doorjamb on the way, and scurried away.

I checked everything was ok with the ferrets and quail – which it was – and then put a bit of ferret kibble out in a spare dish for the cat, placing it where I’d first seen the cat standing.

I had the impression (in the gloaming!) that the cat was grey on top and white underneath, possibly somewhat fluffy, and male. He’s very welcome to move in, if that’s what he wants to do, and he’s certainly very welcome to all the mice and rats he can find!

When I went back to the house, he was sitting in the gateway opposite mine, which is just a big field gate, and watching suspiciously.

Even better than one.

The stripy one is actually a red bantam, yet looks bigger than the black standard sized one! I’ve just moved them to the brooder so they have plenty of space, though the electric hen will keep them comfy and snug.

While I was mucking out the bunnies today I discovered the rest of Tiger’s new litter – she’d got them hidden near the front of the cage. They look about ten days old – eyes nearly open. They can’t be more than a day or so older than Dottie’s litter, so Dexter might even have managed to sire two litters on the same day!

A black silkie chick, complete with pompom on head already – looks strong, cheeps away well and nicely dry and fluffy. The red bantam egg under her chin has a window chipped out and is squeaking away vigorously, so won’t be long hatching either.

Exciting!

The brooder box is full of water ready for a thorough scrub and disinfect this afternoon but the chicks will be fine in the incubator until tomorrow – they have plenty of yolk to absorb that’ll keep them going until then at least.

At last, I’ve got the quail cage stack reassembled! The cages themselves work well, though they’re quite small and I don’t think I’ll cram ten quail in each the way they’re “supposed” to be used. At the moment there are three males each in solitary confinement, the five chicks all together and the three adult hens together. I’ll reconsider the arrangements when the hens have regrown their feathers! In the meantime, everyone seems to have discovered food and water safely, so that’s okay.

I need to find the tank that goes on top for the automatic drinkers but they all know about bottle drinkers in the meantime.

In reassembling the stack, I’ve replaced the flimsy plastic jointed frame with four lengths of 2×1 timber, and the hollow aluminium tubes that the cages were suspended from have been replaced with threaded steel bar long enough to go right through the timber at both ends, with nuts screwed on tight on the outside. As a result, the whole thing is rock solid and very much better!

The pheasant cock who sometimes visits the bird feeders appeared in the goose paddock this afternoon. He does a remarkably good impersonation of withered dock leaves when he lies down, since his colour is the same dark reddish-brown! Hannibal had a brief squawk at him then ignored him, and he sneaked quietly right across under the lounge windows and stuffed himself from the goose dish before lying down in the shade of the pampas grass to sleep it off. I may have to come up with a plan to deal with this in case we have a bird flu outbreak – the usual clampdown regulations are that domestic birds are not allowed to have any contact with wild ones, particularly around food and water sources. This could be tricky! In the meantime I shall be careful about withered dock leaves in case they’re pheasants….

This morning I missed a great photo opportunity. If only I’d had a video camera running!!

I was just heading out with a barrow of dirty straw to add to the muck heap when I saw George decide to bully Dancer. He waited until she was in the middle of a roll and Poppy was facing the other way, then headed over, head down and clearly meaning mischief.

Dancer heaved herself up pretty smartly (it helps that she’s the smallest!) and was just walking off towards Poppy when George tried a sneaky nip down onto her back from his superior height.

Dancer sprang into the air, forelegs curled up, and then kicked out at the top of her leap. It was a perfect Classical capriole that climaxed with a very distinct wet slapping sound and a muddy hoofmark on George’s chest, then she landed tidily and trotted off to her mum, leaving George looking quite surprised!

By the time they came in and I had my phone handy, the muddy hoofmark had faded into more mud where George had had a roll.

 

It’s been an exhausting, information-=heavy, horse-filled, exciting and amazing weekend!

Alexa Kurland is a horse trainer who believes absolutely that the horse she’s working with must have as much input into the process as possible, a minimum of coercion (none at all except for safety reasons) and consent from the horse, with great attention paid to whether the horse is comfortable and immediate withdrawal when they signal they’re not happy where they are.

As a result, we’ve played a game invented by a pony, practised on each other to understand the emotional responses of our horses to what we do and learned so many new ways to help our horses learn and enjoy, rather than experience frustration and confusion.

Using energy work, bodywork (teaching us to connect more deeply with ourselves and hence with the horses) and with the invaluable assistance of Joey, Neeske, May, Teddy, Dinky, Sally and Buddy, we started work every day at 9 and worked through to 8 at night, with just an hour off for lunch (that’s the humans – the horses were never asked to do more than ten minutes at a time and only had a couple of sessions a day at most) we’ve been crammed on learning theory, behavioural analysis and lots of practical techniques to try out on our own horses. I came home after the first day and spent ten minutes with George, who promptly mastered two new skills – he’s now expressing his frustration not by threatening me but by presenting his display a foot to my left! He’s also totally mastered the art of getting treats by not asking for treats, which is quite a Zen thing for anyone to grasp! He’s also taken ownership of the ‘ears forward’ exercise I’ve been struggling to explain to him and I think he’s almost grasped that standing two inches from your human when you’re that big is a bit intimidating.

Last night Dancer and Abe were doing halt, stand, walk, halt, stand, walk, halt, stand routines as a liberty pair. Not bad from an eleven month old foal!

Poppy had now grasped targeting firmly and made it her own, and she’s backing readily and with confidence just from my body language cue.

The game of Panda Catch was the basis of our work for the weekend. Panda is an 18 year old American Miniature pony Alex trained as a guide-pony for a blind woman who loved horses and was an experienced horse trainer and handler herself. During her training, Alex needed Panda to learn to come up under her handler’s hand, so the blind human could be guided – just like a guide-dog. Alex taught Panda to target – to touch a small cone with her nose, as a result of which she was given a handful of food. Most horses’ first reaction to a strange object being held out to them is to give it a nudge with the nose anyway, and getting rewarded with something tasty obviously encourages them to do it again, so it’s a great way to introduce the horse to the concept that a human can offer a cue, which when the horse responds to it in a certain way, gives the human a cue to hand out food (or scratchies, which are also good things for a horse to train his human to provide!) From the initial target game, it’s easy to teach ‘back’, ‘step forward’, ‘go here’ and other things and once Panda had grasped ‘touch’ she moved on to invent a game where she stood in circle of humans, looked around, chose one, then the human who was being looked at was supposed to hold out a target. Panda went to touch the target, got her treat, and then looked around and picked the next person she wanted to play with.

Teddy the Shetland (a very handsome silver bay – the first I’ve seen) mastered this game within a couple of times of being gently steered around the circle by his owner, Craig (one of our hosts for the weekend) and then made it clear that he was in charge and if he wanted to go knock over people’s coffee cups by the seats and come back later, then that was what he was going to do! He did choose to come back, though, and then picked out his next human cheerfully.

Here’s Teddy, learning to stand next to a human in return for scratchies – one day he may be a super support pony for his humans, one of whom walks with a stick. He’s a very handsome little horse!

Teddy’s half-brother Joey showed us how to use the technique of mat work to help horses find a familiar, safe place in a strange place. Joey knows how to stand on a mat when it’s put in front of him, so when he was brought into a strange arena with strange people watching, he was clearly relieved to find something familiar – a mat to stand on!

Another silver bay! Apparently their mutual sire passes on his silver genes very strongly.

The hostesses of the weekend were Neeske and her human, Linsey.

Neeske is a young Friesian – a breed with a great deal of fire and spirit, as well as size. Neeske’s over 16 hands and Lynsey has a degenerative disease, but even at 7, Neeske is looking after her person and the relationship between them is wonderful to watch.

I didn’t take photos of the other equines – May is grey, Dinky is a black mini Shetland, Sally a dark bay Irish Cob and Buddy is another colour I’ve never seen before – a silver buckskin Connemara.

Central to Alex’s teaching technique is that students take turns role-playing as horses while another student tries to teach them to do something. It is quite eye-opening to be expecting a cone to touch – and then find it’s not there! It was there! It should be there! Why isn’t it there? Where is it? The frustration and surprise is unexpected – as was my relief and pleasure at spotting it just in a new place! I found myself trotting happily around a human to stand next to her, getting my imaginary treat!

That bit of work underlined to me how important it is that I never leave George wondering what I want of him without clues – his toolbox of ways to solve problems is still a bit empty and his responses to frustration and confusion are still set to default to ‘tantrum!!’ rather than ‘look for alternatives’. Similarly, Poppy’s response to confusion is to withdraw into herself and disengage, and I need to make sure I support her learning until she’s confident in innovating and exploring novel situations. Abe and Dancer are more resilient in the face of problems to be solved and will readily run through their various known responses (all benign) before pausing and trying something new.

When the silkie bantams hatch, I may well be practising my training skills with their instruction – birds learn very quickly and they’re much less likely to bite me or stand on me painfully if I get things wrong….

Apologies for any typos this time – during the weekend I managed first to let the dogs play on my bed and knock my glasses flying, breaking one of the arms, and then lost them altogether somewhere yesterday, so I’m touch-typing and hoping my spelling’s not too bizarre!

A slight digression from the usual practical, hands-on stuff. Like everyone, I also have my spiritual side and this is the Summer Solstice, when the Year Turns and we move from increasing daylight to increasing darkness again, going down to the Dark Times of Midwinter once more. I’m a fair way north and the contrasts are fairly obvious – at Midwinter we see dawn after 9am and sunset before 4pm, and right now we have perhaps an hour of nearly-darkness after the sunset fades from the north-western sky before the predawn colours start to show in the north-east. I like to mark these important points of the year – the equinoxes, the balancing points when light and dark are equal, and the solstices when the wheel turns from one direction to another – with meditations on deeper matters, whether moral, ethical or spiritual or some combination of them all.

I’m on a workshop this weekend – Alexandra Kurland is a clicker trainer, an operant conditioning trainer, of horses (and other animals) and I know from past experience that she’s a about a lot more than just ‘horse do x, click, treat, rinse, repeat’. She listens to horses, respects them, waits for them to be ready to respond and, rather than being a ‘trainer’, I think she’s a conversationalist. She works with horses, she doesn’t just train them.

We’ve just had the pre-course get-together to do the meet and greet thing, and I noticed during our potted intro spiels that we have a couple of people along who are ‘trainers’ .

‘I started out clicker training my dog and that was great, then I clicker trained my cat, and my pet mouse, and someone else’s horse….’

Whoa! Why? Did they need to be taught to do something specific or are you just enjoying manipulating other creatures?

There’s a line here for me.

When a horse (or any creature) needs to learn something specific for health or welfare reasons, that’s one thing. I will train George to wear a rug against midges because otherwise he’s going to experience terrible itching, rub himself raw and end up suffering horrific self-inflicted damage. That’s reason enough to deliberately set out to control his behaviour whether or not he consents, whether or not he likes wearing rugs (which he doesn’t) and whether or not I think he looks dinky in an all-over midge suit (I don’t think he will).

I will offer the horses things to do where they can work with me if they think it’s fun, or find it interesting, or just want to do stuff with me, any of which might happen to be useful to me one day – such as them getting into a trailer without panicking in case I have to transport them for veterinary reasons, or to shift them from one place to another, or teaching them to pick carrots out of carrier bags so they’re not spooky about bags in hedges if I’m riding one of these days. Or stand in hula hoops just because ‘if I stand here, that daft woman’s going to hand me something tasty’.

What I won’t do is manipulate an animal’s behaviour just because I can. That’s pandering to my ego, not caring for the welfare of my non-human companions.

The gates are open and if the horses don’t want to stand in a hula hoop, they can just walk off and do their own thing. That’s fine. That kind of ‘training’ – even Abe accepting me walking up and down stacks of blocks without swivelling round to stare – is done consensually. If it takes ten minutes or ten weeks or never happens at all, it doesn’t matter (though the mounting block thing is going to work because he’ll get bored of watching me scamper up and down like a demented goat). Even George’s tenacious determination not to let people mess with his feet easily actually isn’t that bad, because he self-trims his hooves fantastically well and they are checked every 6 weeks, albeit from a couple of yards rather than a few inches. If it was necessary to get his feet reshaped for health reasons, I’d get it done even if I had to get a vet to knock him out and roll him upside down to do it!

Abe’s Silly Walk is something he spontaneously produced and I merely encouraged – I didn’t make him do it (as Spanish Walk is traditionally taught by tapping a horse’s legs with a whip to create discomfort and make them move) and if he doesn’t want to, which sometimes happens when I give him the cue, I don’t insist, I just move on to something else.

What this boils down to is the important principle of power. Because of the way the world is, the critters here are in my power – they are confined, they rely on me for food, for water, for stimulation and exercise, for a safe place to live. Legally I have the power of life and death over them – I can have them put down, or just kill them. I do kill rabbits and quail for food, that’s one of the reasons I breed them. I ensure they have the best life I can manage, I take care to kill them as quickly and humanely as I can, and I only kill for food, whether mine, the ferrets’ or the dogs’. I don’t waste anything when I butcher something I’ve killed, either – that would be wasting a life. I appreciate it’s not possible for most and I’m not trying to preach, but I feel that if I can’t take that responsibility to care for a creature in life, kill it humanely and make the best use of its body afterwards, I have no right to eat its meat or wear its skin. I won’t eat meat that hasn’t been raised, killed and butchered with respect and care, which is why I don’t eat meat from supermarkets. (There are a couple of superb butchers in the area, however, who can tell you where a piece of meat came from, who raised it, what it ate, how old it was and, if it’s wild game, who killed it where – and it’s all within a few miles of the shop. I will buy from them).

What I’m meditating on here, however, is not the existence of power, but the exercise of power. I can either exert power over – or I can use power to. ‘Power over’ is a manipulative, controlling thing, it’s putting chickens in small cages because it’s more efficient, cutting pigs’ tails and teeth off so they can’t express their emotional distress by maiming each other, granting more oil drilling licences because it keeps people in work and voting for the politicians currently paying mere lip service to ‘climate emergency’ even though it’s going to worsen climate change and the mass extinction we’re currently experiencing. ‘Power to’ is consensual and enabling, it’s compromising on what ‘I’ want and aiming instead for ‘we’. ‘Power to’ cares, even if it means a bit more work for me. ‘Power to’ doesn’t seek ‘my’ goals but delights in what someone else achieved because I could help them achieve it. ‘Power to’ is thrilled tonight because George has just achieved a new skill in his mental toolkit – he’s learned he can ignore me when I speak to him and he’s not in the mood, he doesn’t have to warn me off (admittedly, he’s been quite capable of ignoring me outside all along – but close up in the barn together, when I could just reach out and touch and with both Abe and Dancer sharing the haynet, he’s touchy and jealous and, until now, inclined to wave his teeth at everyone all round). I’ll also point out that I don’t have much to do with this milestone for him, except I was there for him to look at and then ignore!

That’s one of the big reasons I wanted to set this place up so the horses could be as autonomous as possible, able to choose where they go (admittedly, in a relatively limited area) and when, who they socialise with, what they eat. I can’t do that for most of the critters – the dogs would go off hunting and get hurt, the rabbits and quail would quickly be killed by predators, the geese might wander onto the road, the ferrets would stray off and get lost – but the horses can exercise self-will safely within the barns and field, so I arranged it that way. It does slow up what I do by way of persuading them to carry me around, or let me mess with feet and heads and so forth, because I respect their autonomy and if they want to walk off, I don’t stop them. Apart from the afternoon meal and necessary outside appointments (vet, hoof trimmer) I don’t bring them in, rather I wait for them to come in and be interested in me. I pay attention to their body language – if Poppy sees me coming and turns her head towards me with a little nicker, she wants attention and will enjoy being groomed. If she stops chewing hay and freezes I know I’m not wanted, so I say hello in passing and move right on by. Abe’s even more direct – when he wants attention, I find his nose down my ear or his front hoof doing the gentle bum-poke. Dancer will start nibbling on me when she wants me, and George arrives to loom over me with pricked ears (as opposed to the ears-back loom that means ‘you’re in my way, bog off’) If they’re busy being horses and not interested in me just now, fair’s fair, there’s times I’m busy doing human things and not available for them.

This weekend, then, I’m going to be working hard to learn new strategies and skills that might help me communicate better with my non-human companions…. but I won’t be ‘training’ them. I’ll be ‘working with’ them.

Except for George and that rug.

I’ve just watched an interesting bit of herd dynamics in operation. I stepped out with the dogs for their pre-bed toddle around the yard and found Abe and Dancer in the shed, while Poppy and George were together well down the field, both riveted by something they could see in the forest.

I peered that way and spotted car headlights.

Technically there shouldn’t be cars on the forest tracks – they’re officially footpaths and bridlepaths, not for vehicles. It’s also single track with a chained gate across the end so I knew they’d have to reverse a good way before they could turn around.

Poppy was producing some ferociously powerful snorts – I could clearly hear her from the length of the field! – and both Abe and Dancer suddenly caught on Something Was Going Down and made off into the field at a smart trot together, while Poppy and George came to meet them, also at a fine spanking trot. All four turned to face the potential threat once the herd had gathered itself together, with George closest to the problem, then Abe, with Dancer just behind him and Poppy in the rear.

The car headlights advanced towards the gate, which the driver probably didn’t know was securely locked. I went back to get my binoculars and watched the rest of the show through them as the car reappeared, reversing, and slowly made its way through stacked timber either side of the track. The horses watched it very alertly, all four tails cocked (George can cock his tail to a very respectable angle, it’s just that the Arabs stick theirs up vertically and make his look a bit, well, half-cocked). Slowly, with Poppy still letting out powerful snorts from time to time, the geldings advanced down the field, showing off their knee action and holding their heads and tails high (and higher, in Abe’s case). Dancer followed, with Poppy still bringing up the rear, and after the car finally vanished into the trees and was gone, they all stared for a few minutes, then the girls turned and put their heads down, Abe relaxed his tail to more normal operation levels and I left them with George still watchful, Abe waiting just behind him with a sort of ‘it’s his job, I just hold his coat’ attitude and the girls peacefully grazing.

Whoever the idiot was driving the red car, at least he’s had some reversing practice. Now if he could get some sign-reading practice and realise he has no business on a bridlepath next, that’d be good.

If George is going to develop itches, then sooner or later I’m going to need to start washing him off at intervals – fly sprays and lotions can leave a residue on the skin that needs cleaning off, and a soothing bath can help relieve itching as well. Since I have no idea what his opinion of being made wet and soapy is, I decided to start small.

I know he’s not thrilled by hosepipes being held near his hooves, because I’ve tried that while filling water buckets a few times. He snorts and walks off. I decided I’d start with a damp sponge instead, so as he was in a good working mood this morning and wanted to hang about after the others took themselves out (not too hurriedly – I got to groom everyone first!) I brought out the treat bag, a bucket of water and a clean sponge. George played target with the sponge nicely for a start, then I let him watch as I dipped it into the water bucket and held it up pouring water, squeezed it out and finally offered to him for a sniff again. That all went fine and I repeated it several times until he got bored and walked off for a drink, after which he dribbled more than the sponge!

I asked him to stand and then gently held the sponge towards his shoulder, and he allowed me to stroke him with the wet sponge – not dripping wet, but wet enough to leave a soggy patch on his coat. He got plenty of treats, of course, and allowed me to stroke him with the sponge up and down his neck, along his ribs and even down his shoulder towards the top of his leg (he expressed his opinion of me applying fly repellent to his lower legs this morning by picking me up by the hood of my sweatshirt for a good talking to!)

I rinsed the sponge out and repeated the intro-to-bathtime exercise on his other side, where he accepted it rather less happily, but he did accept it.

Who knows where we might have got to if my local Jehovah’s Witnesses hadn’t interrupted us?

Still, it was an excellent session and a good start on one day being able to wash him all over.