yeah saw on her stall camera that one mare who had somehow (?) gotten her right front foot hung IN her hayball, she evidently had wacked it around breaking the screw on lid then inserted foot… she stood there looking at her foot. …Needed to cut the hayball apart to get it off
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Yikes! I had one get a haynet down and the string inserted into the shoe. Luckily I had them all on breakaways so he wasn’t stuck to the fence, but he was dragging the haynet around with his foot looking really pathetic. Caught that one out the window.
I also had a horse scratch his butt on a t-post that he had pulled the cap off just moments before (before I started superglueing them to the top), somehow got his tail and leg strap wound around it which I STILL cannot figure out, and was completely stuck to the t-post. He’s a smart egg and just stood there until I was able to free him. Caught that one on the camera.
He also took the little bucket cap thing off his water bucket, got that bent somehow, and poked it through the tail flap of his blanket, getting tied to the wall of his stall. Again, he just stood there, and the only reason I noticed was that he wasn’t moving around the stall as much as normal on the cams. I typically will use vetwrap or electrical tape on my buckets, but I had just put a new bucket up and had to get more tape from the house which I figured would be fine for “next trip to the barn”. Clearly, I was incorrect.
Cameras make me feel SO much better.
yeah, at least for the most part the Morgans we have are pretty level headed not subject to panic
Daughter’s first Morgan she bought herself was a beautiful buckskin, they made an excellent team. After we moved him from the isolation quarantine paddock, were we kept newly arrived horses, into the pastures I saw him standing next to the fence looking west to the pasture two places away which also had some horses in it.
Never though much about it other than he sure looked nice.
Two hours later there he was standing there so I went out there to see just what he was looking at. Nothing, he was standing there because he had hooked his left front shoe on the bottom 9 gauge wire of the fence.
He looked at me then at his hung shoe, I just told him to stay there which he did while I went back to get the bolt cutters to cut the wire, then had to pull the shoe to get the wire off. He just looked at me then walked off.
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Good story, well told.
Thanks for the laugh.
several of our horses were expected to work from voice commands, over the years there were several incidents that others noticed remarking upon “those” horses
Daughter had her buckskin with her while in college at Texas A&M College Station, it was actually cheaper to keep him there than what it was costing to keep him here in our backyard. She had a vet come to do some work on him where he was boarded, they were out in the open working from the vet’s truck when she needed to get something from her truck, she drop the lead to ground (he was trained to ground tie) walked away to her truck looking back as He Had Picked Up One Front Foot to follow, she looked at him like what are you doing and he put his foot back where it was. The vet watching just comment, he sure is well trained.
Another was our first Morgan, she was smart and used in multiple disciplines and a real easy going horse that we loaned to many deserving up and coming youth. At a Class A we had loaned her to a young rider who was not experienced for what was called a command class where the judge would just call out a gait that was to be done, no specific order and was reversing directions often. The mare was listening to the judge tell the ring steward the next command to be done which he told the ring announcer by radio, the mare was changing gaits/directions upon hearing them, the judge saw this then really mixed things up with the mare following each command. Then at the end of the class it was the usual line up on the ring steward who normally stood still but the judge asked him to move around, the mare followed him. This judge was one who we would normally never show before since we had Lippitt Morgans and she preferred the newer style Morgans. After the show she found us to tell us she was impressed with our horse’s abilities.
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That is something I enjoy teaching my boys. They all have a very good woah from voice commands. I learned the benefit of that when teaching students - if they had a reliable voice-trained woah, I had control of the situation, even if I was at the other end of the arena - and people also felt better about riding a horse that responded to both body and voice signals.
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that is what we did also, most of the young riders legs were too short to give cues to the horse so we always like you had them give the voice command
i was interesting to see the horse sidestep to recented its charge back into the saddle
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A TB trainer friend trains all his horses to halt when he says Ho. It was hilarious to see him do it when they wintered with us.
Yup crazy, racing fit TBs stopping dead when he told them!
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