Relative Something

We thought the rain would arrive during the afternoon yesterday based on the radar scans, but it didn’t start falling until well after dark. In the middle of the afternoon, we made a special trip to the barn to team up on putting rain sheets on the horses. To my surprise, Mia didn’t move away as we were covering the other three while plying them with treats.

Since she was right there, I tossed a lead rope over her neck and offered her a few treat bites, while Cyndie quickly wrangled a sheet over her back. Mia was doing fine, but there were leg straps on the back that Cyndie didn’t want to bother Mia with, so she was trying to knot them up to keep them from dragging. While she was doing that, the other horses started to crowd us, hoping for more treats.

We ended up in bad positioning, and Mix decided to lash out at Mia with a kick. That riled us up, and things got a little chaotic as Cyndie and I took turns chastising Mix while trying to calm all the others and not lose the progress on getting Mia’s sheet fully buckled.

It never pays to take shortcuts. We really should have staged them on separate sides before starting, but having them all standing together made it tempting to go for it before any of them had time to reject the idea. In the end, we got them all covered in advance of the cold and wet conditions that could last for the next few days.

Cyndie saw a video of a homemade indoor activity challenge that we thought Asher would go for, so we collected the pieces and strung them up yesterday.

His favorite toy of late is a ball that we put some of his dry food in for him to roll around until individual bites fall out from all the gyrating. We thought he would surely get excited to flip the cups and bottles on a string to gobble up all the pieces that drop out.

Well, he showed little interest in having anything to do with this plastic trash that he knows is off-limits when it is in the recycle bin. I thought it was good that he could see the treats at the bottom, but he’d probably like it more if they were painted bright orange to look more like dog toys similar to his ball.

He doesn’t need to see the food inside them; he knew what was in there from across the room because he could smell it. He simply wanted those enticing tidbits to be in his orange ball, the way he likes it.

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