I'm becoming known as the lady with the loud palomino mare. Whenever I ride off on Wally, my Paint gelding, Lexi stands in her paddock and calls for him. A lot. She doesn't go crazy. It's not like she's wildly pacing back and forth, working up a sweat and threatening to commit suicide. She just neighs, as if to say, "Where are you going? When will you be back? Should I put the hay in the oven now, or are we going out tonight?"
Okay, that last part I exaggerated. But you get the idea. Lexi is a drama queen. And since we live atop a little bluff at the corner of a main street in our horsey neighborhood her whinnying trumpets for several blocks.
People who live several streets over have seen me riding on the trails and remarked, "Oh, I know you. You're the one with the noisy palomino."
My golden lady, she doth protest too much when Wally leaves.
Wally, on the other hand, is more aloof. Plus he has a low, hoarse horse voice. If he were an actor I'm guessing he'd be one of those quiet, romantic types. You can hardly hear him when he nickers. When I ride off on Lexi he'll watch us ride away and then flutter his nostrils with a faint snuffling sound... and then go back to eating whatever it is I tossed in his feed bucket.
"Oh, she'll be back," he's probably thinking. "The women can't stay away from me for long. I'm just too cool. Besides, this carrot is mighty tasty."
See how I so easily attach emotions to my horses? I suppose we're all guilty of that. But who can blame us. Anyone who's spent their life around horses knows that some equines are drama queens and some are aloof. Some are real characters with a sense of humor and others are stoic and distant. Yet each has a distinct personality, if we allow ourselves the time to discover it. For more insight on this subject, read this article currently on Horse Channel:
Horse Emotions
Then let me know if your horse speaks to you.
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4 comments:
Haha! They same thing happens to me. One of my horses, Barbie, I ride a lot more than the other, Natalie. Natalie will whinny a little bit, but she'll settle down soon. But Barbie is a completely different story. When I take Natalie out she goes nuts. Racing around, whinning at the top of her lungs, etc. My neighboors don't seem to mind too much. We also have guinea hens which are very loud. And our neighboor behind us has peacocks and those are the loudest birds ever!!!! My other neighboor has a ton of animals, among them 6 minature donkeys. They bray extremly loud. At 5 a.m. Our poor nighboors.
Oh wow - So I have this gelding who I (unbeknownst to me) bought as an 18 month crypt-orchid. Of course, over time I had several clues in figuring this out.
He definitely jumped the fence to get to the "hot blonde" palamino mare who was totally prancing around enticing him (I know - I saw haha).
And there was my favorite trait - The Hot Mare Moo. Seriously. Anytime a mare came anywhere near to glancing his way (or walking along, or minding her own business - basically any mare in sight), the boy seriously moo'd.
Ah yes - Horse personalities defnitely keep me daily entertained!
Well, I'm glad that I'm not the only one in the horse world with noisy beasties! Maybe we should hand out earplugs to our neighbors for Christmas? Thanks for sharing.
This makes me laugh! Haha! We have three Hanoverians at the barn, a mother and two daughters. They're very close together - Erina, the mother, is 30, and Darcy is 19, with Derby a year younger. The daughters were weaned from their mother, but they had NEVER been separated. It ended up that I was the one who had to ride Derby, and my friend had Darcy in the barn, and Erina was outside. I was walking Derby around and she kept whinnying for Erina and Darcy. Every time she got to the side of the arena closest to the barn, she would walk sideways and stick her head over the fence, whinnying nonstop.
My friend told me that Darcy was whinnying back to Derby and generally going nuts. Erina was leaning on the gate and neighing, nickering, pretty much everything in the sound range that horses make. There's a dent in the gate even today from that day.
We never separated the three of them again until earlier this year when Darcy and Derby went off to be bred and were kept in two separate barns.
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