Donut's First Week

I tried to keep my goals for Donut pretty simply for her first week in her new home.  The most important thing I wanted was for her to get used to a routine.  One thing I had really debated about was whether I should keep her on the same schedule that I would have used for Nimo, which was in during the day (from about 8 until 4) and out all night.  (Virginia summers can be challenging with the heat, humidity, and bugs, and many horses appreciate being inside during the day with a fan to get a break from those challenges.)  My other option was to leave her out all the time and just bring her in to the stall to eat her grain and alfalfa and then go out.  What I ended up doing was leaving it up to Donut.  If she seemed OK to be in the stall during the day without being stressed, I would stick to the regular barn schedule for stalled horses.  But if being in stressed her out, I would adjust her schedule to be out more.  That might normally have been hard to do if all of the horses in her field were stall-boarded horses who were in during the day, but the field that we (the barn owner and I) had chosen for her was all field boarded horses, so they would be out to keep her company if she needed to be out during the day.  The one thing I worried about if she was out all the time was that she might be stressed by the other horses picking on her until she settled in to the herd.

As it turned out, Donut was absolutely fine being on the regular barn schedule.  She had zero issues adjusting to being in a stall for a big chunk of the day.  She was very food-oriented and she also slept a lot, so that occupied her time quite nicely.

One thing that I did was to lead her in to her stall in the morning and lead her out to her field in the afternoon.  The staff who work at my barn have varying degrees of skill with horses, but none of them were necessarily comfortable handling a yearling whose training was pretty basic and whose reactions to lots of new things were unknown.  I planned to handle her exclusively until I felt comfortable that she knew what was expected and could handle it without getting reactive or balky.  In particular, the walk to and from her field was pretty long, so there would be a lot of opportunities for things to maybe not work out so great.  Of course, I wasn't really sure how long that would take...

What I discovered was that Donut led really well.  It was clear to me that someone had put in some quality time working with her.  My friend had said she hadn't worked with her that much, but someone at the rescue where she had been born must have worked with her.  She responded to pressure incredibly well, and I discovered that she would lead regardless of my position.  So, if I was in front of her, she would follow.  If I was at her head or her neck, she led well.  And if I was farther behind, like near her withers, she would also walk forward quite willingly.  Sometimes a bit too willingly, though.  Her natural walk was insanely fast.  I still wasn't sure if she was gaited, but her walk left no doubt that she had gaiting in her bloodlines.  If I had been riding and wanted to get from Point A to Point B really quickly, that walk would have done it.  However, I am a short person who doesn't necessarily walk that fast, so we practiced walking at human speed:)

The most amazing thing about how Donut settled in during her first week was how absolutely calm she was.  She had zero reactivity to anything (with one exception), including when the bulldozer was felling trees near her field.  On a couple of mornings, we had to walk within 100-200 feet of the falling trees, and she didn't even give them a second glance.  (I mentioned it to the friend I had gotten her from, and she said her husband had been doing the same thing on their property while Donut was there, so she probably got used to it then.)  Regardless of why, Donut outshined many of the other older horses, who had lived on the property for years and whose fields were much farther away from the work being done.

I also started walking her to the arena and around the farm a bit to help orient her, in case she ever escaped from the field or got away from someone.  I feel like it is important for animals to understand where they are.  So the only time she ever reacted to anything that first week was when I had her in the arena while my daughter was riding.  Gemma got on the mounting block and scraped her boot across one of the steps.  Donut basically teleported herself about 10 feet in a nanosecond.  (Note to self, be prepared to fall off Donut a lot if we don't get that teleportation skill managed...)  It didn't take more than a few seconds for her to recover from her fright, though.  And we spent the rest of that session, as well as a couple of others, working on the sound of boots on the mounting block.

Donut next to the offending mounting block.

I did find a few other things for me to work on, too.  The first was catching her in the field.  She would actually come up to me, but then she tended to move her head around a lot for putting on the halter.  I found that if I looped the lead rope over her neck first, that would be enough to make haltering much easier.  She also didn't quite understand how to move through a gate without me leading her through.  It wasn't a huge deal because I generally wasn't dealing with other horses trying to push through the gate, but I did start working on having her move through the gate on her own.  (I actually ended up taking her out to the round pen a few times, to work on it that way first.)

I also really needed to trim her feet.  My friend had had them trimmed a couple of months before I'd brought Donut home, but I was not particularly happy with the trim.  (In fact, I haven't been happy with a trim I've seen in person for so long I can't remember the last time - maybe 8 or 9 years ago.  The farriers in this area all seem to leave the toes too long, thereby also causing underrun heels.)  I thought all four hooves were too long and the angles were too upright.  In fact, it looked like her front feet had a bit of a curl at the bottom, which I wanted to address pretty quickly.  I also suspected, based on how Donut tried to kick me in the head every time I even went near her left hind leg with a hoof pick, that maybe her experience with the farrier hadn't been super positive.  I didn't know her too well yet, but her general personality was friendly and low-key.  And I could touch her all over her body and brush her with any brush all over with no reactions or sensitivities, so her defensive behavior when I tried to pick up her left hind hoof was likely to be the result of a bad experience.  Given that behavior and my past experience with farriers, I had no intention of letting a farrier touch her feet until after I had a chance to work with Donut and make sure she was comfortable having her feet picked up, moved around, and rasped.  (And even then, my plan was to use a farrier only if I felt like I couldn't get her feet balanced on my own.  I would probably have to haul her to one of the equine clinics in the area to use the farrier they had on call for corrective work to get one that was good.  None of the ones whose work I have seen at my barn or on other horses' feet has impressed me.)

When we'd loaded Donut to bring her to the barn, I don't remember having much trouble picking up her front feet.  And she really wasn't being too difficult about picking them up for me now.  Rather, she had some trouble holding them up.  Which is probably pretty normal for young horses that haven't had their feet handled much.  Nimo had similar issues, but to a much bigger degree, when I got him.  He despised having his feet handled, and it literally took me years to get him to the point that it wasn't a struggle.  (Nimo had never had his feet handled because back then, and I think still now, some people think you shouldn't handle or trim a young horse's feet.  That is garbage.  I'm not an expert, but after dealing with the consequences of having a very big horse who didn't want his feet touched, and who needed years of corrective farrier work to get his feet balanced again, I feel pretty comfortable saying that one of the most important things you can do with a baby/weanling is handle their feet and trim them.)  Donut was not even in the same category of difficulty as Nimo had been, so I felt pretty good about my ability to work with her and improve her skills within a short period of time.

During the first week, I think I was able to start rasping her left front hoof.  I just did 2 or 3 rasps at a time and then set her hoof down.  I'd let her rest for maybe 10-20 seconds and then pick the hoof up again.  My plan was to do a little each day until I felt like I had trimmed all I could on that hoof and then move to the next one.  And I missed Nimo quite a bit right then.  Even though his feet were hard as rocks and over 6" in diameter, I realized that when I trimmed his feet, he did a lot of supporting action on his own to keep the hoof stable against the action of the rasp.  It is incredibly hard to rasp a hoof when the owner of said hoof moves the hoof with the pressure of the rasp.  Donut also had a hard time keeping her foot stable, meaning that I had to operate the rasp with one hand and use the rest of my body to help her hold her hoof still.  So despite her tiny feet that were pretty easy to rasp, the trimming process was much harder than I originally expected.  That actually made me feel much more comfortable with my plan to do a little each day on my own, rather than having a farrier do it all at once.  

I know zero farriers who have any patience with horses that struggle.  Their response is never understanding that the horse is having trouble with its balance or that the horse is inexperienced and needs some help.  The most common response is to yell at them.  If that doesn't work, they hit them or jerk on their faces and then probably go on Facebook to complain about owners who don't work with their horses.  The thing is, it is true that many owners don't do as much as they could with their horses to help prepare them for a farrier appointment.  BUT, it is hard for an owner who doesn't know how to trim or shoe horses to replicate the scenario of actually being trimmed or shod.  Most owners don't have the tools or the hoof stand that farriers use.  They probably don't know quite how to put the leg in the same positions that a farrier does, which are different than the ones people use to pick out their horse's feet.  They certainly don't have fires in their vehicles and anvils and shoes and hammers and nails.  

So I think there really needs to be this understanding that asking a horse to stand quietly and comply with an owner's request to pick out its feet is not the same as asking a horse to go through the lengthy and probably uncomfortable process of having its feet trimmed.  Because farriers often use positions for the legs that are most comfortable for them and not for the horse.  (I get that being a farrier is hell on a person's body and I'm not trying to be critical here.  I could never trim multiple horses in one day.  But I think it is important to know what we are asking, which is that the horse holds his legs in positions that are not natural or comfortable so we can perform a necessary task.)  I actually ended up doing some leg stretching and moving exercises with Nimo to help accustom him to the movements that a farrier would ask for, and that definitely helped.  But it was still hard for him.  Mostly because farriers wanted him to hold his feet up for longer than he felt comfortable with, so he would snatch his leg away when he couldn't hold it up anymore.  Which would make the farrier mad and cause the farrier to hit him.  When I started trimming his feet myself and gave him more frequent breaks, I almost never had an issue.  In fact, I could do all sorts of things with his legs, like rest them on my knee while I looked more closely at the hoof or rasped one section more carefully, or move them around so that I could see better or use the rasp more effectively.  All I had to do to get that flexibility was allow him to put his foot down every minute or two.  (And yes, I explained that to more than one farrier, but they never listened.) 

Anyway, enough of that digression.  Back to Donut's first week.  The biggest issue we had all week was one that I had expected.  It was how she would interact with her new herd, or rather how they would interact with her.  One thing I learned with Nimo was that the first introduction to a new herd can be really hard for a human to watch.  Nimo was actually run through a gate by the alpha horse in his new herd.  (In retrospect, the horses should just have had more room.  I was forced to do the introduction for a 12-horse herd in the sacrifice paddock, which was simply not big enough.  It would have been better to do it in a large field.)  Donut was at the age where if she lived in the wild, her herd members would be starting to expect "big horse" behavior from her.  At 15 months old, she would probably still be forgiven for minor infractions, but she would be expected to acknowledge other horses' space and access to resources.  Her domestic herd would probably expect her to act like an older horse right away.  I wasn't sure exactly how things would go, but I was determined to give her the best opportunity to minimize the drama.

The first thing I did was to pull out the two more dominant horses from the field, leaving the two ponies.  One pony was the one we were leasing for Gemma and the other was one that Gemma had ridden for lessons many times.  Gemma had also ridden the other two horses for lessons a few times, and I felt like I knew both fairly well from all the time we'd spent retrieving one or the other pony from the field for months.  All the horses were good, calm horses under normal circumstances, and I felt comfortable handling them.  But I knew that could change in an instant with a new horse.

After the two horses were safely stashed in the arena, I brought Donut in and the introductions began.  The two ponies were not particularly excited to see a new horse in their field.  But Mini (the one in the fly sheet and the one we were leasing), was really not that fussed about it.  She just wanted to go back to eating.  Butters, on the other hand, was well-known for having the sass of a much bigger horse, and she definitely expressed it with Donut.  On the whole, though, there wasn't much more than posturing, so I decided to bring one of the other horses in.

Mini, Butters, and Donut try to communicate with each other.

Stormy, a large pony, was the next horse I brought in.  He tends to be a little introverted and there was very little drama with him.  He simply stood in one place and gave off an aura that even I could feel from 10 feet away.  He basically said, "Don't come near me," and Donut paid attention.  I don't know if I've never been around a horse like that before or if I just never had the sensitivity to notice before, but I have never felt anything like it.  That pony never moved a muscle, flicked an ear, or blinked an eye.  He stood perfectly still and communicated everything through his energy.  Very cool.  And I appreciated the lack of drama, for sure.

Next I brought in Candy Cane.  Candy Cane was the leader of this field.  I wasn't sure quite what to expect from him.  He is used as a beginner lesson horse and while he can be a little in your pocket, he is pretty quiet.  Yeah, well not when he discovered a new horse in his field!  He chased after Donut quite a bit at first, until she figured out a pretty smart strategy.  She just stood still about halfway out in the field and let him run himself and the rest of the herd around.  It was really interesting to watch, and I didn't know quite what was going on at first.  Below is a sequence of videos from the first few minutes.  The first one shows Donut being chased a bit, but left on her own too.

This next one shows chasing and then Donut starting to figure out a strategy.  You'll see her disappear behind the run-in shed and not come back out.

This third video shows Donut's strategy in action, as the rest of the herd runs around without her.

This final video shows Donut out by herself and realizing she can eat because the rest of the herd is busy running around in a different place.

Over the next several days, I watched with no small anxiety as Donut had trouble integrating into the herd.  Candy Cane chased her a lot, sometimes running her the length of the field.  Even Mini, who was the lowest horse in the pecking order, would make faces and pin her ears at Donut.  I just made sure that there was always a hay pile well away from the others and that Donut knew where it was, so she could eat in peace.  There was also grass in the field that she could eat and she was coming in to eat during the day, so I knew she was getting enough to eat, but I couldn't help feeling worried.

Anyway, after a week of the shenanigans, I caught this sequence of pictures as Donut re-introduced herself to Candy Cane and the two became friends.  (It wasn't long after this set of pictures that one of the barn staff told me that Candy Cane would let Donut share his grain.  Which was a really big deal.  While the other field boarded horses were fed their grain in nose bags, Candy Cane got his in a regular feed tub on the ground because no one would dare mess with him.  Donut endeared herself so much to him that he would let her take the first bite from his grain.  Then the staff would halter her and take her out so she didn't eat the rest of it.  Horse behavior and interactions are so much more complex than I used to think they were.)

Whatcha lookin' at?

From that point on, Donut would also often share Candy Cane's hay with him.  Even though she remained the lowest horse in the pecking order.  I was especially interested in this situation because of something I had noticed with Nimo.  He was the alpha horse in his herd, but he often shared hay or ate next to the lowest horse in the herd.  He never shared hay with any other horse.  I have read in a couple other places in books about mustangs that the herds don't have a linear pecking order.  Instead, different horses have different responsibilities.  For example, the stallion doesn't typically lead the herd anywhere.  His job is defense.  Instead an older mare will be responsible for setting the direction and pace of the herd when looking for food or water.  And it may not always be the same older mare.  It has never been clearer to me that we need to get away from simplifying the way horses interact with each other, and by extension, the way they interact with us.  And I'm so thankful that I have a horse who is giving me opportunities to see things in a new way:)