Habits

The other day I mentioned how horses sometimes have habits. I have the habit of sniffing my mom's boot when I get nervous. It's always her right boot. I don't know why. I just feel a little more confident when I can do that. Sparky has something similar. When he's a little unsure, he reaches his head down and scratches it on his front leg. I guess those things give us something to think about instead of the thing that has us feeling scared.

Lots of horses have habits. Some of them are pretty strange. There was a horse named Merlin in the barn I used to live in. He had all kinds of strange habits. The weirdest one was the way he'd bang his teeth on his paddock fence when it was time for the hay truck. He'd pace up and down the fence line and when he got to the far corner, he'd drop his head and hit the pipe fence hard with his teeth. It made a loud bang. He could do that for hours and there was a perfect rhythm to it - pace, pace, pace, BANG! pace, pace, pace, BANG!

My neighbor Billy told me that Merlin had been orphaned as a foal and raised by people so he didn't really know he was a horse. Then when he was bigger, someone bought him and put him in a pasture with some other horses who just beat him up because he didn't know how to act around them. So he was all messed up. He used to bang on his neighbor's door too sometimes from out in his paddock. He'd reach over the fence and hit it with his head, again and again. He sure was a strange horse.

Arco who lived in the end stall of that barn used to run his teeth along the plastic food dish that was mounted in his stall. It would make a rasp, rasp, rasp sound over and over again. There was a buckskin horse that liked to rattle his water bucket. Polano on the other end knew how to open and close his paddock door. He'd do that all day. You'd hear the door slide shut with a bang and then a few minutes later it would slide open again. And Poco the Paint horse pawed the concrete outside his stall when his person had him tied up. That sure was a noisy barn sometimes.

A lot of horse's habits are because they get bored. One of my neighbors in my barn does this thing they call cribbing or windsucking. He grabs a piece of the wood that lines the fence between our paddocks between his teeth and stands there with it in his mouth grunting while he sucks air. It's really strange. I asked him once why he does it and he said he didn't really know. It's just a habit. I like to chew wood sometimes but I don't suck on it. I'd rather just chew it in case it tastes good. Usually it doesn't.

There are two other horses in the barn that kick at each other and fight all the time. I don't know why they do that. I like to be friends with my neighbors. That way you can scratch each other and stand beside them and visit and stuff. Not those two. They bite and kick and squeal and make an awful racket. Sometimes when I'm working in the Flat Arena the noise they make will cause me to startle because their paddocks are right near it. Their people put up a big wall of wood between their paddocks and I guess it helps to keep them from hurting each other but it sure does make a loud noise when they kick it.

One of them, Spencer, has a new habit. He likes to stick his tongue out the side of his mouth when his mom is riding him. She doesn't like that at all. She had his teeth checked and his bit checked and was all worried that something was the matter with him but he's fine. He just likes to stick his tongue out. I can understand that. I like to do things with my mouth. I don't know why. It just keeps me busy.

When I first came to live with my mom, I was a little bit of a nipper. I wasn't trying to be bad, I just like to play with things and I use my mouth to do it. But sometimes I played too hard and I bit her and she didn't like that at all. I learned after a while how to be careful and now I can play without biting. She doesn't mind that. We play games all the time. I just wiggle my lips on her or grab things without using my teeth. Every now and then I forget and she makes that loud sound that means I'm bad. And then I remember. Which just goes to show you that you can sometimes turn a bad habit into one that's not so bad. Which is good.