Oh, you think darkness is your ally. But you merely adopted the dark; I was born in it, molded by it. I didn't see the light until I was already a man, by then it was nothing to me but BLINDING! The shadows betray you, because they belong to me!
I like to pretend I speak Spanish, so I talk to the farm animals in Spanish. Which means that the goats have learned that when I yell, “¡Mis Cabritas!” They should come over to me. I’m not sure if they have associated it with food or attention. But it works, and it’s fairly new - I’ve been calling them like that for years, but they’ve only learned it within the last two weeks.
And I love it! I love seeing them run up to me, trusting and adorable. It makes me feel a little bad when I use it so I can grab them for science tho. I had to get fecal samples tonight and in order to do that accurately, I have to lock them up in separate stalls, which they don’t enjoy. But it’s for their health and we don’t do this very often, so I guess we’ll all have to grin and bear it.
But in happier news …. I met TWO foals this weekend!!! They were both terribly fluffy, nippy, funny, nippy and their tails were like … fox tails. They looked like poofy pipe cleaners and were SO short and soft to the touch. Here’s some pictures!!!!
The first picture and the video is of a rotten little 4-month-old mini horse colt. He both wanted attention and wanted to eat flesh, so it was a difficult balance between reaching in to pet him and not getting nipped. The other mini horse visible in the video is his mother.
The rest of the pictures are of a (less than) 2-month-old draft filly. She wasn’t quite as nippy or fluffy, but she was still so stinking cute! Also, don’t worry too much about the balding spots. Like a lot of mammal babies (even human babies! Sometimes you have to keep mittens and socks on human babies 24/7 for a while so they don’t scratch themselves with their little nails!) she is still sensitive to both heat and stimuli, so she rubs herself a lot. The farmer who owns her attached a soft brush to the wall, so she can better help herself. I love little miss legs, lol. Her mom is in the back of pictures 6 and 7
(Stuff I learned these past few days. Sad, but true stories for these little guys. But happily, they and their mothers are all getting adopted, and the rescue legally binds the new owners to inform them of any new movements of the horses and offers a very easy return if something was to happen. So things are looking up!)
So the farm we went to is a horse rescue, and a very well-run one (a lot of horse rescues are fakes and nasty). The mini-horse mama was originally going to be sold to a private (ew!) big cat owner. Apparently, since mini-horses are overbred and under-wanted (like most horses), they’re pretty nice, cheap and fat solutions to the people who can’t get easy meat for their exotic pets. No word on whether she was going to be live food or not. In any case, she was probably kept with a stallion because the owner didn’t care, and she and another (still pregnant) mini mare arrived at the rescue. But they’re healthy and fine now - my mother and I even cleaned their yard!
The draft girls duo have a similar story. The mother was (probably, she didn’t have papers) a brood mare, and was reaching the end of her fertile days. What happens often with older horses (or ferals) in such an overbred horse country like ours, is that they are sold to a collector of sorts who then passes them around for six or so months until they can be sold to a country that will eat them, like Canada or Mexico, or to a pet food factory. And since they sell by the pound, it helps to get the mares pregnant, so they’re heavier. Luckily, this lovely lady was picked up by the rescue and almost immediately had her baby. So all’s good for this pair!
The reason horse meat cannot be commercially sold for human consumption is because, basically, the American government decided it was too hard to check up and inspect many horse-owning properties to see if they were well taken care of, let alone clean enough to be eaten by people. I’m not really against horse meat, I don’t think I’d eat it myself, but I’d much rather America sell horse meat and thus heavily keep track of and protect horses, than the current system.
So yeah, the horse industry, a lot like pretty much any animal industry, is pretty fucked up. The racetracks are a big reason behind this - as is a lack of proper animal education. So please don’t support racetracks and remember to really consider your property’s capabilities when you’re getting a new animal.
Horses, as much as the wild mustang and/or brumby sounds cool, are like any other feral animal - they can’t survive well in the wild, and ruin the ecosystem for the real native animals and other life forms. You will never see a truly healthy wild horse, and that’s a goddamn shame. So don’t dump them either.
