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The black and white pinto filly died -- apparently pneumonia. She was fine one day, breathing with a death rattle the next, dead before we could get the vet out. They're not very sturdy at three days old. Naughty' s baby (two days older) and Chessa's baby (a week older) were in the same field in exactly the same weather and they're both fine, hale and hearty little buggers. *sigh* The weather hasn't been obscenely bad or oppressive for new horse babies -- it's just the breaks. These things happen.

Damn it all.

(no subject)

On a happier horse note, I drug Taku out of the field today and beat on her. She's still impressing me with her relative clue, remembering what we've done and progressing fairly rapidly ever onward. She's also still ugly but shedding out and growing hair over the bald rainrot spots on her back. I really want her to have good job skills because nobody is ever going to love her for what she looks like.

On the feed sack thing -- to make it less scary, I've had it folded up in half, half, half so that it looked 1/8 as big as it really was and was significantly less floppy to boot. I rubbed the folded-up, non-floppy feed sack all over the horse, while she stood still on a loose (lots of slack) rope. It took me two days to be able to touch her anywhere but on her nose with the fully-folded feed sack. That might seem like a really long time, but Taku isn't tied for this stuff. She's standing in a halter and lead, the end of the lead in my free hand. It's a twelve-foot lead, so she can move around pretty easily because there's a lot of slack in the rope. I don't want to HOLD the horse still -- that's not where I'm going with this. She's bigger than I am, stronger than I am, and faster than I am and while I *could* try to hold her still and rub the feed sack on her, she wouldn't be very happy about it. If I pushed the matter, she'd pull the rope out of my hands, leap about a bit, get all excited, and basically fail to cooperate. I don't want that. I want her to hold HERSELF still, which is easier for both of us. It takes more time at the front end than forcing her to stand still while I make with the feed sack, but it works better in the long run.

This is why I've been working slowly and carefully up to using the full, unfolded feed sack -- because I want the horse to hold herself still for me. Today I got the feed sack fully unfolded and it even flapped about a bit in our brisk spring winds, so was relatively frightening. Taku stood still, kind of tense but not moving, with a big old drape in the rope, while I flopped (still pretty gently) the unfolded feed sack all over her. So, y'know, progress.

Also, feed sack stuff isn't the only thing we do in a day. Horse attention spans aren't that great, so we do a little work on several goals. We don't do the same things every day in the same order. (Hell, I'd get bored if we did that.) Today we worked on circle attention span, picking up feet, touching ears, going forward on a rope to address obstacles (walking through two plastic barrels) and (walking over two barrels, laid down on their sides), feed sack skills, and eating grass in the yard (she's pretty good at this one -- it's just how we take a bit of a break in the middle, five or ten minutes of easy time to split up the half hour or so that we spend together). I try to end each part on a good note, something that she did right, and I try to have at least four or five things to work on in a given day so that there is some variety to the stuff we do.