Horse Haven

How cute is this goat? She's got star potential! Horse Haven at Best Friends includes an assortment of horses, mules, donkeys, goats, and sheep. My job was to help care for them - which consisted mainly of cleaning up after them, if you know what I mean.

For some reason, I just couldn't stop taking pictures of this pretty girl. She just seemed to be posing for me!

I spent most of the day with another Best Friends intern named Ashley, and I never realized how many goofy farm animal stories I have. I spent most of the morning telling Ashley stories that began with the words, "And this one time, at our farm house...." The poor girl is probably praying that she'll never get paired up with me again!

Lucky for me and Ashley, this sweet goat was nothing like the ornery goat we had when I was a kid. That darned goat (Rocky, or Rockhead) would head butt you right into the side of the barn! I think it was how he entertained himself.

After our morning poop scooping duties were done, we got to ride on the feed truck.

I felt like a kid on a hay ride!

Here I am with a volunteer, and Ashley,

getting ready to head

out to feed the horses.

Riding on the feed truck is one of the best ways to see the lower canyon - it's really beautiful in the morning, and a little chilly. I could've used another layer that morning, but it was well worth it.

After the hay ride, we had to give the goats fresh water and muck the goat pens (muck = poop scoop). It's not a hard job, really. Except that the little balls fall through the muck rake. And I'm not sure that I'll ever look at blueberries the same. It was certainly one of those moments when I was thankful that I'm not an OCD type. You'd make yourself nuts trying to clean all of it up! And I think our presence made the goats a little nervous, because when we entered the pens they seemed to all eliminate at the same time! Or maybe they're just doing that continuously. Imagine the joy of walking into an enclosure where 4 nervous goats are giving you the evil eye and either making yellow puddles or dropping blueberries. Good times. Ashley and I worked fast so we could get to the Parelli demonstration with the horse trainers.

The Parelli method is really impressive. It involves building a relationship between the handler and the horse, so that the handler isn't always using physical methods or threatening to use physical methods to get the desired behavior. We watched one of the trainers take Cowboy through the "7 games" - all things that a horse can do, like step back and to the side, but wouldn't normally do on cue. Cowboy was a show off that day - it was really impressive to see how hard that horse would work for a few cookies.

See the horse trailer in the background? Before the demo, Cowboy walked right into it and helped himself to some cookies that were stashed in there. Loading a horse into a trailer can be a seriously stressful event, and a horse walking into a trailer on his own is not the norm!

I really loved my day at Horse Haven. It brought back a lot of old memories. Happy memories of our farmhouse, where my sister Patty had the magic touch with all of the horses, and where one of my favorite times of the day was at sunset when we'd hear our horses running through the fields. I thought of the time that a horse ran off with me when I was trail riding with Patty, and she said I looked like a little jockey when that horse jumped a fence and ran all the way back to the barn with me on his back. And of course, the times when I've been bitten, and my sister was bucked off of Champ. So many memories. Poor Ashley had to hear about a lot of them. By the afternoon I tried to tone it down a little, so I wouldn't drive her absolutely nuts. I don't know why she never sits next to me at lunch now. ;)