Indoor Girls Need Not Apply

Spend any real time with horses, not just arriving for a lesson to a tacked-up dead broke horse once a month, and you'll start to truly appreciate all of the little things that get wrapped up in loving huge animals that live outdoors. For me, and my shrieking kids, this has recently included the evening bats.

I love bats. Anything that eats blood sucking insects is a good critter in my book. Bats squeaking as they fly past you at eye level, make a pass, turning around and flying straight back at you again is a little creepy. Once I knocked one out as it flew directly into the tines of a manure fork I was carrying, he drug his little body across the floor using his freakishly small little rodent hands to pull himself forward until he felt well enough to fly.

Sharing your life with horses also includes rats and mice. They are inevitable. Taking every measure a human can against rodents, if  you have an outside animal, there will still be tailed vermin. Add in that the said animal eats grain and the problem grows. Years ago caring for my old Paso Fino, Flashy, the barn went so far as to keep grain in steel locking cans, cans located inside locked freezers with full seals on them. Even with Alcatraz grain security I still felt that wonderful early morning rush that coffee could never top, the feel of a tiny field mouse on your hand as you reached into a dark feed container.

Whisper offered to help manage the beasts who stole her dropped bits of grain, and drowned a rat in her water bucket a few days ago (okay, maybe she didn't drown him, but she also didn't offer to help him get out). She was proud to point out his little floating body shortly after I had kissed her nose good-morning.

The spiders are a whole other issue. Snakes I don't mind. After all, they help control the vermin and can stay around as long as they like provided they aren't venomous. Finding a large snake skin wrapped up in the hay is as cool to me as the tiny bird nests that sometimes develop in the hay mangers. But the spiders. Ugh, the spiders. For me they are not so welcome. Sure, they eat flies and I should be grateful but the only place I've ever seen black widows has been around and in barns. Poisonous spiders scare me enough to hate the whole order. Nothing is quite as heeby-jeeby producing than putting a blanket on a horse in a dim lit stall only to see sacs of spider eggs hanging off the material where your body was against the horse as you dressed it. About a month ago this happened with a black widow mother and ... bleh.... it's just too traumatic to talk about.

You must also appreciate cats as barn cats are as essential to barns as the horses are. A good barn cat knows how to get out of the way of horse hooves, eats mice, and allows little kids (that are as common around ponies as flies) to pick it up and talk baby talk to it. Some barn cats attach themselves to a horse and can become good companions. Native Dancer's groom called the Dancer "Daddy" because a cat that had always had black kittens began having grays after it formed a tight connection with the horse, even traveling in the box cars with him.

Having a sort of scavenger spirit comes in handy when it's time to pull from the round bale, insert Forest Gump, "You never know what you are going to get". Any number of strange things can be wrapped up as the hay is turned into a bale. To date we've found a full spinal column of something that was about 8 inches long, chicken feathers, freakishly large crickets, frogs, snake skins, and the occasional bird body.

When you think of the majestic beauty and allure around the horse, the power and grace, and the almost intoxicating dance of trust and power, remember the poop shoveling, bat concussions, and trough scum scrubbing that come with being a real horseman.