Two beautiful white mares (gal pals) stand side by side in a rural pasture on a warm, sunny summer day. It’s always nice to have a friend to hang out with. Yellow wildflowers grow along the wooden fence line in this newest art creation.
More equine adventures. Y’all, having a #horse and a #donkey at the same time really emphasizes their different brains.
Today I was playing a game on my phone and didn’t go out to feed lunch until rather late. When I finally walked out, I whistled and yelled hi, as usual. I got one anxious whinny and one long drawn out donkey bray - but when I got in the barn they weren’t there! The gate had blown shut again (this time I propped it open with concrete blocks instead of sticks), and both of them were locked in the meadow.
Usually, if I’m late with lunch, Samwise will bray complaints at whoever opens the front door. But our kid had gone in and out of the house several times while I was distracted on my phone, and the donkey alarm hadn’t gone off!
So: they were both trapped in the meadow. Miss D was furious, pawing the ground outside of the gate as soon as she heard me approach. Samwise brayed angrily as soon as he heard my hello. But neither of them considered yelling for humans, because they weren’t in the proper yelling-for-humans location.
One of the most important horse psychology tips I ever learned, one that’s consistently been true for my entire experience, is that horses don’t generalize well. Miss D doesn’t “whinny for food,” she “whinnies for food when in the right spot.” Those are different concepts in her head. She’d quickly learn to whinny from different spots if I fed her in different spots on the property, but she hasn’t learned that routine and she can’t make the cognitive leap very easily.
They just have these peculiar blind spots in their perception. (I mean, we do too from their point of view - we never smell the wind, we charge heedlessly through scary footing, etc.) The Venn diagram of the similarities between horses and donkeys is a really interesting space.
This is a two-equine property, but now I kinda want a mule for the next companion, just to see how their weird hybrid brains work too - but it’ll probably be an old pony, and hopefully many years from now.