Do They Ever Listen?

Sometimes, despite not having children, I feel called upon to act as someone's mother. And believe me, this is not a role I feel comfortable with. I find myself saying things like, "It's for your own good!" or "Why are you doing this? You're making me very unhappy!" The "children" I am referring are the four-footed kind: Maggie and Robin. Mostly, my pleas for good behavior fall upon deaf ears.
  Occasionally, I am forced to reprimand Maggie the Mexican Pony. (It comes with having a 900 pound pet; you cannot allow her to bite, kick or otherwise attempt to intimidate you- especially when you're trying to do something good like pick out her hooves.)  I may growl at Maggie or sharply rebuke her. (No, I am not beating her about the ears with a stick, but I push her off firmly or snap her lead line). The punchline here is that Robin the Good finds this entertaining. She sits on the other side of the fence and laughs tauntingly. There is a bit of sibling rivalry between the two critters...

And as most of you know, I rarely get mad at Lil' Robin - like maybe three and a half times in the past two years. She is a very good dog. But the other day proved the exception to the rule.
The blacksmith came to trim Maggie's feet. Typically, he does this out by the barn but on Thursday I thought to bring Maggie up on the lawn so she could graze a bit and there are fewer gates for him to carry his tools through. Maggie stood fine, despite a strong wind and in short order her hooves looked nice and smooth and attended to. (Next time, maybe she'll opt for a pretty French tip!)

 

I decided to go in the house to wash my hands and eat lunch before cleaning up the lawn. Big mistake! As I opened the door Robin bolted out (offense #1), shoving me out of the way as she hurtled straight to where the horse's feet had been trimmed and (offense #2) immediately scarfed down a luscious selection of hoof parings.
This is beyond gross. Hoof parings are like big nasty old dirty toenails. And they're sharp! No matter how clean you keep your horse's pasture, they stand around on poop and mud and all kinds of bacteria and they stink. Needless to say, is truly delicious to dogs.
I was frantically crawling around on hands and knees, fishing for bits and chunks and thought I had gotten them all. And I kept ordering Robin to go play some place else. I threw the balls, I waved attractive sticks in the air... and she still kept returning to the hoof trimmings. It got ridiculous; I had told her seventy three times to "Get away from there!!!" in my sternest voice. She earned a new nickname: "Sneakus" because every time I turned around she had snuck back over to snorfle around. I finally took a tarp and some rocks and covered the area. One of the funnier moments was when I glanced back to see Maggie at the fence line, visibly laughing at Robin (for a change) as if to say, "Nyah, nyah, nyah! Rita NEVER yells at you!! How's it feel now?!?!?"

The morning after, I can't find Robin and I go downstairs and she's seated at that door and I detect that familiar shoulder hunch and gak gak gak sound like she's starting to throw up... so out the door she goes, barely clears the terrace before  ejecting a foamy mess. And sure enough! It's got a ripe chunk of hoof in it, which I snatched up in my (gloved) hand and threw far over the fence. (Gloves are in the laundry.) Do they ever listen to me? I told her she'd get sick!

Dog and Pony Update

I haven't featured our fluffy barnyard friends recently so I decided this was as good a time as ever. Let's check in with Maggie the Mexican Pony and Jules the (Perfect) Dog.
This is what greeted me in the field today:

Maggie spent a good part of the night shellacing herself in mud. Do we remember that Maggie is a BLACK horse? Here's a detail of her back end:

She looks like a brown and black zebra! After thirty minutes of currying and brushing, she looked marginally better but wherever you touched her, puffs of dust arose. In addition, she has thoughtfully whacked her foot on a frozen chunk of mud (I am conjecturing...) and took a big piece of her hind hoof off. Ouch. No pictures of the damaged foot- it's too pathetic!- but here's her other side. It's a bit more presentable:

At this stage of the winter, with all the fuzzy coat, it's almost impossible to clean them. Maggie resembles and old sofa in a basement rec room.
And Jules? Yes, the Perfect Dog continues his winning ways.

There he is, contemplating his very favorite activity. (Hint: it has something to do with chasing small round things.) Maybe he's waiting for snow. He does like snow, unlike the rest of us. But in the meantime, Jules has made himself super useful by providing logs for the wood stoves. Most mornings, he selects a log or stick from our walk and carries it back home. Our neighbors find this highly entertaining, especially when he chooses an especially long branch and he looks over his shoulder, expecting me to pick up the other end and help him carry it home. We then proceed up the road like a yoke of oxen. How perverse is it that he makes me work on our walks?

But there's a new twist. Jules is pretty smart and he figured out how to correctly train me. Several times recently, he picked out a log that was a bit too wide around to fit comfortably in his mouth. He struggled with lifting it and I'd try and help but I found myself carrying his log, with Jules glancing approvingly at me. I have become a log valet for the dog!