Feb 23, 2011

Bella is such a sweet mare.  She is respectful at feed time and will back up when you "shoo" her away and tell her "back", but then she will also whack you with her big ole head, so we'll work on that obnoxious habit.  I spent a little time with her tonight just raising my arm whenever she tried to bang into me with her head, then I spent a few minutes with pressure on her poll to drop her head. She doesn't know that, at all!  But she definately was in a learning frame of mind, she kept trying.  It was funny, she would bring her head back up and wait for me to put pressure on it, then try a few different things. She thought turning her head away from me was the answer (she assumed that rather quickly), and when she thought she knew what I was asking, she dropped her head, sighed, licked and chewed, and went back to her hay.  Very cute.

Its so refreshing to have a horse here that you don't have to undo abuse issues, and break through that barrier to get them to even acknowledge that you are communicating with them on some level.  She's already there!  How nice!

Oh, and she does this funny and cute little head-toss thing when she sees me coming with dinner, lol!  She does LOVE her food!  She was none too pleased when I introduced the hay net tonight, she is a pig about her hay and tramples it, and pees/poops in it, so she's getting the net!  But she figured it out in a few minutes.

I have noticed that she carries a lot of tension in her neck and back.  Her back looks like the under-side of a saddle, its obvious she was ridden a lot.   She's a bit creaky, she snap, crackle, pop's a lot.  She also has what feels like a displaced vertebrae in her neck on the left.  It just feels like bone protruding, but she lets me palpate it and it doesn't seem to bother her. She does have difficulty curving her neck to look behind her on either side. She kind of does this head twist thing to look behind her.  I'm not really sure how old she is, her teeth don't age her much more than mid-teens.