Arabian Horses Are Characters

Horses can really be characters sometimes and none can be better at it than Arabian horses. One such character just happens to be Scandalous Storm. He's the 6 year old stallion that I took to the Mike Neal Halter Clinic and that I'm currently starting under saddle.

Being a typical stallion, Storm has a busy busy mind. If I don't keep him occupied he'll find his own forms of entertainment. Unfortunately over at the boarding barn the horse gets left to his own devices way too often. That can only spell trouble.

The boarding barn is primarily self care. We provide hay, grain or feed, and supplements, clean stalls and fill waters. Someone comes into feed both morning and night. That's where the problem with Storm comes in.

It's not that the horse is aggressive. He's bored. So Storm entertains himself by playing with whatever might be loose in his stall. That includes a couple of jolly balls, one hangs and the other with the handle is knocked around the floor. The horse also has a clump of milk jugs tied together that make great noise when shaken or banged on the walls.

Another gallon milk jug filled with grain has holes punched into the bottom. Hung from the bars in the stall, it makes a fun way to slowly feed grain and occupy the horse. Of course, the bottle gets pretty mangled in shape because the way the horse releases the grain is banging the thing with his head. But it works and he likes it, it just doesn't stall full long enough!

With all of these things to play with you'd think that would be enough for Storm. But for some reason this horse's favorite toy has turned out to be his round soft feed tub. The horse tosses the thing in the air. He bangs it against the walls. But his very favorite thing of all is to dunk it in his muck bucket sized water container that sits in the corner of his stall.

He flips it and splashes and knocks his water all over the stall. Sometimes even his blanket get wet he makes such a mess. But that's not really the problem, we deal with those things OK.

The only bad thing about that is the poor person feeding has to fetch that sucker out from the bottom of the bucket each and EVERY morning. On cold winter mornings it's no fun sticking an arm into icy cold water to retrieve the grain tub. Not to mention that this horse likes to dunk his hay so that water is kinda a gross. Then finding a way to dry off the darn arm before the rest of the feeding can be done is also a bother. Storm is causing a problem with this habit of his.



Thankfully, the person who was stuck with this task came up with a plan. (She's also the one that showed me the plastic milk jug feeder.) She figured it we'd give Storm something else to play with in the water he would leave the tub out. So we added a bunch of small plastics balls to the tub.

Storm was out in his paddock when the balls first got dropped into the tub. He didn't pay much attention until it was time to eat. That's when the horse came in. At first Storm was not amused by the balls floating in his water. He snorted and blew with his tail over his back, not sure he wanted to even remain in his stall.

Eventually, the call of dinner was stronger than his fear of the colorful balls floating on top of his water. The horse came in to eat his dinner with one eye on the food and the other eye on the water tub.

It only took him a day or two to get the hang of those balls bobbing around on top of his water. The horse was back to dunking his hay but no longer his feed tub. Whenever the horse feels the urge to play in the water, he has lots of balls to chase and he's actually pretty happy with that, although we've not been able to catch him on film.

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silly horse