Busted!

Mares and foals innocently following me into the corrals before I separated them for weaning. Such a tough process for all of us.

I received an email updating me about Mya the Wonder Pony. One of the stories made me chuckle.  Mya was my first pony and best friend for twenty years.  She’s now in semi-retirement with her new best friend Smith and his mom Ericka.  Ericka said she had decided to repurpose a heavy duty garbage can as hay storage.  She went out to fill it, and Mya was at the far end of the back lot.  By the time Ericka had returned to the house, she looked around, and Mya had come to investigate the garbage can, had tipped it over and popped the lid off and was feasting on the contents.  ‘Busted!’ was the caption to the photo Ericka sent me, as in ‘caught in the act!’  After I got done chuckling, I responded to Ericka’s email with ‘Busted’ stories of my own about Mya!

I hate the first day of weaning.  I try not to ‘hate’ but it’s just really hard on me to hear distress calls from my mares and foals.  It’s even more challenging this year because I have a mare that’s never been through the process before.  And we’re all in a new place with new routines and facilities so there’s not much familiar for the foals to fall back on when they’re separated from their dams.  I separated the mares and foals in the morning, putting the foals in a corral a couple of hundred yards away from my house, and the mares of course hung as near there as fences would allow.  The inevitable cries of distress from mothers and children weren’t as audible at that distance.

After dinner and dark, I sat down at my desk to work.  I was in the middle of a project requiring lots of concentration, so I hadn’t gone out for final feeding of ponies in the corrals at my usual time.  Suddenly there was a distress cry from my mare new to weaning, and it sounded like it was right outside my window.  It wasn’t, but it was at the fence as close to the house as she could get.  She could see me through the windows, and repeated her cry to me to ‘fix the problem.’  ‘Busted’ immediately came to mind – she could see me and ‘caught me in the act’ of ignoring her.  She repeated her call until I couldn’t ignore her anymore!

We will of course all survive weaning, and the good news is that the process is started and one day closer to being completed.  I will have to ignore distress cries that are normal to the process until those calls subside.  We’ll all be happier when that day comes, and until then we’ll muddle through the toughness together.

© Jenifer Morrissey, 2019

You can find more stories about my life with Fell Ponies in my book What an Honor, available internationally by clicking here or on the book cover.