The Big Move

I'm happy to report that after a day in which I had to move every single hoofed animal to where it has lived all winter to somewhere new, all livestock is moved, bedded, fed and watered in their new abodes with only 3 motherf**kers, 1 you sonofab**ch and a minor number of strangled screams in the process. This is an all-time record for me.

Today's monumental effort was designed mostly to make old man Cody (the very elderly Tennessee Walking Horse who lives here) happier. Ever since his best friend and soulmate Ginger died last month, he has been seriously struggling. Not only does he just plain mourn her, his eyesight has been failing in the last year and she was his seeing-eye horse. He feels lost in every way a horse can.

In the last several weeks, I have tried a number of different living arrangements for Cody but none have been the right fit. Cody, who is well into his 30s (we think, he might be 55 for all we know), is on special senior feed that takes him forever and a day to finish. Ginger was his perfect elderly roommate because she, too, was on that same feed. And they liked each other so much, they were happy to eat their old horse grain head to head from the same trough. My struggle since then has been to find someone Cody could be with (because he is very herd bound with his sight issues) that also wouldn't eat all his food. I have tried and fail several different arrangements and my worry has been deepening.

But after literally mapping it all out on paper and examining every angle, I felt I hit on the right formula for maximum Cody happiness, safety and proper mealtimes. But, that formula also meant that literally every animal, in every pen, would end up someplace new. And the clock was ticking, because I needed to get this job done before the horrifying -60 windchills hit tonight.

And my biggest pain in accomplishing this Herculean task was this mare, Kas. Because Kas LOVES change--it makes life interesting...a very important thing for an overly intelligent mare with not a long going on work-wise in midwinter. And if she can make life even MORE interesting by causing chaos, gee, well why not? This is the horse that sometimes tries to double barrel the tractor to just see what happens and will lift goats into the air and drop them, again just to see what happens.

There was literally nowhere I could put her during the big move that she couldn't nip, kick, chase or in some way terrorize those whom I was moving...other than this fence post. If I put her in a stall, she would just reach over and bite whomever walked by. If I put her free in the pen, she just watched gates to see when she might reverse the animal I was attempted to chase through. Even if I dumped her loose in the yard, I guarantee she would have found a way to open the door to the house and chase the dogs outside before stopping to eat all of our breakfast cereal from off the top of the fridge. She is afraid of nothing and that gets her into more trouble than any horse I have owned in a very long time.

And so she spent her day tied to a post, watching despondently while I did all the critter chasing and she got to do none.

It was very long, very tiring day spent in the wind and snow but it feels dang good to have everyone in a spot where I feel they can ride out the frozen hell of the next few days and hopefully, in the case of Cody, be happy to be for the rest of winter...because I really don't want to move that many animals in one day again!