It’s snowing now. The Blizzard of 2016 has officially arrived. They’re saying we could get over two feet of snow, or snow and ice mix. The barn has been filled with hay. Water has been stockpiled (as much as one can stockpile water) in case of a power outage (still praying we don’t get one) and all preparedness that can be made to care for the horses has been made.
Naturally, this means that the moment snow began to fall, both horses and the donkey stopped eating their morning hay, left the shelter of the run-in shed, and are now hunkered against one fence beneath the branches of the neighbor’s white pines, reenacting some sort of equine version of the lost Donner Party.
In years past, I would have hurried outside in my pajamas with only one sock, a penny loafer on one foot, a wellie boot on the other, rushing to lead the horses back to safety, and then I’d have given them extra hay and locked them in the paddock.
Now, I know better.
Sierra, the 20-something app/thoroughbred is so obsessed with allowing himself to be pelted by precipitation (hail included) that unless he’s actually tied under shelter, or locked into a stall, he’ll just go to the middle of the paddock and stand out in it anyway. Saida/Aisha, the 30-something thoroughbred will find fault with every morsel of fresh hay I offer her, and probably throw a large portion of it out into the deepest section of farm mud (the sargasso sea of the paddock where full sized trucks can be lost) and then stand forlornly looking at it before pooping on the rest of the new hay and ignoring it. Fran, the 15-20-something rescue donkey will (if I can find the strength to physically drag her into the paddock) just stand under shelter with a grumpy expression, and then bray as if she’s starving to death while wading through the hay Saida/Aisha just threw all over the place in a vain attempt to catch up to me before I leave.
I’ll return to the house now penny loaferless (lost to paddock mud) cold and bedraggled and cussing to lay a sailor low, vowing to eat ungrateful-horse-burgers for dinner.
No, I no longer waste strength worrying about where the equines choose to stand in the snow storm. Not when that strength might well be needed later to haul water out to them if the power goes off. They’re on they own to use their horsey logic to make good choices, or questionable ones. They’re blanketed, and with available shelter, water and food. If they don’t have the sense to utilize any of the above, it’s on them.
After all, the Donner Party got fair warning about what lay ahead, and they still chose to go on. Maybe all of them were suffering from a blight of horse logic. My horses can likewise make their own ill-advised decisions.
*Hits publish on this article with a snort, and then goes to peer out the window and check on the morons standing under the white pines*