Horses Need Your Help

Posted by gspeed on Mar 7, 2009 in Animalia | 2 comments

I was once owned by   For a few months, I was the proud owner of a horse. This was back when my dad still hadn’t learned that you shouldn’t put an 11 year old in charge of your shopping list.

I thought he would have figured out that little nugget of parenting etiquette after I’d already gone through 2 rabbits (living in the apartment stairwell), 8 chicks (6 of which ‘jumped’ off the roof), and a bloated goldfish that shared its cloudy bowl with an unlucky tadpole which eventually got eaten.

After I proudly trotted Colonel Foxy, a young appaloosa , around a dusty ring for 2 hours straight, my dad agreed that a horse would be the ideal pet. But have you ever spoken to a horse owner?? I don’t know if it could have helped my already waning popularity. Either way, Foxy was a good horse, as far as horses go… and just to be clear, my definition of a good horse is one that doesn’t trample you to death after you’ve managed to gracefully somersault over its head and onto a pile of carefully placed manure.

It is only now  I realize that a horse would never intentionally hurt a decent owner. Horses need them to survive:  A 1500 pound animal prancing around on relatively tiny hooves-comparable to a fat person hopping around on his fingertips and tippytoes-is going to have issues. Without a farrier coming by to trim their hooves  and put on new shoes ever couple of months, horses would stumble all over the place wishing someone would just put them out of their misery.

We also act as their private chefs: A horse will waddle off and eat all kinds of crap that will leave them with indigestion.  And indigestion is a major killer of the domesticated equine!! Even eating too much can cause the dreaded indigestion. Unfortunately, horses can’t barf…they just can’t…and so thousands of horses die of colic (when their digestive systems just give up) every year.  So next time you find yourself kneeling over the toilette bowl after a little too much boxed wine…be thankful that you even have that choice!

Either way, like their close counterpart the unicorn, horses have figured out how to use people to help them survive. This is remarkable, since the domesticated horse is about as smart as a sea cucumber. Thousands of years of inbreeding will do that to anything…