Opening the Barn Door

It’s easy for city folk like us to laugh heartily at the antics resulting from taking a couple of millionaire heiresses and dropping them into the middle of a farm community. I have to admit, I passed up my opportunity to watch The Simple Life on Fox, but it had more to do with my general dislike of reality shows than anything. I didn’t know who the show’s two stars were, but I was more than aware of the nearby city of Altus.

Where the actual so-called simple life is concerned, though, I can more than relate to being a fish out of water. The thought of being a part of that life never occurred to me until one evening in 1998, when the woman who wasn’t even yet my fiancee’ asked me if I wanted to be part-owner of a horse. Quite innocently, my response was, “Which part?” Curiously enough, she didn’t press the matter further. (I thought it was a valid question.)

Now, six years later, I’m married to her. And I’m not the part owner of a horse. I’m the owner of four horses. And our four horses live on my in-laws’ farm with about sixteen or seventeen other horses. On Sundays, to pay off the “debt” incurred by having my wife’s parents board and feed our critters, we show up early in the morning and often stay until late that night to feed the horses, haul hay, clean stalls, do some grooming, and generally admire their beauty.

Later this year, we’re planning on moving those horses to the pasture that we bought along with our new home. There’s already a barn on the premises, and horse-friendly fencing (barbed wire is generally frowned upon if one is raising horses for breeding/show purposes). I’d be lying through my teeth if I tried to convince you that that barn and that fencing didn’t have a lot to do with us buying this house. I know how to do a lot of things, but having passed on shop class in high school, I have to say the building a barn is not among my skills. I wouldn’t know how to build a particularly good one that would have such features as “wall-mounted hay feeders” and “stall doors” and “lights” and “remaining standing in a stiff breeze.” That there was already a barn here is a godsend.

In some ways, I look forward to Sundays. I love being around the horses, but there are some things about the purely physical task load that are just daunting. Feeding a paddock with more than one hungry horse is an unpredictable and sometimes dangerous thing. I’ve been stepped on only a couple of times, but it’s a couple of times too many – we’re talking upward of a thousand pounds of horse, concentrated into a foot which is stepping on the foot of a 270-or-so-pound human being. I’m lucky not to have wound up with a broken foot. There are playful nips and then there are outright impatient bites. And there are kicks too – low-flying cow kicks that might sting a lot and leave a nasty bruise, and full-blown defensive kick which can weigh in at around 1,000 pounds per square inch of pressure (and that’s on the low side); since mares instinctively kick with their hind feet, almost the entire weight of the horse is directed into that kick. That’s something I’ve only encountered a few times with horses that were cornered by other horses, or horses in situations that “spooked” them (such as a thunderstorm), and in every case it either wasn’t directed at me specifically or was a miss, going right past my head. I don’t think I’d be here writing this is it wasn’t a near miss. And bringing the horses onto our property means increasing these risk factors from weekly to daily frequency. Fortunately, our fearsome foursome is actually very well behaved, with only one bona fide troublemaker in the bunch – but as noted above, a number of environmental factors can make them react with more uncertainty than they normally would.

And then there’s just good old fashioned sweat. Bags of horse feed are at least 50 pounds each. A square bale of hay is heavier than you might think – depending on where it’s from and how densely packed it is, it can be well over fifty pounds on its own; a small standalone feeder will require four to five bales. And then there’s scraping the stalls, which basically involves shoveling out every single pound of solid waste that’s been deposited on the stall floor, depositing that in a wheelbarrow, and then taking that wheelbarrow and depositing its contents somewhere – frequently in a pile to be spread over the ground as fertilizer at a later date. The wheelbarrow’s important, because the first couple of times I did this, I had to carry my shovel loads about 50 yards out of the barn to the aforementioned pile. That’s half a football field with my arms supporting a shovel loaded down with…well…crap. Fortunately, the stall-shoveling is primarily a summertime ritual because most of the horses on the farm are free to roam.

So how did I make the transition from urbanite computer guy to someone who loves horses? It’s quite a story. The first horse my wife bought – we acquired two before we were married – was a chestnut-brown Arabian mare with a white blaze down the length of her face. When she arrived at my in-laws’ farm, she was very skittish – she’d just left a good home, and that previous owner had rescued her from a “dispersal sale” – usually the last stop on the way to the slaughter lot. My wife, her sister and their parents were well-acquainted with horses, and usually take a cautious, non-hostile, but still quite assertive stance with their herd. Sultry is generally a shy horse, and when I was first introduced to her, I approached her with two things: fear and a carrot. Luckily, she preferred the carrot and we bonded on the spot. I was initially scared stiff of being anywhere near a 2,000 pound bundle of nerves, but as it has turned out, Sultry has chosen me to be “her” person, and still prefers me over anyone else whether it involves feeding time or getting a shot from the vet. On one occasion, she was in foal and miscarried – and it took my presence to calm her down enough for the veterinarian to examine her and clean her up.

Which brings me to one of the main things I’ve realized on this adventure: I’d be willing to wrestle anyone who claims animals have no emotions or don’t feel pain. I was already certain of that having lived with my two cats for five years at the time, but my unexpected voyage into horse ownership has deepened that conviction, as well as my general preference for the company of animals over the company of people. On some lazy summer days, I’ve found Sultry snoozing in a sunny field and laid down with her, resting my head on her belly and taking a nap myself. I’ve seen mares become morose almost to point of making themselves sick if separated from their foals for weaning. And in one extraordinary case, I’ve seen an elderly mare take care of a sick animal that wasn’t even a horse.

The mare in question was nearly 30 years old when I first met her. Slow-moving, gentle, and just a little bit lazy, she was the eldest of the herd, but anytime any of the mares had a baby, she was right there. You could feel that she had a thing for the new arrivals. But one of our newest arrivals at the time was a young deer – a buck who had apparently been hit head-on by a truck and survived. His legs still worked fine, but his jaw had been shattered – and he had learned to eat out of the side of his mouth as the bones and muscles healed around the new shape of his face. He was, simultaneously, one of the most pathetic and yet cutest things I’ve ever seen. He made his way to my in-laws’ farm and stayed there, not only because hunters wouldn’t pursue him in their pasture, but because we all got into the habit of giving him food. Unexpectedly, the old mare took him on like he was her own foal, protecting him from any herdmates who might try to “play” with him by chasing him, sharing her food with him, and letting him take shelter beneath her in the rain.

That right there is the core of my love for animals. Admittedly, a lifetime of cat companionship had primed me to be a sucker for my new four-legged furry friends, but there’s a size-and-weight-ratio-difference element that gave me great pause in the beginning. But animals have taught me a lot about patience, and they’ve taught me more about unconditional love – or at least something close to unconditional love – than I’m likely to find this side of having my own children. As a result, I think twice about how I treat other people. It’s easy for me to feel protective of an animal. They’re so completely different from me. If they’re domesticated, they need my help. There’s an attachment of dependency and the resulting loyalty. But a horse befriending a deer? The horse is more like the deer than she is like me. They’re similar, and yet different, but there’s no prejudice there – she could sense someone who needed help and protection, and provided that.

Have we yet mastered the art of providing shelter and care for those who look much like us, and yet are noticeably different in color, or size, or origin?

Now you know why I don’t mind the so-called “simple life” – it shows me what instinctive parts of nature that we have bred out of ourselves, emotionally, socio-politically, and geographically. Much to my surprise, I now prefer the company of horses to the company of humans, and while I wouldn’t consider myself assertive with them, I handle horses – even new arrivals, including ReRun‘s retired racehorses that my in-laws occasionally board as they wait for adoption – with less fear, more patience, and much more respect and reverence that I ever would have expected to six years ago. Because I think there are people out there who could learn a great deal from them. It’s a life that I can highly recommend.