What Fence?

Yesterday our barefoot farrier, Stronghorse Church, was here with his lovely assistant Danielle. After finishing with our spotted saddle horses, he called to me when he thought he was witnessing something unusual: Millie, our younger SSH mare, passing through a fence. 'Twas nothing unusual around these parts. Millie has loosened some high tensile fence to the point that all she needs to do is move slowly and she will pass right through the supposed barrier.

Stronghorse exclaimed that she'd just walked into and through the fence, only to hang up her last hoof on a strand and stop. Most horses, he told me, would explode in panic, if they got a hoof hung like that.

Not Millie, I told him. She has perfected the art of moving slowly enough that the fences just melt on past her. She can open any grain bin / trash can, too, I told him.

He allowed that she's a smart horse, then gathered his tools and came up the hill to trim the feet of our paint horses. Since the rain has made our hillside into a mudslide, I brought Lucy and Janet out onto the gravel drive for their pedicures. It was their first time out of that pasture since entering it last May shortly after Janet was born.

The little filly--well, she's not so little anymore, for once the throatlatch of the yearling halter could be buckled on without the need for extra loops and knots--she enjoyed exploring her new stomping grounds enough that I left the gate open after Stronghorse had finished. I figured they would come back in at dinnertime, and Lucy did just that.

Little Janet, though, was feeling independent and allowed her dam to wander out of sight. Lucy was munching on hay inside the pasture when a shrill whinny rang out and we saw Janet racing down the driveway toward the main gate. We made noise and the filly saw us and turned our way. I was moving over to mark the open pasture gate for her, carrying a flake of hay, when she charged on a trajectory bound for the fence.

She acknowledged the high tensile wire by lifting herself a bit off the ground. Her body cleared the wire just fine, but her long legs got caught and she flipped tail-over-head before hitting the ground hard. I was mentally kicking myself for not carrying a wirecutter that day, as I hurried over to help untangle her errant foreleg.

She didn't need my help, and sprung up and out of the fence as if she'd not even fallen. I watched her for a bit and she seemed to move without trouble, so I went along with my chores.

This evening the filly is still moving well. She and her dam had free roam of the back acres again today. When I came up to feed, Little Miss Janet was curled up near the driveway gate--hanging out with thye dogs waiting on their supper, too. I did notice that she has a cut by her right eye that she may have earned in her fall, but it looks clean and doesn't seem to bother her--so I left it alone for the evening.

What troubles me, though, is that Janet's first encounter with challenging a fence ended with her successfully surmounting it. I'm hoping this does not send her along the path to Millie's lack of care for human-imposed "boundaries."