Moses escapes

Well Moses escaped from his stall today.

He took an opportunity while his stall was being cleaned and made a break for it. When I arrived, one of the other barn gals had managed to confine him to a small space between the jump field and arena. She is the hero of the day in my opinion. If he had escaped beyond that, I'm not sure we would have been able to capture him.

I rode Hampton (who is feeling fabulous by the way) and later when over to see if Moses would respond to another horse.

He didn't. Of course, Hampton sort of marches over all like "Hi! Oh hei!! Are you a buffalo I can herd? Hi ! hi! I'm Hampton!! Hey!! hi!!" and poor Moses walked away quickly.

Moses is all like "go away you giant creeper."

After I put Hampton away, some of the other barn gals decided they were going to try and catch him and "work with him." Me and the girl who first contained him wanted to just let him loose and "herd" him back into the barn and his stall. (We have the ability to totally lock in the portion of the farm he happened to be in. There would be no where for him to go).

But, as we all know, get a bunch of barn girls together and there are a couple of know it alls that emerge and want to do it their way.

I know that I do not have the skill to tame, capture, wrestle, etc. a WILD horse. Weanlings, yearlings, yes. Not-really-trained horses, yes. I'll give that a shot. But Moses is about as feral as I've ever seen. He flinches and bolts if you even think about coming close. I knew I didn't have the skills. And I did not feel like skiing behind him in a bunch of mud. So I just sort of stood and watched. One gal did manage to get a hold of his catch rope. And he would take off and pull it out of her hands. (So now he has learned he can do that) We offered him hay and grain and he did respond to that. But in my opinion, it was not the time or place - or people - to start this "conversation" with this horse. It was chaotic at the barn (everyone was out because of the warm weather). In fact I was sort of embarrassed to be part of this spectacle that was going on.

He will take grain from your hand - which I found to be a good sign!

Eventually someone else showed up and said - "If all the gates are closed let's just run him back into the barn"

DUH!!!!

And that's what we did. And it worked great! Imagine that.

Moses is now contained once again.

Poor guy.

(Someone more experienced will be working with him starting next week, thank goodness).