18/09/2023
While we’re thinking about how we might intrude upon our horses’ natural lives with our manmade plans and expectations, I for one, am still gathering new information. This, during my summers of moving the herd about to improve our pastures.
Horses are demanding grazers. It is perhaps little known that while they thrive with turn out on some sort of forage—for their mental wellbeing, their postural and gut health, even the state of their incisors—horses are plumb hard on grass.
If we look at many turnout plots and pastures, we see tall and coarse grasses that remain untouched… while the horses ‘camp out’ on the grasses that are cropped right to the ground. Season after season of this and the choice plants become miniaturized, unable to withstand the onslaught on unpalatable weeds. Horses will choose to dig up these short grasses with their front feet, just to feast upon the tender roots!
They also like to be on hilltops. Higher ground. I live in an area with large predators, so it makes sense that they don’t want to be trapped in a valley, or caught by surprise. They want to see what it is that’s coming to get them. In the run-off vales and low spots, the vegetation becomes rank and untouched. The hilltops and south-facing slopes are already more fragile and these tend to be the first ones eaten out.
What we’ve been experimenting with is protecting our vulnerable grasses and moving the horses from rough patch to rough patch. It’s hugely labour-intensive and many times, the horses refuse to eat the taller grasses, until they’ve been mowed. We move the water sources and salt/mineral to the areas where the horses do not usually congregate because they will loiter at these, just as we might hang around the water cooler at the office.
What has surprised me most, however, is their genuine upset at not being able to gather close to our house at night.
I have learned that unlike the wild beasts around us, horses need human companionship and a feeling of safety, every bit as much as they are happy to see us arrive in the morning with their feed. This tells me that the relationship that I have been made to believe is one-sided—in that we need them more than they need us, that we’re interlopers—is not entirely true.
Perhaps the only instance where we might question our mutual need is with the actual wild or feral horses who exist without any contact with man, not even for feeding. It makes me realize what an incredible about-face Sarcee must have felt when we asked him to come into our lives and do our bidding.
Our horses find safety when they are with us—or, they should—and feeling safe is one of the vital components of a healthy, happy life. By watching, I am seeing that being with us, among us, ain’t all bad. In fact, when I would move my horses to lush, new grazing plots and then, leave them, they would become quite agitated, exhibiting what we would call ‘herdbound’ behaviours that usually exist only between horses.
I have seen this when I leave one of my horses in stabling at a show ground, for instance, when I go away for lunch. Surrounded by other, albeit strange horses, they are clearly choosing my human safety and companionship. Finding this same need within the whole herd, in a familiar pasture setting, has come as a genuine surprise.
So, my horses—even when running freely as a happy group on large tracts of land—need me in their lives. We’ve long been told that it is us who infringe upon them but I am seeing that in a healthy relationship, we simply bloom in one another’s company. Or, so we should.
The chasm of communication isn’t as great as we might think. What we really need, I believe, is an awareness, a well-developed sense of empathy. The promise of comfort and safety is only step one.
Shown here, Berry on the pasture as night falls. We don't have a barn; we have no horses kept in the corrals, as a magnet. There is only Mike and I, living alone on this hill…
But always, always, my horses are grazing their way towards home.
