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Monday, January 30, 2012

Are you Crazy?

These were the words of Felicia, my wife, when I sent her this picture.



Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Mentor a Rampaging Elephant

I was recently watching an Animal Planet thing with my kids, it was about Elephant Rage.  For the most part it had to do with what an elephant remembers and rampaging captive elephants.  The part that caught my attention had to do with a game preserve in Africa.  On this preserve when the elephant population gets too big, they are harvested (not my words, I would have said shot them…but I am not too politically correct.).  They generally harvest the large adults, which leads to a lot of orphans.  These orphans are then forced to “raise” themselves, learning how to be elephants on their own.  Elephant babies stay with their mama’s for most of their lives, babies are raised in a “village” so to speak.  Aunts are right there and all (momma and the aunts) take a part in raising the babies.  Males do not run with a herd, but young males do band together.

Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Checks My Ego Wrote

About 10 years ago I rode a mare I called Twitch ( wrote about her in the story “Twitch and the Leopard Print Onesy”).  Ol’ Twitch turned out pretty good and with all of the success I was having with my quasi-natural horsemanship, I started getting asked to ride other horses at the stable.  Of course this fed my ego pretty good and I got to thinking of myself as the next great natural clinician.  After all I had read a book or two and had me a cotton rein!  Looking back I’m surprised that I could keep my hat on my swole up head!

I was asked, at one point, to ride a little Arabian mare.  Now I had a pretty low opinion of Arabians at that time.  I thought that any time they got a little rattled, that BB would start bouncing around inside their head and lead to several different kinds of wrecks.  I now know that that it usually isn’t the horse so much as the horseman that is the problem.