This week, Marty has mainly been teaching me the truth behind that training tip: “If you want your mule to do something, try going away and doing something else for a while”. I guess he thinks I’m not patient enough yet.
Despite having come into his pen every day (twice a day) since he came home 4 months ago, he has now started to ask the question: what if I don’t want to? I suspect this has something to do with the fact that the herd recently had a course of psyllium. Psyllium is used to flush sand from the gut and can be fed daily as a maintenance supplement, but we tend to do an intensive week of it every couple of months. If it gets wet, psyllium forms this horrible congealed yuck which is very unpalatable, but when it’s dry some horses (Iris, I’m looking at you) will just blow it out of their feed bowls. So to combat this we layer the feed and the psyllium, which usually means that the herd get a little more food than they would normally get. Marty’s usual straw chaff wasn’t enough to guarantee that he’d eat the psyllium, so I gave him a little bit of Fast Fibre too. Now he thinks his normal feed is very boring and probably not worth coming into his pen for!
So far, walking away and getting on with another chore instead has worked, and Marty is always waiting by the gate to his pen when I come back. I’m hoping that if I just continue to be extremely boring, Marty will accept his lot and we can go back to our regularly scheduled programming!
The other waiting that I have been doing this week is waiting for Xato. As I type, he is in a lorry somewhere in France; and, ferries permitting, should arrive on English soil in the early hours of Wednesday morning! We’ve had a bit of a last minute panic about arranging transport to bring him the last leg of the journey from Sussex to Surrey, but I think we’ve finally sorted it and he ought to be on the yard tomorrow afternoon. I can’t wait to give him a well-deserved scratch and a hug…
And while I’ve been doing all this waiting, I’ve also put a design up on TeeSpring and have set up shop on RedBubble, although the latter is in it’s absolute infancy at the moment. So if you’re after a few mule related gifts for yourself or for someone else, have a look and see if anything takes your fancy…
