I barely mentioned Flora, the oldest mare at the rescue, in my memoir. Though I didn’t work with her often, Flora was a wonderful dark bay with a generally pleasant personality, aside from a few quirks. She had a terrible fear of clippers, whips, and fly masks, and grumpyness about picking her feet up. She wasn’t dangerous about it anymore, but she never voluntarily lifted her feet. Unlike my horse friend Spruce, who eventually lifted his hooves on his own once he learned that I was gentle with them, Flora’s hooves stayed firmly on the ground. Unfortunately her hooves were an absolute mess most of the time, due to several health issues. Soft, peeling frogs (the middle, rubbery part of the hoof), crevices which got continuously infected with thrush, heel bulbs that didn’t grow in like they should, cracks and warping. To be honest, hoof picking was probably painful for her. I was still tasked with cleaning them out and medicating them along with all the other hooves in the barn. I tried talking with her about her hooves, explaining as best I could that it was helpful for me to clean them out. I picked out the crevices as gently as I could. Still, with one front hoof in particular, I needed to quite forcefully squeeze the leg tendon to get the hoof off the ground. She’d flail it around if I didn’t wedge it against my own knee while picking, and then slam it back down as hard as she could the first chance she got. None of the other hooves meant as much to her as that one. She was very protective of it. I tried getting her to lean on the wall, thinking maybe it was pain in her other legs keeping her from lifting it more willingly. That didn’t work either. Finally I asked the barn owner why Flora specifically objected to the front left hoof being picked up. “Ah, that one a volunteer once thought they were picking out a rock and they dug in so hard they took out a big chunk of her frog . She was bleeding all over the place. They felt so bad about it. But that’s why she won’t let most people pick it up.” The knowledge didn’t make it any easier to pick her foot out, but it did tell me that it wasn’t me imagining things or making excuses for that hoof being harder to work with. It was a behavior with a real cause. There were most likely other real causes for her fear of fly masks. There are real, legitimate causes to all horse behaviors that seem “naughty” or aggressive. Something happened to them to cause them to be that way. Sometimes we never know what that cause is, but it doesn’t make it less real. Sometimes you’re not the problem, and neither is the horse. It’s just something that happened to them. The memory of fear or pain.
Read more about the horses in my memoir, Standing In a Field With Horses, available on Amazon and SmashWords.
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