Animal magic
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♥May. 13th, 2018 // 03:09 pm♥
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I've not really ridden since Monday, as my leg's still sore (it rained last night, so I couldn't just go around in my trainers this morning. After an attempt to get my boots on I gave up and wore an old pair of Mike's: ankle and foot are still rather swollen), but Mike's had a few goes on Benny. He's started hopping again, which probably means that when I came off him he re-tweaked whatever it was that he tweaked to make him go hoppy in the first place. Sigh. Hopefully it won't take so long to get better this time.
We're trying out clicker training with Bob. He's now excellent at dropping his toy to have it re-thrown, with much less trying to play tug-of-war. He's a bit better at coming when called, although he's still crap if he's busy with an interesting smell. We're having a bit of success at stopping him from barking, but not a huge amount. Yesterday, we left him in the garden while we moved lumps of concrete across the stableyard to the skip. Unfortunately, next door's cat came into his view and the next thing we knew he'd jumped the gate, run across the stableyard, and jumped the wall onto the road. Fortunately he lost sight of the cat at that point and stopped, but annoyingly he now knows that he can get out. Even more unfortunately, when we got him back into the stableyard he was still excited and decided to play with the ducks. No harm done, but he spent the rest of the time we were out there with his muzzle on, and being busy rolling around trying to get it off was enough distraction that he left the girls alone. The local dog trainer's been on holiday, but I'll be giving him a call next week.
(The rescue assured us that they'd tested him with cats and he was fine. Then again, they also said he'd been chipped and vaccinated, so.)
We also have a bit of an egg mystery going on: Zu Zu laid consistently for a fortnight, then stopped and hasn't laid for a couple of weeks now. In the gap, Magrat laid for about four days and then stopped. This morning, Agnes had laid. I had some rubber fake eggs, which I was trying to convince Zu Zu were really hers without much success, so I bought some apparently very realistic sand-filled ones. I popped one in the nest this morning, when I took out Agnes's, and left the other two, along with the two rubber ones, on a pile of bricks in the stable. When I went to feed the girls at lunch time, the two realistic ones and one of the rubber ones were gone (although the realistic one in the nest was still there), which rather makes me think that something is stealing them, and possibly that Erzulie has been laying all along and we've just been missing the eggs. As she tends to lay late morning (unlike the runners, who usually lay before they come out in the morning), I'm not sure how we're going to stop it happening, short of popping out every five minutes to look for an egg (and disturbing her from laying in the process). |
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