File This Under “Just Plain Weird”
Posted by Mikki on Jan 12 2007 at 07:48 pm | Tagged as: General
Here’s another funny little quirk my horse has: practically every single morning when we go up to the barn to let the horses out, Valentine pokes his head out and looks at us, then quickly retreats back into his stall to let loose with about 5 gallons of pee. I swear he does it on purpose. He’s actually held it till we let him in at night, too. Six acres of pasture and he has to pee in the stall.
Well of course! You can’t possibly pee out where you can be seen! Sheesh!
Oh, of course. He is SUCH a shy little wallflower!
We have a horse who is quite similar to that, except with poop. It doesn’t matter if he poops right outside the barn door, but the minute he walks in the barn he poops again. We’ve had him for almost 15 years and I cannot think of one time when he didn’t do this. It can be quite frustrating at times (like when you’ve just cleaned the barn all out!) But we’re all pretty used to it now, there is a shovel that lives by his stall now!
They’re marking their territory. They want anyone who might come along while they’re out to know that that stall belongs to them.
I have horses that never do it at home but take them to a show and that fresh clean stall that smells like strange horses and they have to pee everywhere.
Ah…that makes sense! Well, there is no question who that stall belongs to.