Dear Wal,
Let me explain. It's impossible for him to concentrate on anything for more than thirty seconds, and he's deathly afraid of the weirdest things. Not as weird as some of the things Montana is afraid of (large, brightly colored objects) but still exceedingly strange. He is also wickedly smart. Take the fence.
Now let me preface this by saying that yesterday we had a huge crisis over him in the fence. He's too smart for it. He knows that he can just push through it. We have electric fence, exceptionally flimsy electric fence, and we also live in the middle of a thickly wooded forest. So the fence doesn't always work, even when you maintain it (which doesn't happen very often because it's such a huge pain) sometimes it just doesn't work. Anyway, Buzzy has discovered that the fence is flimsy and that even if it shocks him he can just keep going through it and it will break and no longer shock him. There was a very long process before we got to this point.
First, he got out a few times in a place where the line on the fence was just a wire that was pretty hard to see. I figured he just didn't see it and hit it full speed by accident (the fence wasn't working at this point), so I put up a visible cord on it so he could see it. Then he took that down too. At this point I knew he was doing this on purpose. This happened over about a week. I didn't want to have to go around and wack down all the things growing on the fence and fiddle and fiddle until it worked, because that takes at least a day, sometimes two. So, I just kept fixing it when he got out. I figured out that he wouldn't bother the stuff that was tight, so I did that to the place where he was getting out. A day or two passed. Then he got out again. By this point, school had come around and I was at my wit's end about what to do. I had to spend a day or two at school waiting for my textbooks to arrive for my college classes, and the situation detiorated. Parents became frustrated. Explosion followed...while Watson was over at my house. Talk about bad timing.
I even repaired the fence so that the part where he kept getting out was electrified, and there was still a huge argument, totally avoidable on both sides. I won't go into details. The electified part of the fence didn't even stop Buzzy. He still went through it. I don't know what to do. All I can think of is that the fence wasn't working when I thought it actually was. Next time I'll touch it myself and see...I kinda chickened out the first time.
Also, this time around I'm going to try and work on Buzzy psychologically. I know from his personality that he needs a job, he needs entertainment. So I'm going to try to ride him almost every day. Another thing that I've noticed is that he gets out around feeding time. I think I'm feeding them too late. I usually feed them around 8:30 in the evening. Probably too late. So I have to get them fed before cross country practice. I don't know how the whole riding and feeding business is going to work out when practice moves up to 4:30 instead of 6:00. Preferably, running is the last thing I like to do in the day, because I'm about dead by the end of it.
Anyway, I'm going to try and keep him entertained and child-proof everything. I have to make sure all plastic and tools and things are out of the way or else they will end up stomped around in his stall or knocked over. Sometimes I find his halter laying in his stall (it hangs right next to his door). What he does is he grabs it and twirls it around.
So as you can see, my horse is a pest. But he's very cute.
/endrant
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