It felt too cold and windy to ride when I went to the barn today. In all honesty, it isn’t that cold in an absolute sense, just when compared to the balmy weather we have been having for weeks.
The young woman who leases Hap is made of sterner stuff than I, and was riding him in the arena. I decided to fetch Lily from the mare field, and spend some quality time grooming her.
Lily, as far as I can tell, is the only horse I have that enjoys being groomed. Hap views grooming sessions as an opportunity to make manure in the barn aisle while pulling blankets off of blanket bars. If you foil this behavior by putting him in a stall, he will rattle feed buckets or attempt to let himself out of the stall by fidgeting with the latch. If you tie him in the stall, away from toys, he sulks.
Smoke really hated being groomed. Notice the past tense: I haven’t groomed the horse in years. Smoke would make threatening motions with either his teeth or his rear feet when I attempted to do so the last few times. His skin seemed to be supersensitive. I fretted about this and finally mentioned the behavior to his vet and asked what I could do. “Don’t groom him.” There you go: I have instructions from a vet not to groom the horse. I do drag a metal comb through his mane (which is almost as long as an Andalusian’s) once a year (more or less) when I can’t stand looking at the tangles any longer.
I don’t groom Rags because he is Jack’s horse, and I already have three horses to feel guilty about my slack grooming habits. Besides Rags, although mostly a light color, tends to stay clean. He is a fairly fastidious horse, and his chestnut varnish markings tend to camouflage dirt and stains. As a bonus, he has the sparse mane common to Appaloosas, so it requires no combing.
But Lily seems to enjoy being groomed. She stands quietly letting me work around her except when I ask her to move. She doesn’t play with the blankets hanging by the stalls. I can groom her in a paddock without a halter and she will stay with me rather than checking stuff out. She even seems to like to have her mane combed and her face brushed.
It is unfortunate that Lily likes to be groomed: I felt a lot less guilty about my indifferent grooming habits before I had her.