Games Horse People Play

 There are many 'games' that people who spend copious amounts of time around horses are familiar with.  Probably the most well known is "Catch Me If You Can" (which sometimes is also called "Tag, You're It"), where the horse person goes out into the pasture to catch the horse and bring them in (usually to ride, sometimes for the farrier or the vet), and the horse, spying the person from across the pasture comes part of the way to the person, then spins and runs off in the opposite direction.  If the person gives chase, following the horse, this can go on for a long time. That one is one of my most hated games, and I refuse to play it unless absolutely necessary (there are ways to train this out of a horse, but you must be diligent in the process).

There's also "Find the Shoe", in which the horse loses one of their shoes, either by getting it sucked off in mucky spring mud, or steps on the heel of it with the toe of a rear foot while running and wrenching it loose (in which instance it may go briefly airborne).  Either way, there's a metal shoe out in the pasture somewhere, and the person is tasked with finding it.  Over the years, and working and multiple farms with shod horses, I've gotten to what is probably expert level in that game.  It's time consuming, but I can succeed.

Another is "Where's My Halter?",  where the horse, turned out with a halter on either rubs it off on something (their leg, a tree, the water trough, a fence post, the edge of a run-in shed or other building) or entices their pasturemate(s) to play Bitey-Face and pull the halter off for them.  Then the horse person must search the pasture to find the halter so they can put it back on and lead the horse from the pasture back to the barn or whereever else the person had it in mind to take the horse.  I also avoid this one by not leaving halters on during turnout (a few exceptions being if the horse is new and unfamiliar with the barn routine or hard to catch [see "Catch Me If You Can"]).

The latest one I have had the dubious honor of playing (thanks, Tubbs) is "Fly Mask, Or Pile of Horse Poop?"  Tubbs always wears a fly mask over his face when he goes outside, even in the cold weather when there are no flies.  This is because he once had a cancerous tumor on the lower lid of his right eye, which, during treatment of said tumor, left him with light sensitivity and decreased vision in that eye as well as missing a small chunk of eyelid.  So he wears his mask as both protection from bugs and other things that might get into that eye and as sunglasses against the UV rays.

Tubbs, however, would prefer not to wear a mask.  He likes to try to rub his off.  He also has a tendencey to shred them.  A couple of weeks ago, his owner brought him out a brand new mask to replace the one he wore into dilapidation.  The 'old' mask was a light grey color.  The new mask is a stylish black (he's a black horse, so this one, at a glance, blends right into his head).  Unfortunately the mask not only matches the color of his hair, it matches the color of every manure pile in his pasture.

So, one recent evening, when I went to bring the horses into their stalls for dinner, I found Tubbs mask-less.  Which meant, ready or not, I got to play "Fly Mask, Or Pile of Horse Poop?" and try to find his mask in the expanse of pasture.

In the three pictures above, can you tell which black splotch is a pile of poop and which is the fly mask?

If you said the fly mask is in the third picture, you'd be correct.  But without getting up close, it's hard to tell which is which.  Definitely not a fun game when you are searching an acre of pasture.  Then again, none of these games horses like to volunteer their people to play are very fun.  Just another reason horse people are crazy.