Grooming Therapy
What’s the best thing to do when your job has you worried that there’s no way you can meet all your deadlines? And your nerves are just shot from life in general?
That’s right! You try to groom a winter’s worth of grime and hair off your horses!
The rhythmic scrape, scrape, scrape; pull hair out of shedder; bang out dirt; spit out hair that’s gotten into mouth; is very soothing and relaxing. Honestly, it does bring you back down to basics. The sunshine and almost 70 degrees weather doesn’t hurt a person’s mood either.
Murphy
Luke
Of course, everyone who has horses and doesn’t live in some sort of desert is talking about mud. It’s finally getting warm enough to ride, but there’s too much mud to ride without tearing up your pasture or riding ring, unless you are fortunate enough to have an indoor arena to ride in.
But that’s okay because from the way Luke acted while I was grooming him, I have a lot of in-hand work to do before I ride him. Although, I should cut him some slack since the guy that lives behind us was shooting clay pigeons and we had pellets raining down on the trailer Luke was tied to, not to mention the overall BOOM! sound. I was a little jumpy myself.
Murphy usually loses his winter coat by the time Luke starts shedding in earnest. I guess that’s somewhat of a blessing as I don’t have both of them to completely shed out at once, but it does prolong the length of time that I’m covered with horse hair.
Murphy’s present to the birds. Great nest building material.
Even after I cleaned off the mud, Luke still looks like a hairy, chubby pony. I have a lot more clean up work to do on both of them, and I don’t just mean grooming-wise.
It sure looks more relaxing to brush a horse than to trim a dog’s toenails (my task for yesterday)!
Beautiful horses!