Isn’t it amazing.  We’ve been in horses for years and we think we’ve seen it all.

SURPRISE!!!   We haven’t

I remember when I was a kid (back in the Stone Age), my friends had a grandfather that had been in the ice business.  He used his horses for work.  He was so knowledgeable.  He had remedies for everything that could happen to a horse.  He had a recipe for a white blistering liniment that was fabulous.  It worked wonders on my horses hock.  But when you asked him what was in it, you weren’t going to get an answer.  I know it had eggs, and it smelled like creosote.  No one uses white liniment any more that I know of.  If they foundered, you stood them in mud.  If they were down in the morning you gave them a bottle of whiskey or brandy.  If they got up, they went to work.  If they didn’t, you went and bought another one.  If they coliced, mineral oil and you walked them forever.  Sore on the skin? Vasoline and Sulfur powder.  Discharge from the nose (usually Shipping Sickness) Vicks and Bigeloil.  Lame with swelling – run a cold hose, and Bigeloil.  Life was so simple then.  No vets, just homemade meds.  Unfortunately, he died and all those wonderful recipes went with him.

In the last 50 years I’ve seen so much more than I ever needed to see, but they were all learning experiences.

Sitting in the doctor’s office I was reading my new copy of Equus.  Always learn something new there.  It was about “How Horses Read Human Emotions.”  I find things like this totally fascinating.  As you know if you’ve been reading my posts, I love studying the horse.  How they perceive things, and how they process information.

We all know that horses can pick up on our emotions from our energy and body language, but now they have found that they can pick up on our facial expressions.  The horses, in the study, ranged in age from 4 to 28.  What amazed me most was that they tend to look “from their left visual field which enters the right brain hemisphere, which contains areas specialized for processing threatening events.”  Now it will be interesting to see what eye they are looking through when they study something.  Especially scary.

So no matter how much you think you know, just accept the fact that there is always so much more to learn.  The more you know, the more you realize you don’t know.

The next time you go into feed your horse “SMILE!!!” they’ll wonder what you are up to.

“Here’s looking at you kid.”

(Love that line, from Casa Blanca.  Humphrey Bogart said it to Ingrid Bergman.  Now those were actors, and movies.)