Warmblood By Scot Tolman


he bugs are gone, the days are cooler, and second- cut hay fills the hay feeders. With each passing day, the faint, “I’m feeding a baby elephant, here!” summer ribbiness of my mares becomes more and more a memory, and I happily stand at the pasture gate gazing at their dappled, fat-induced glow. I have the same philosophy for horses that I have for humans: no ribs. My kids are forever chiding me as I place my hand about 12 inches down from one of the mares’ backs and give a little push. “You’re not going to find a rib, Dad. We’d have to go Eskimo on her ass and slice her open like they do with whale blubber to find a rib.” So I like my horses fat…I don’t want them so fat that they jiggle as they move down the barn aisle, or so fat that they have to be embarrassed when we shop for new blankets: “Sorry, sir. You and your hippopotamus will have to look in the ‘over-sized’ section.” That being said, I don’t want them having to spend any time worried about from where their next meal is coming either. And, it’s not that I so much want my humans fat as I want them “fed.” Does that make any sense? I am a compulsive feeder. If you are an animal and


T


you move to my farm, it becomes my obsession to add flesh to your sides. If you are human and you’re visiting my home, I have during 20+ years of marriage been conditioned to wait until you get your shoes off before I hand you a blueberry-pear-with-a-hint- of-white-chocolate muffin, still warm from the oven, baked because I just knew someone would stop by and needed something to eat. This compulsion has created an interesting, and


noisy, phenomenon among my animals. When they see me, they suddenly need to eat. The chickens come running, the horses begin to whinny if they’re outside and pound the sides of their stalls if they’re in, and the goats bawl with an almost human-being-murdered insistence. Similar to Pavlov and his dogs, I have inadvertently conditioned my horses to feel hunger at my presence…or the hint of my presence. Laughing loudly in the kitchen not only causes the dogs to bark


66 November/December 2010


and the parrot to imitate the laugh, it also can cause the inside horses to start whacking their front feet against the welded-mesh sides of their stalls. (Did I think about the noise metal grating from floor to ceiling would generate when I ordered these stalls for the new barn? Oh, no. I did not.) On the surface, this is funny. In


reality, it has its dangers. Knowing that my horses respond so well


to food stimuli, I also used this methodology to keep my riding mare from walking off from the


mounting block until the decision is mine and not hers. It only took one training session before I found myself balancing, left foot


in the stirrup and half of my butt in the saddle, while my 17-hand mare twisted herself in half to reach my right, grain-filled pocket. I say, “balancing,” but I should say, “counter-balancing.” When you are as large as I am and as tall as she is, and one of us is leaning way to the left in order to reach 12 kernels of grain, the other has to lean way to the right into non-weight-bearing air to compensate. The only good news in this situation is that if the physics of the situation go awry, she’s falling to the left and I’m falling to the right. So, if you’re hungry…actually, it doesn’t matter whether or not you’re hungry. Stop by. I’ll feed you.


WT


Scot Tolman has been breeding Dutch Warmbloods for the past 20 years at Shooting Star Farm in Southwestern New Hampshire. Read more of Scot’s writing at shootingstarfarm. com.


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