It was bath time for the horses and ponies on Sunday and subsequently short wearing conditions for the humans.  With the warmer weather finally deciding to hang around and a sunny afternoon, it created the perfect conditions to give the equines a bath to rid them of all of their winter dandruff and dirt.  If this weather didn’t change to normal seasonal temperatures, I was starting to wonder if I  was going to have to keep my parka on standby in case we had another cold spell.

Bathing a horse or pony proves to be more difficult than bathing a dog or other smaller animal. No rubber duckies required.  It clearly is not possible to just bring the horse into your bathtub in your house. It requires doing it outside with a hose and an open area. Some horses have a much higher tolerance for the hose and spray from the nozzle, while others put up quite a fight. Griffin was an angel, and I do thank his race track days for desensitizing him to things like loud noises, tractors, hoses and dogs. He took the hose and spray like a champ. He closed his eyes and basically grinned and barred it.

The challenge was with the little one – Nova.  She is the cutest little thing, and you think she would be easy to man-handle and get to do what you need to do with her. I was wrong. She put up quite a fight and was not having it with the hose.  She planted her little hooves and would not budge to move forward towards the hose. She conveniently stayed just out of reach of the hose. Next I tried to fill up a bucket with some clean water and dump it over her back. As you can tell from the picture below, she was not impressed with that either.  In the end the pony won and we didn’t get a full bath in.

I will have to think of tactics to outsmart the little pony for next time…