Surprising news from Annie pony
Annie is a pony I absolutely love to communicate with. She’s expressive, she and she comes out with some really specific stuff that her owner knows exactly what she is talking about. It’s been about a year since we last checked in, so it was time for another chat.
As always, I started off asking Annie for information that her person would already know. The first thing she showed me was a new car on the drive! She had noticed it there recently. Her owner was amused - somebody on the yard had changed where they parked to the driveway to her field, and it has obviously not gone unnoticed.
Annie also showed me the track system that she was living on, and complained about the slim pickings of grass. She had also seen big tractor tyres recently - her owner confirmed that she has been living on a track and that they had been schooling over cross country fences the day before, including fences featuring tractor tyres.
Annie’s person wanted to know how she felt about her tack set up. Annie had plenty to say about her bridle making her poll feel funny, like it pulls the headpiece and brow band forward off her ears. When asked if she preferred her other bridle, she said yes, and showed me a leather bridle. I could see two sets of reins but only one bit on this other bridle. This didn’t make much sense to me but happily it did to her owner, who had been wondering about combining the sidepull with the bitted bridle - Annie had picked up in this and was expressing a preference for trying that set up.
Another tack combination that was unfamiliar to me - a neck strap with a fleece lining. I asked Annie if she was talking about a breastplate or martingle, both of which sometimes have fleece covering the points that might rub, but neither of these were right. Working with her owner, we deduced that this was a request to modify her neckstrap, which her owner has noticed rubbing her sometimes - I think her owner is going to try to modify a fleecy girth sleeve or similar, and Annie will have the most luxuriously comfortable neckstrap that history has ever known!
The whole communication flowed really nicely and there was a lot of information that Annie’s doting person could identify and verify, but one thing made both of us scratch our heads, and I’m still not 100% sure I believe that I understood Annie right. The yard is near an electricity sub-station, and the owner has been concerned about it having a negative effect on the horses including Annie. Annie, on the other hand, seems to actively enjoy “vibing” with the electricity - how strange! I saw one of those vibration plates that were all the rage in gyms a few years ago, and Annie explained that it felt like one of those, and that she found it useful to help her to self-regulate. Her owner says that she has taken Annie to have some therapy on a vibrating plate for horses previously, (I had no idea those existed!) and that Annie had seemed to both enjoy and benefit from it, and that Annie spends a lot of time at the part of her field nearest the electricity sub-station, staring at it. Perhaps, despite both her owner and I feeling it’s probably not a good thing for horses to live so close to one of those, Annie really does know better and is getting free micro-vibration therapy at will?! It’s something I could never have dreamed that an animal would say that they enjoyed and found useful.