Saturday, April 17

Today I am grateful for:

I did some more leading work with the ponies, using the surcingle and letting them drag the pole. They did very well with it. Then I spent some time grooming out Ursula's long, thick mane and tail.

I noticed that a neighbor's goats were out. They were in the big field between our two properties (that belongs to someone else; there is one property between our two places, but you can see this other neighbor's yard from our house still). Anyhow, the goats were running for the proverbial hills, four of them I think. So I jumped in my car to go talk to the neighbor and let him know.

I've been in this yard a few times now, usually to tell them that their dogs are running loose on the road, once to ask them if the dead goat in the ditch was theirs (they said no, but I bet it was theirs, they are the only place besides us that has goats in our area) and I'm never ready for the impact of this place. It is a giant garbage pit, everywhere you look. Old vehicles, old lawn mowers, mountains of household garbage, junk pouring out of the garage, just crap everywhere, plastic bags all the way up their driveway caught in the trees. The pens for the animals are small and patched together, nothing looks taken care of. Their dog is covered in tumors of some kind that they likely didn't bother to investigate by taking it to a vet. There are chickens and turkeys running around loose everywhere. I almost hit a very small goat that ran in front of the car, of course it was just loose on their lane, not anywhere near the yard.

I suspect that they were allowing the goats to roam loose to eat, to save on feeding them hay. They certainly don't have any pasture around the yard, it's basically a house yard surrounded by plowed land, a little bit of bush on one side,but there's a strip of grass on each side of their very long driveway that is not fenced. I think they were trying to graze the goats on that, but of course they won't stay.

By then, the goats were likely almost half a mile away, far across the plowed field. I wonder if they even would have gone looking for them if I hadn't told them which way they had gone. If they had gotten out of sight first, I don't know how they would have found them, because there are lots of open fields and bush they could have gotten to.

This place just hits me in all the spots. The filth and garbage is like all the awful hoarder farms I hated growing up. Even my hoarder sister's place isn't quite this bad, but the shitty pens and awful care of the animals reminds me of her, back when she had animals.

Before you ask, no, there wouldn't be much point in reporting these people for animal cruelty. If the animals had food and water, that's about all the authorities care about.

These people have kids, too. Their life must be....special.

Oddly enough, the guy living there seems nice enough to talk to. He even offered to help me when my car got stuck in a deep snow bank on the road. Not a BAD person? Who knows. Really negligent.

It makes me really grateful for whatever it is that keeps us motivated to keep our yard clean, and to keep taking our garbage to the dump. I'm glad we have the means to care for our animals.

Then I tried to ride River, but I hadn't done much with him, just some ground work, when the wind just started to ROAR. I could literally hear it coming in the distance. So, that was it for the day.

Now it's raining, which is good.

I finally finished "The Magician's Land" by Les Grossman. It took awhile. The "Magicians" trilogy were pretty good, overall.