Horse Hide-and-seek at Monte Ruivo

 Sunday 21/08/22

We love watching the sun set and seeing the different patterns the hills make.
This one looks just like a cat!

This morning we decided to do a horse poop-scoop at the back of the house.  This is the one area the horses can access around the house and outbuildings so we tend to try and keep it clean to avoid stepping in any surprises, and to keep the fly population down around the house.

Finding the perfect spot for a roll is essential.

Bliss!

Unfortunately horses are very sociable and they came over to join us for a while.  Not a problem, we gave them a spray with the hose as the day was going to be very hot.  They then thanked us by leaving giant piles of droppings all over the cleaned place!  Back to square one...

The owners had also explained the game they use to give the horses extra nourishment, hiding buckets of high-energy feed and then letting them find these.  We decided to give this a try as it also lets us separate Galante to get  him some extra rations.  You can see the result in the video, the owners had their own video to demonstrate the process to us and described it as horses chasing a donkey.  I am almost as graceful, but you will notice I was leading the race for a while!

The feed smells wonderful in spite of the look.

The others don't realise he has extra rations

All in all it was lovely to spend some quality time with the horses; they really are fantastic animals.