George left us in complete wonder many days. The antics she pulled were like nothing we'd ever seen out of a horse. My foreman recently remarked to me that her all time funniest moment is due to this horse. She wishes she could insert a memory card in her head, remove the memory and submit it to America's Funniest Home Videos or the like. The memory she's referring to came when it still required two people to pick her feet. It actually happened after they were done. She and one of the guys in the barn walked out of the stall and a few seconds later all I heard was laughter. Apparently the filly had thrown herself on the floor and thrown such a temper tantrum that it caused the guy to remark "That looks like my 2 year old!" Attention issues much?
George also had special hind shoes at one point. They were a hard plastic that were glued on and had an extension off the back to help get her off her heels. The aisle is blacktop. The added noise would spook most horses, especially a young foal. Not this one. She figured out that she was making the noise, and to her, that was the coolest thing ever. From then on, all you'd hear going down the aisle when she was being turned out was "click, click, CLACK!" She'd be walking normally down the aisle and then throw her hind end in the air, slamming her feet down to make as much noise as possible. Once you got outside on the wood chip path, she'd stop.
George's mother wasn't so sure about this whole motherhood thing. She really was a good mother, she let the foal nurse, wasn't aggressive towards us. She just had a habit of walking up to her sleeping baby and kicking her with her front foot to get the baby up. She did this outside or in the stall, in fact, she still does it with her '11 filly. Well, George didn't always tolerate it. We were working in the aisle one day and heard a commotion down the aisle. We figured one of the babies was cast against the wall. When we reached the end of the aisle, we saw the filly in the middle of the stall, kicking at her mother with both hind feet while the mare ran circles around the edge of the stall trying to escape the filly. My foreman called the filly mean, I said she was getting payback for her mother interrupting her naps.
George slept a lot. She also was very lazy about getting up. It would have been nice to have a cattle prod most days. The babies occasionally cast themselves against the wall, it happens, no big deal when they're small enough to flip back over so they can get up. Usually the flipping of them can be quite dangerous because they will start kicking. One day, George cast herself in the door. My foreman grabbed her hind feet and another co-worker grabbed her front feet. Midway through flipping her over, my foreman lost her grip on the filly's hind feet although the filly wasn't fighting it. Still, the filly didn't fight, she laid there flat on her back all four legs in the air. Casting herself on the wall would become a favorite trick of hers for awhile. Because she didn't fight, it usually meant that only one person was needed to flip her back, but she quickly became an annoyance in the barn because of her little trick.
I didn't just choose George, she chose me too. I had the short-shift of night-watching on the farm and that involved checking on every horse on the farm hourly. By the end of the summer, the majority of the mares and foals were out in one big field. Usually, they found their way to a spot in the field that could not be seen from the road. So, I'd trudge my way out into the field, usually with an idea as to where they were because I could see one mare from the road. It was after I finished checking on them that I had to be careful, because I typically ended up with a four legged shadow. If I wasn't careful, this crazy little filly would follow me all the way back to the gate, out of sight of the herd, out of sight of her mother, she didn't care.
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