Blazing Flipiphanies

There IS something about horses, further down, I just had this blather thing going.. I keep deleting a lot, so, jeeesh, I gotta try to not type so much.

Does anybody else cry when they watch the ending to the movie "The Full Monty"? No? Must be me.

Dog Talk...
Have you guys been wondering about my girls? They're ferociously tugging on a helpless frisbee as I type. Flip rumbles loudly with her fiercest growling thunders from the depths of her deep, fearsome killer chest. Blaze, very quietly, grumbles that it's her danged frisbee anyway. Flip loves to rub Blaze's secondary status into her nose.

Blaze outweighs Flip by about 8 pounds, and has inches to spare, both height & paw and ear wise. But Flip is "wilder", and of course, older, and of course, "first" dog.

Blaze FinallY did a predator "straight-UP-Dive Down" jump, after a creature in the snow. Then she moved on. No big deal to her. I howled with laughter, and praised her happily, but, meh, she moved on. Blaze is three years and 2 months old. She will probably never be truly "wild", like her half-sister. I love the freeze, the ears zooming in on the tiny sounds of rodents scratching, the Pounce! Blaze does one pounce per three years, it seems:) Her first pounce was at earthworms, her first spring. Yeah, predator fail.

Blaze doesn't even Like mud. Flip is always enthused by dirt.

Flip will stay in that "seek the creature" zone, seeking/digging, until I call her off, or she decides she's missed. Flip is a "wild" dog. Gotta do what ya gotta Do. When Flip has seeking behaviour switched on, she's in her own little world, a magical kingdom that is all smells and sounds and senses, searching. For some reason, I'm NOT in that world;) (Until I say the right word.)
Flip lives/loves to seek/pounce.

Darned squirrels. The word makes Blaze crayZEE. I mean CraYwithAcapitalZEDeeeeeeee. Chipmunk, geese and rabbit are also just words continuing to electrify Blaze ears, and fire up her paws.

Blaze will gallivant around me, on about a 60' circle, chuckling away as I ask her if she's crazy. She gallops her laps earnestly, ears flailing away in the wind.
Legs a la Pluto Akimbo.

It's a really handy behaviour for when our hour walk just isn't enough for Blaze. She's a leftie, as far as spinning direction. Like me:)

Blaze is alertly awaiting/thinking work, until she falls asleep. Flip comes inside to eat and sleep, and wrestle with her sister, and play matriarch. Mostly she eats and sleeps. Hah, having typed that, Flip is wrestling sister again.

Outdoors, as Blaze and I play, Flip is off killing the BigRedJollyBall, her favourite, the most challenging. Flip likes to become oblivious to anything but the OnE thing she's working on.

Coyote Tangent..
Pretty sure the coyotes shredded MediumBlueJollyBall's handle into a lovely big blue circle, out the back 40, this past fall. They must have been well-fed/bored, to play with something so useless:) Either that, or the one that watched us playing last summer from across the pond got the idea. Coyotes live to Seek, too.

Here's a picture of Flip and BigBlueJollyBall, the first winter we had her.

Flip likes to squash Jollies, with her chest. Big fan of flattening, is Flip:) She counts/hoards her toys this way. She'll end up lying on top of a FrisBee, several stuffies, and a nylabone. Maybe she was a laying hen in a past life;)

Same winter..
Flip diggin' some mice or moles or other hapless rodent:)


Temple Grandin's new book is giving me triple-flip epiphanies when it comes to understanding my behaviour quandaries. She's noticed so many of the same things as me, and I'm only just into the chapter about horses. Her dog chapter was a great summation of the basics we've figured out so far. She liked "Merle's Door", too.

Fascinating, so true, paring their/OUR behaviour down like that. Fear is making clearer sense to me.

OH, this was funny. Kid sister's Millie-dog is our family's canine matriarch, and a deity of GREAT respect accorded by puppy Blaze. Ol' Millie takes no shite from no puppies. Anyway, Millie-Dillie had the frisbee, Blaze wanted the frisbee. No way in the WORLD would Blaze even dream of playing tug with Millie. Millie was totally game for it. OMG, No. Blaze's face was just scandalized that we'd even suggest it!

Blaze has slowly, cautiously learned to play tug with Flip, and Blaze gets a shivery thing going with her mouth, not panting, just, ohohohohohOH. OHverExcitement. Scorpios ThrivE on it;)

Horse Epiphany, out of the Blue
OH, and I recently realized another thing. It's pretty simple. I can't believe it hasn't been mentioned before. I'm positive it has, SOMEwhere. I am most certainly not that unique. I might even be wrong:)
If you look at your position, on the horse, and you can imagine holding that exact same position, on the ground, would you fall over i.e. lose your balance? If your answer is yes, you can hold that position...
THAT's balance.

That's what Christilot Boylen's nasty leg exercise helps the most with.

Keep yourself, balanced over yourself.
Horses are a coiled spring of energy. So are you.
(are not)
Are TOO!

This picture, from the stone ages, clearly shows that I was bloody lucky to survive my early years over fences, with my neck in one piece. That's what first mare taught me too. Keep your leg underneath you. NOT like this...


Compare to this picture, seventeen years later. If you pick me up, and put me on the ground, I will not lose my balance.


Temple Grandin Epiphany One.
Seeking is even more fun than finding.. It's so obvious, isn't it?
Give an animal a purpose, a goal. They seek. As do we.

Seeking can be an antidote for fear. Begin seeking peppermints, HP's Top did. Exactly.

Whoah, choking on the Yoda pill, and out...