14. Scratch me!

Today, we took the two lead horses, Jack and Darling, to the fruit garden. It's guava season now, so there were plenty of ripe guavas lying on the ground. The horses are crazy about fruit. We let them eat quite a lot of guavas, and then we took them to a bunch of yellow bananas we had discovered earlier. All the yellow ones were gone,  sadly, but the horses also love the green ones. They eat the whole banana, including the peel. And they love it. Many horse people (like some of the people in the clinic) think this is quite strange, since horses normally don't like bananas, and definitely not the peel (according to others...I have no idea...I have never tried feeding a horse a banana before). But Darling couldn't get enough of those bananas. She was ten metres away from them on a short rope, but still she would turn and head for the bananas. It was very nice giving the horses such a treat, especially since they enjoy it so much.

After having been back for a while, I got out of the hammock I had been resting in to see where Kristina (which is the name of my fellow working student, and also my friend from Norway) was. When I came around the corner, she was scratching Moonlight, the youngest and most trusting horse in the herd. Before this, we had hardly touched the horses at all. Then Gaia, another trusting horse, came up to me. I guessed she wanted to be scratched as well, so after saying hello, I tried to scratch her on the part of her body closest to me. She liked it very much (and showed it by scrunching up her nose in pleasure), so now the game was started.

She would show me where to scratch her, and I would scratch her. When I stopped, she would signal for me to continue by turning her head towards me, as if she was saying: "More, please. Right there." When I decided I had had enough, Moonlight claimed my attention, and the game was on again. Moonlight wanted to be scratched on her tail and the inside of her hind thigh, and I thought these were risky areas (in case of kicks), but I tried. It went very well, and I could thoroughly understand why she wanted to be scratched. She had lots and lots of insect bites, and I can definitely relate to how that feels, as my legs are polka dotted with them as well.

It was a really nice bonding experience with the horses, and it is so nice to see and be able to interpret their telling me where to be scratched. It is a kind of grooming, which is what horse friends do to each other, and it is a kind of friendship ritual. It is very nice to feel that the horses feel they can trust me enough to let me scratch relatively intimate areas. This scratching episode just made my day.

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