Every vegetable gardener has dealt with wildlife at some point.  Usually it’s rabbits, deer, mice, etc.  I never expected the kind of wildlife I’ve been dealing with: a 2 year old horse named Addie.  Addie lives with his mother on the farm, and loves to test his prowess at liberating himself from the fenced-in confines of his designated paddocks.  That’s all well and good, except that he celebrates his freedom by romping through the garden!  Fortunately, he can be pretty light on his feet and somehow manages to mostly step between the vegetables.  So there’s not too much damage done.

 

Until, that is, he starts to miss his mother.  He can’t figure out how to get back over the fence to her (it’s a mystery how he gets out in the first place).  So then he starts to get a little panicky, which causes him to stop romping through the garden.  Instead, he storms through it in frustration.  Unfortunately, a panicked, frustrated Addie is not so light on his feet.  So there’s a fair amount of damage done.

 

In the past, I had found signs of Addie’s antics (i.e., his big old footprints all over the place), but had never witnessed them in person.  Well, last night I had the privilege.  When I arrived for some evening weeding, there he was racing back and forth.  I tried to shoo him away, but he got a defiant kind of gleam in his eye, and raced right past me.  I’ve always heard about horses having personalities, but now I really know what that means.  That horse was daring me to stop him from running through the garden! 

 

After a while, he started to get a little frustrated and panicky, at which point he really started to make minced meat out of the veggies.  Well, I have no horse sense at all.  Some might say I have no sense period.  But that’s another story.  I realized the extent of my lack of horse knowledge when my calls of “here, horsey, horsey, horsey” failed to rein him in.  So I called up to the house for help.  Luckily it arrived pretty soon, and we steered him up the road and eventually into the barn. 

 

In the end, the damage wasn’t too bad.  I think rabbits or deer, if they decided to show up, would be more destructive.  So I figure I’m lucky that the only wildlife I’ve had to deal with has a name and a personality.