I bet Laura Ingalls Wilder never had this trouble

12 April 2009

I had some weedy little turnips that I thought might be a nice treat for the Shetland ponies and goats that I occasionally walk past on a wander in the fields, so I dropped them into my rucksack along with my camera and cycled up the little hill to feed them.

On one side of the path was the field with the Shetlands and the goats, but they were at first nowhere to be seen. On the other side of the path was a field with a big horse (horsus maximus) and another Shetland. Suddenly a Shetland in the first field noticed me and came trotting along the fence to see me. I offered it a turnip, which was duly sniffed and poked, but ultimately spurned. Ok, be that way.

I turned to the big horse, who now had his head over the fence, chopping on the evidently much greener grass by the path. I held up one of the bigger turnips on my flat palm and he took it gratefully and ate it calmly.

Turning my back on him I went back to the other fence and a second Shetland came careering across the field towards me. Hmm, he’s eager, I thought. No, not eager so much as crazy. He wasn’t pleased to see me and ran up and down the fence line, huffing and puffing. Then as I reached down to pick up my bag to move away, he shoved his head over the electric fence and bit me on the shoulder. Clearly he’d been told after some earlier moment of aggression to pick on someone his own size and he wasn’t about to miss out on the opportunity when it stood before him holding a bag of turnips.

I stood back from the fence, now with a nice grass stain on my jumper and a bruise beginning on my shoulder and watched as the mad thing ran up and down in front of me. He stopped for a moment to smell a big pile of dung on the grass and then let off a big fart. Which at least left me feeling like the more civilised of the pair of us.