Even the horse is having a go.

My daughter’s horse, Louie, hates me. Perhaps it stems from the time I changed its name. It’s stable name is Leaping Louie. However it suffered from Laminitis or some other horsey ailment last year and had to stay in its box for a few weeks. So I logically began calling it Limping Louie. A mistake in hindsight but I was never any good at that kind of thing.

  That's him on the left. Don't let those long eyelashes and innocent looks fool you.

   It already has an attitude problem since when my daughter bought it, it was called a horse because of its height. However it must have been measured standing on something, because in actual fact it's half an inch too short so it's really a pony. I would have thought such distinctions would have been lost on an animal. Mistake number two.

   I went to pick it up from the field today. It hasn’t stopped raining for what seems weeks and despite just having rolled in several monstrously large piles of horse manure from his fellow horses, whom he detests, he began following me back from the paddock, sheltering behind me so his face wouldn’t get wet from the horizontal rain. He didn't even want his bridle on and seemed content without it. Mistake number three.

   I should have considered this since I don’t hold a grudge from the time it “accidentally” bit me while I was feeding it a carrot.

   Just as we were approaching the gate where all the horses mingle before being taken in we had to pass over a crater a two hundred pounds bomb couldn’t have created – filled with filthy mud and all kinds of equine secretions. That's when it head butted me right in the bum, sending me flying straight into it. 

  I could swear it was laughing after I finally emerged, coughing and scrubbing something alive from my eyes and hair before swinging its head and ambling towards its box. I'm going to look up the number of that dog food factory.