A Horse Story
First of all, thanks to all who have posted comments about the stories appearing here. I appreciate them and I thank you for taking the time to leave them.

Secondly, this is just something I wanted to write down because it made me feel like I'm doing something important in my small corner of the world.
Remember the horses my brother and I got back in April? They were an abuse case? I think I mentioned them in email at some point. When we first got them, they'd spent a good part of their lives confined to their stalls. They weren't physically abused as we think of the term. They were cared for, petted and fed, but they'd never been allowed out of their stalls for long periods of time. All they knew were areas about twelve feet square, the size of an average bedroom.
My horse (her name was Princess and I haven't changed it because my nieces call her Princess Leia, so I'll probably just keep the name) had a habit of staring at the railings around her. She would stand still, looking at the top rail or the top of the gate and her eyes would just move back and forth across it. When I opened the gate to let her go out to the paddock and get food and water with the other mares, she would just stand there or move to one side and find another rail to look at. So for a long time there I would lead her out to the food, to the water, then around the paddock to the gate to the pasture, just kind of show her around. Day after day of this. I'd leave her out and she would go to a fence and stand there and look at the railing. Her eyes just moving back and forth at it. Whenever I saw her doing that I'd pick up a few little pebbles and lob them at her until she stopped and moved away.
After a while she started to leave the stall by herself, I'd open the gate and she'd walk out with the other horses and eat, and after a while she would go to the pasture gate and follow the others out to graze. She stopped rail watching, too, and now stands right up at the gate every morning, waiting for me or my brother, whichever of us is doing it, to open the gates, and when I walk into the barn she looks down the aisle like all the others to see who's coming in.
This morning I let them all out and left them and went on to do other things. I was passing the paddock a while later and saw that two of the other mares were out in the pasture and Princess was in the paddock with my brother's two geldings and my sisters mare and her foal. When Razz, one of the geldings, went to drink some water, Princess rushed over and stood between him and the trough, stopping him. The other mare and the foal were still drinking.
It just made me laugh to see how far she's come since I got her. There is a definite pecking order among the horses and the geldings are at the bottom. Kasey, my first horse, is sort of the queen of the stables. She rules.
It was good to see that Princess has come to know the rules and she's prepared to enforce them when Kasey isn't around to do it!
Poor Razz had to wait until the mare was finished before he could get some water.