On being alone

UPDATE: Being alone is all well and good, but sometimes it would be nice to have another person in the car when I'm going skiing and have to put chains on the tires to get there...

At the age of about 8, I was lucky enough to have a horse-crazy mother who was finally able to fulfill her lifelong dream by getting me a pony - Paleface - and then later, a horse - Najmah (she also got herself a horse for a while). By the time I was a young teen, I was doing things like riding Najmah through the Dairy Queen drive-thru and sharing a hamburger with her. I ate the burger, she ate the bun. This was Texas in the '70s, so the only really unusual thing about that was that I was riding English style instead of Western. Although I often rode with friends, we lived in a rural area where I was also able to just saddle up and ride off by myself pretty much whenever I wanted. It was very liberating.

It would be just me and Najmah. Usually Whiskey, our border collie, would come — ostensibly for protection, but in reality she mostly just chased squirrels (she did attack and drive off a much larger Keeshond who was trying to bite Najmah's heels once). I had a feeling of exhilaration and well-being and thought I never felt alone or lonely because I was enjoying the company of other beings. I had these same feelings years later with my horse, Sandpiper.

The weird thing is, I get the exact same feelings when I'm skiing, and I'm almost always alone when I ski. I even prefer to ride the lift alone if the resort isn't too busy. Making conversation with a complete stranger on a long lift ride can be interesting, but is sometimes just too stressful. My mother actually recently asked me if I get lonely skiing. No, never. It doesn't bother me to have lunch at the resort restaurants alone, either.* I have more recently started riding my bike regularly, and yes, I get those same feelings. I often ride with friends, but far more often alone.

I actually kind of find it sad that the "company" was all in my head. This, of course, doesn't mean that I didn't love the horses. When we left Texas for California, we had to leave them there, and I missed them terribly and cried for weeks (that was back in 1979, and I'll still get choked up thinking about it). Or perhaps I should say that I WAS enjoying their company, but that wasn't why I wasn't lonely.

I like company, but I guess I'm also just comfortable being by myself.

* My mother told me once that she had never eaten in a restaurant alone. I was flabbergasted. I've even been to movies by myself.

Twister the One-eyed Wonder Horse

WARNING: IF YOU'RE SQUEAMISH ABOUT EYE-SOCKETS, DON'T EVEN LOOK AT THIS POST

UPDATE: Apparently, don't look at it if you are squeamish about the trots, either. (No pun intended)(Okay, I lied. Pun intended)

Yes, I have one of the smartest horses in the world, and I'm not the only one who says that.

A little bit about Twister: He's about 25 years old, and we've had him since he was 18 and William was 12. Come to think of it, Bill and Twister came into our lives right around the same time.William and Twister's first 4-H competitive trail ride. Third place!

As I've said in previous posts, he was born with a huge cataract in one eye, and developed equine recurrent uveitis, aka moon blindness in the other. When we got him, he had had recurrent infections for many years, and his eye was very scarred and caused him constant pain. It was very light sensitive so he kept his eyes closed and fell asleep a lot:About three years ago it abscessed and I had to have it removed (and not put back in like SOME people). He's been MUCH happier ever since. Interestingly, Twister isn't the first blind horse I've had. Paleface, the Pony of the Americas I had when I was growing up also went blind due to moon blindness. He also adapted and lived for many years after. (Yes, the common denominator seems to be me, but Twister had it well before I got him)

Other problems we've dealt with are: mild arthritis, mild navicular, occasional very painful hoof abscesses, and a leg wound that didn't heal for well over a year. Oh, and his teeth are almost worn down to nothing on one side, and not much better on the other, so he can't chew his food properly. I am an expert at bandaging legs, packing hooves, putting ointment in eyes (the left one, anyway), and giving shots. He also had almost constant diarrhea, for which I took him to the vet several times. They just told me that he's an old horse and there wasn't anything I could do.

What's this banana slug photo doing here? Oh, right. I'm a biologist.

Last summer, I started noticing that his poop (yes, this is a technical term - if you're a sailor) was more horselike and less cow patty-like (a scientific description). The ranch owners and I also started noticing that his water was full of hay, disgustingly stinky (another scientific description), and had to be cleaned out far more often than all the other horses. I thought he was just drinking with his mouth full, and dropping some hay in. We also thought he might be accidentally pooping in his water - after all, he IS blind. Well, turns out he's blind but he's not stupid.

One day, while I was cleaning his paddock, the ranch owner came around to feed. While we were chatting, Twister grabbed a huge mouthful of hay, carried it over to his water trough, and dropped it in. The owner and I looked at each other. Did he just do that on purpose?

I went over, scooped it out and said, "Twister, don't do that, you idiot!" He immediately sniffed around, picked it up and plopped it back in. He then spent the next few minutes slurping it off the surface. He went back over and picked up another huge chunk of hay, carried it over and dunked it in the water, and then happily slurped it up. I couldn't believe it. He was softening it up so he could chew it. We were astounded. We watched as he did this with the rest of his hay. He must have originally done it accidentally once or twice, and discovered the hay was softer and easier to chew when soaked for a while. I would never have credited a horse with the reasoning abilities to connect the dots.
And because he's able to digest his food better, an added benefit is that he managed to "fix" his own diarrhea problem.

I just have to clean out his bathtub trough frequently. I might think it stinks, but Twister's next door neighbour, Spicy, thinks it's delicious when I drain it. After:Is that a smart horse, or what? Handsome, too.

On misanthropy

I've always enjoyed being by myself. I love just sitting alone and reading a book, messing about on the computer, or even taking a nap. I like going into the office really early, because there's nobody else around.

I've never minded going to restaurants alone. I just take a book. Once, while I was getting my degree in Indiana, my parents were in England, and my son was with his dad in California, I was alone for several weeks. I was working on my thesis, but I decided to take a break one night and go to Grindstone Charley's, a fairly nice restaurant. When I mentioned it later, my mother was shocked that I had gone to a restaurant alone. I, in turn, was shocked that she had never been to one by herself in her life.

I've also gone to movies alone several times. I went to a late-night showing of Jurassic Park when it was still in one of the huge domes of a Century Complex theater. I think they've since subdivided all those into smaller screens. There were three other people in a ~500 seat theater and they all sat down in the front. I had pretty much the entire theater to myself, so I sat back and put my feet up on the chair in front. When the velociraptor lunged for Laura Dern's feet as she was yanked up through the ceiling, I actually jerked my feet back. Embarrassed, I looked around but there was nobody to see....whew!

I used to ride horses a lot, and I loved going out with only the horse for company. My 3/4 Arab 1/4 quarter horse, Thalj Najmah and I would go out for hours just enjoying ourselves. I could talk to her, and I could justify it as not just talking to myself. She was always willing to do whatever I wanted, from suddenly taking off at a mad gallop to herding a neighbors wayward calf back through a hole in the fence (which probably looked odd with my English saddle and jodphurs, but hey)(did I mention I lived in Texas at the time?). I did have a few human friends, but if you ask me who my best friend was when I was a young teenager, I would have to say Najmah.

Now, most of the time I go skiing and ride my bicycle, I spend literally hours alone, and surprisingly to me, find it just as enjoyable as riding a horse. I always thought I had the horse for company, but maybe it's always been just me. Don't get me wrong; I like going with friends, too, but if I waited around for someone to go with, I'd never go.This is the only picture I could find of Najmah. I'm sure my mother has others. The white pony was our much loved Pony of the Americas, Paleface. And there's the Mirror dinghy that my father built one winter when we lived in upstate New York.

Line breeding

I read hundreds and hundreds of books while I was growing up. Somewhere among all the Black Stallion, Hardy Boys, Hornblower, and of course Tolkien books, I read a book by Albert Payson Terhune called Lad: a dog, a (somewhat anthropomorphized) true story about the life of Sunnybank Lad, a collie. From that moment on, I wanted a collie and was going to get one as soon as I could. And I did. My ex-husband David and I weren't married yet and couldn't afford an expensive dog, so I called a local breeder and asked about pet quality puppies. She didn't have any puppies, but she had a two year old that we could come and look at. It was love at first sight for both me and Robin.

While talking to her, I was completely flabbergasted when she started explaining her breeding practices. She "line bred" which meant selectively inbreeding the dogs with the best characteristics to try and reproduce those characteristics...I don't remember exactly how much, but Robin's mother was very closely related to his father. I had recently taken a genetics course at UC Davis, so I was even more shocked. She didn't seem to understand that, though she was trying to consolidate the genes that resulted in a champion's conformation, the puppies were far more likely than average to receive two copies of a deleterious recessive gene.

I googled line breeding and got a lot of dog breeders who more or less said the same thing. They defined inbreeding as the breeding of relatives not separated by more than one generation. Line breeding is used to concentrate the good qualities of an ancestor. They seem to justify line breeding because they use it to "set" characteristics that they want and weed out the genetic defects in a line. The genetically defective dogs are sold as pet quality if they are not "too" defective, or destroyed. Personally, I think that purposefully creating defective animals is inhumane and immoral. That said, I can understand that for certain rare breeds, line breeding may be the only option.

Of course, line breeding isn't limited to dogs. I pointed out that genetic relatedness is one of several hypotheses about why champion racehorses often have major problems in a previous post. Line breeding occurs in all domestic animals.

Then I happened upon this guy. He justifies line breeding because it is sanctioned in the bible, starting with Adam and Eve. If you take the bible literally, Adam and Eve's children would obviously have to breed with each other (this wouldn't be line breeding according to the dog breeders' definition - it would be inbreeding). He then points out that everyone would be 50% related to Adam and 50% related to Eve. This doesn't seem to faze him.

He then goes on to state that Noah and his progeny were God's line breeding program and calculates out their percent relatedness. Apparently God chose Terah's blood to concentrate and create the Jewish race. This guy is a Pony of the America's (POA) breeder. I have a special fondness for POAs, as I had one (Paleface) when I was growing up. I hope they're not all being bred by morons.

My mother took this photo just after my son was born. Robin was a lovely dog.

And remember. If it doesn't drool, it's not a collie.