Our home and offices are set up to watch the horses so we call it the observatory. It is situated on a rise overlooking one of the pastures and with a clear view of the other. We spend several hours a day specifically watching the horses and keep tabs on them the rest of the time, watching closely if something interesting happens.
There are seven horses in the herd, a combination of tennessee walkers and rocky mountain horses. They range in age from five to thirty and all but one are geldings. We do not ride them, in fact we handle them as little as possible, letting them be horses in their own way. There are interesting terrain and vegetation differences in the twenty or so acres they live in.
Of course anyone can watch horses and many people do. The difference is that we are implementing a specific theory of animal behavior, so we are looking for things that others might not see. Our theory and the things we see are discussed in the other posts here in the blog.
The central questions we pursue are what are they doing, what do they need to believe and/or think in order to do it, and why are they doing it? We also spend a lot of time considering why it is so hard to answer these simple questions.
By coincidence there are also a lot of mostly wild critters that we also watch. We are surrounded by a large US National Forest.
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