Whistle

He comes when I whistle.  Its basically the coolest thing ever.  Half the time he nickers, too.  Which thrills me even more.  One day soon I'll try to film it.

Taken with ipod

He knows to give me space now when we work.  I ask him to trot, I ask him to stop.  He stops and gives me two eyes and stays where he is waiting for further instruction.  I can change his direction with a gesture; he backs up with a slight jiggle of the line; he moves calmly and willingly through tight spaces that only give him about 6-8" of open space off either side.  He's content to pick up his feet and have them picked out.  In the next week I need to get him okay with a rasp running over them because I plan on having the trimmer come out in the next two weeks.  He gets lazy and over reaches in the back lately, so I'm optimistic that a little trim will correct this.  It will be good to have a baseline for his feet anyway.

He has 24/7 turnout over....a lot of acres.  They can cross a stream and climb through a small cove of woods into a higher pasture, too.  There are three round bale feeders in addition to all the grass.  He's currently getting 1 scoop of low sugar, high protein grain each day.  When Jeanna took the industrial blow drier to him to get the dust off his coat was quite shiny.  His weight estimate is right around 600lbs. right now, and I think he looks better every day.


Its still a mystery to me as to what color he's going to shed out to be.  He's got places where he was bit or kicked before I got him that have grown back in a light grey, but the rest of him is that rosy grey.  His mane is black, his tail fades from black to light grey.  Around his ears especially, there are a lot of chestnut hairs, but the bulk of his body is a deep grey.  From what I've been able to find on the internet, he sounds like a rose grey, but I could be wrong.  What do you think??