Hi,
The human has been slacking again. This what happens when your human gets another human involved. Honestly, although he gives me carrots when I’m good so he can stay! It’s also taken this long for the human to declare me clean enough to model my frilly ribbons.
So the human and I thought we should explain Operation #get the human a sash more throughly and more slowly. In her defence the human cares very, very much about me and tries to make sure I have everything to keep me mentally and physically as healthy as possible. (Unfortunately what I need and what I want are not always the same…I want unlimited food, this is not an option). So to look after my mental health the human has always tried, made sure I have friends, forage and freedom. She also likes to give me toys. But she sometimes needs inspiration! While she can be very creative, she needs help (a lot of help in many ways but this blog is about me not her!) so she joined a group called Thunderhooves enrichment challenge group. Which is full of good ideas for fun enrichment games. Then the lovely lady who started the group bribed the human with frilly ribbons to play even more games with me! The human says I’m easy to bribe, she can’t really talk, promise her a frilly ribbon and she’s right there! So for each frilly ribbon we had to do 5 games in a category. To get the sash we had to do 5 games from 6 different categories. The first games we will share are from the environment category:
Three places for hay. Pretty self explanatory instead of giving all my hay in one place age gave it in 3 (no I didn’t get 3 times as much hay as usual..human is far too smart for that) but this encourages me to engage in foraging behaviour rather than standing in one spot all the time! 
Berry branches: horses do naturally browse as well as graze so this just adds a bit of variety to my indoor foraging (I do get turned out lots but there was too much grass for me over the summer..I came in for my own good apparently.)
On a similar note we went hedgerow browsing. Although I was more interested in grazing than browsing. But these enrichments are also about letting me choose stuff I like! So the human does have to listen to my ideas!
The human failed to photograph our hedgerow browsing so we’ll this when I went browsing and the human wasn’t impressed. Apparently it’s not exercise if I eat more calories than I burn.
4. Foraging walks, I try to make all my walks (inhand or under saddle) foraging walks. The human says this is bad for my manners. So we have to take the clicky box. The human says ‘picnic’ I get to snack, until the human says leave. But if I do she clicks her box and I get a sweet so its all good.
5. Ice cubes, so I totally cheat with this one. I let them melt and then eat the goodies but making them enriches the human. It’s important to keep her busy too.
I’d say I’ll be back soon but the human is easily distracted at the moment.
Love Pepper
Blog of a bargain cob 