Paddy and D'Lite meet!

I decided today would be The Big Day. D'Lite-DeeDee-Dahlia-Dolly hasn't shown any signs of being sick, and since it is the weekend and I have more time during the day I thought I'd let her and Paddy meet over the fenceline.

I had to do some creative horse moving first. I had put Paddy and Mac out in the Bachelor Pad and opened up the tape gate to The Strip for breakfast. (Side note - everything on our property has a name. On one side of the driveway are three pastures separated by tape fencing. The two end pastures are irrigated; the middle one is dry lot but has some dead grass in it. The left pasture is The Strip. The middle dry lot pasture is The Bachelor Pad. The right pasture is The Upper Pasture. There is a tape gate on each side of The Bachelor Pad that goes to each of the neighboring pastures - I can open them all up, close them all down, or have one opened and another closed.) Dolly (as I'm calling her today) was up in The Barn Pasture (dry lot) for breakfast. Everyone was calm and happy this morning.

In order to get Dolly to The Bachelor Pad, where she could meet Paddy over the fence, without having her meet Mac over the fenceline, I had to close the tape gate between The Strip and The Bachelor Pad first, then put her in The Upper Pasture and then move Mac up to The Barn Pasture so that Paddy would be in The Strip by himself. This is her first time on the irrigated pasture.



Once I moved her there and moved Mac, Paddy started running around like a lunatic, which he will sometimes do. Even though Mac isn't nice to him, they've been spending a lot of time together lately, so Paddy was upset. You might think it was because of the hot little filly, but it wasn't. Mac didn't care one bit and found his lunch hay and was happy.

So while Paddy was running around in The Strip, Dolly was prancing around for a bit in The Upper Pasture. I wanted them to meet over the fence and I wanted Dolly off the grass since she's not accustomed to it. She was there probably less than 5 minutes, but clearly loved it because when I first opened the gate (there's a tape gate from The Bachelor pad to each pasture next to it) for her to go in The Bachelor Pad, she trotted in, realized there was no grass, and trotted back out to graze! So I went and got her, brought her to The Bachelor Pad, closed the gate to The Upper Pasture and let her and Paddy meet.



It was so uneventful it was boring. Oh well. I think that's a good thing, actually. I'll likely do this configuration for another week before I actually put them together. It makes things a lot easier if I know there won't be fighting over the fenceline and everyone can be calm and carry on.