Well, since I will no longer have new things to talk about with my horses (except for the occasional photos and updates from my parents), I will be adding more frequent posts about the last couple years with training the mustangs. So keep watching!
For now, I just want to show pictures of our happy, 2 year old, Ms. Turkey. She thrived on the journey to WI, and she is quite happy about her plush, new abode. In her old home, she lived in a pen outside with a shelter made out of straw bales. It worked great, but she had no company, and her pen got rather muddy and snowy in the fall, winter and spring. NOW, Ms. Turkey lives in a very sheltered garden shed with windows, and a cushy hay floor. She'll live here over the winter, then when spring comes, we'll move her to an outdoor pen where she'll have more stimuli.
She can't move around well at all (a bit like a very obese old woman with bad knees - she grew too fast when she was a chick because she is a meat turkey and we fed her and her brothers (who became Thanksgiving dinner a couple years ago) too much. Now we just keep her comfortable and she's quite happy. She can get around to the things she needs, but she definitely doesn't need lots of room to run. She just needs some mental stimuli.
Her favorite time of the day is feeding time. She clucks and chirrups to us. My parents have cracked corn for the chickens, and when we gave that to Ms. Turkey for the first time, she thought she'd died and gone to turkey heaven! She chirruped so loudly!
Ms. Turkey became a pet because of her interactions with us. Unlike her brothers, who became puffy males interested only in displaying, Ms. Turkey would come over to visit and see if we had anything for her whenever we approached the pen. The way she looked at things offered in our hands before she'd go ahead an sample them was very endearing. So, Ms. Turkey earned her pardon from Thanksgiving dinner.
I just wish that she hadn't become so large. We ration her now, so that she stays at a reasonable weight. One night while I was home in WI, I had a dream that Ms. Turkey magically became a young normal weight turkey and she was jumping up and down on a bench (it is currently impossible for Ms. Turkey to leave the ground). It was a good dream, but alas, was only a dream.
