When we last left off with our intrepid baby hero, he was hell bent on removing his new fly boots.

The first day he removed one twice, and then overnight he removed three out of four, tossing one over his stall door for good measure. I wish I could have seen him removing the hind one, that must have been a spectacle. There is no elegance to his removal tactic. It’s not like he finds the velcro’s little tabs and pulls on those. No, he just grabs as much fabric in his mouth as he can and then YANKS and YANKS and YANKS until it finally comes free. These poor boots. I have to give them a lot of credit, considering how forcefully they’ve been violated by his teeth, they still don’t have any holes or tears.

The next day I put all 4 boots back on, put a little chew spray on them, and turned him out. Here’s where I should mention that I have 3 different chew sprays/goops on this property and Presto is not deterred by any of them. I think he refers to them as “seasoning”. Like he will stand there and lick it off because he’s a weirdo. I dunno why I even bothered putting some on the boots.

Anyway, I was convinced that if we could just get over the novelty of having toys on his legs, he would eventually leave them alone. All I had to do was outlast him.

An hour later I looked out and he was missing one already. Dammit. Out I trudged, and found it in the back of the pasture.

I put it back on, went back inside, did some more work, and looked out again a little while later.

Another one was missing. Dammit Presto.

Ok, fine. That’s how you wanna play this? Let’s go. Game on.

That’s right bitches, I duct taped them. A strip around the top and a strip around the bottom. He looks like he’s ready to go work on a construction crew.

Naturally the first thing he did was rip the tape off. I ended up having to go several times around with the tape so it was nice and stuck to itself, and harder to rip through. That finally seemed to do the trick.

That worked to keep them in place for the rest of the day, and I left them on in his stall overnight to see what would happen. The next morning:

SUCCESS. HAHAHAHA I WIN.

A strip of duct tape was missing from one, but they were still on.  And they stayed on all day yesterday, no further problems. I still caught him yanking on them a few times, but he wasn’t successful in getting them off. I wouldn’t say that I’ve won the war yet, but I’ve definitely won the battle and made some major advancements.

Presto also got ride #3 yesterday. I wanted to see if there were any changes with his mouth fussiness since he’s been lunged a couple times in his sliding side reins. I lunged him for a couple minutes in them first, then took them off and climbed aboard in the closed in courtyard. We walked, we trotted, we made circles (ok ovals), we did some transitions… it was maybe 10 minutes total. He was much much better in the mouth, no fighting or head flinging. It’s amazing how much better the steering works when you aren’t having a mini-tantrum.

This was our first ride totally off the lunge, and with no handler on the ground. He was super, really quiet and well-behaved.

Henry watched all of this unfold and you could basically hear him saying “Good, go torture that one, I’m retired.”. No you turd, you aren’t retired. But he did pull a shoe on Tuesday, and I’m not sure when it’ll get put back on. He’s been wearing his glitter boot (boy that thing has gotten a ton of use already) so he’s ok to go out but the one I had was a little bit big to ride in… I bought it sized to fit over a wrapped/packed foot.

I wanted to order Presto more oil anyway so I went to Corro, grabbed another glitter boot (because how could you ever own a regular boot after you’ve owned a glitter boot?) in a smaller size, and some treats to put me over the free shipping threshold.

Given all that’s going on in the world right now I truly had no expectations for when it would ship or arrive, but it shipped same day (Tuesday) and arrived here yesterday. Three cheers for Corro, I’m impressed.

I should be able to ride Henry just fine in the new boot. Or… I could if it would stop raining buckets. Sigh.

Hope everyone else is making it through the week ok! Happy Friday…