You know it isn’t going to be great news when you hear from your trainer early in the day with an email with your horse’s name in the subject line…great, who did what to which horse or what body part?  Luckily, the damage was to an inanimate object.  Even more lucky, there was no damage to the horse that caused the barn damage.

As you can see by the photo, Ike decided that his feed bucket was very, very naughty and had to be destroyed to save the barn.  Not sure what triggered this destructive turn.  We did begin switching Ike to a new supplemental feed with yesterday’s dinner. [Purina discontinued their Athlete feed last year.  I stockpiled almost 20 bags in my family room to delay the switch, but the day finally arrived to change over to the Purina Amplify.]  We are not certain if the change in the feed made Ike mad that there was a change in the taste or if he like the new feed so much that he was mad that there was not more.  Or it was completely unrelated to the feed and he was bored.  Either way, Mom had to stop to buy a new feed bucket on the way to the barn today.

Sadly, this is not the first time Ike has destroyed pieces of the barn.  We had to buy a new gate after he mangled the old one when he’d rear on the gate to take it off the hinges.  He also played with the ceiling fan blades enough to damage the motor;  his fan would spin slowly like top getting ready to topple over.  That poor fan was put out of its misery last summer.  And finally, the day is near, when we will have to purchase the lumber to reframe the windows of his stall.  Ike still exhibits termite like behavior in spite of the No Chew sprayed on the wood with chicken wire stapled over it.

Fingers are crossed that the new bucket will survive the night.