Tuesday, August 7, 2007

How Do Your Horses zzzzzzzz ?


How do your horses sleep? Have you ever noticed? I know that Kola definitely lies down. I've seen her laying down and in such a deep sleep that she's in REM. Hooves twitching, eyes twitching, totally dreaming. Misty on the other hand, in the five years that I've had her, I've only caught laying down to sleep once and that was this spring after they had their vaccinations and were completely wiped out from them. Other than that I've never witnessed Misty laying down to sleep, unless she does late at night out in the pasture. With Kola, it took me awhile to get comfortable with it and realize that she wasn't collicking. When I had Dakota, he often would lay flat to sleep as well. To see Kola laying and dreaming is something else. It makes me wonder, what do horses dream about? Are they weird distorted dreams like most of us have from time to time? Or are they primitive dreams of freedom or of predators chasing them? Or are they dreams of us, feeding and caring for them? What do you think? And have you witnessed your horses sleeping or dreaming?

3 comments:

Rising Rainbow said...

I have no clue but I have wondered. lol

whitehorsepilgrim said...

I don't know. However I have noticed that, when a few of the herd lie down to sleep, many of the others follow suit and get down too. They all look so contented.

Occasionally I've seen a cat sleep with one of the horses, for warmth I suppose. It led to the demise of one cat when the horse rolled over and crushed him. That was sad.

lisa said...

I used to live on a Quarter horse farm, and at one time we had 16 head, mostly pregnant mares. We were sleeping in the office in the barn one night to try and "supervise" a mare that was overdue with her first foal. (Supervise is a joke of course, since they always seem to have them in the 5 minutes when you aren't looking.) Anyhow, we got concerned when one of the mares sounded like she was having respiratory problems. But when we went to her stall, she was sleeping on her back, all 4 legs in the air, and snoring! It was the funniest thing I've ever seen, and had I not witnessed it, I'd never believe it. All night in that barn the animals snored and rustled around, I never knew the barn was such a noisy place at night. No wonder they snooze off and on all day!