The Horse Who Thought He Was a Cow

I never wanted a horse. To the best of my knowledge, my mom, my brother and my sister never made mention of wanting one either, and yet we had a horse. He was an American Pony and his name was Starfire.

I think the whole horse thing came about from my dad bartering for his services. He was a crop duster and I think that a farmer couldn’t pay his bill so he gave dad a horse, a saddle, and a sulky.

The problem with this horse was that he had lived his whole life with a herd of cattle and no other horses. The poor thing thought he was a cow. This of course was a daily problem for the farmer in that every morning the cows would come in from the fields to be milked and Starfire would take his place in line. When he made it into the milking parlor, the farm hand would say the same swear words until Starfire thought its first name was one of the various forms of “Darn it.”

Starfire was also bilingual or at least he picked up the accent because every time he whinnied it was followed by a “moo”.

On the first day we were introduced to Starfire, we saw dad slowly driving his pickup down Marine Drive. Behind the pickup, a horse was plodding along with a rope tied from his bridal to the trailer hitch. Every mailbox he walked past, Starfire would swing his butt over and knock it off the post. He did this just to be ornery.  Dad pulled into the driveway and with a look of faked excitement, told the family we now owned a horse and as I mentioned, all the accessories.

The whole horse ownership thing was fraught with problems. We didn’t have fenced acreage for him to graze so we would stake him around the yard to keep the grass down. It seemed like families out for a drive on Sundays would go out of the way to see the Mitchell’s horse in the front yard. Honored and humiliated both start with an “h” but mean something totally different.

The other issue we found was that no self respecting horse-cow likes to be ridden. It seemed like every time I climbed into the saddle, he would gallop to the nearest apple tree and scrape me off on a low hanging limb. It’s hard to feel like the Lone Ranger when your horse is galloping off and you are hanging upside down on a tree limb by your spurs.

Neither did he feel that he should pull the sulky even though I showed him plenty of photos of bulls and oxen pulling carts. I can remember my sister and I thinking we would ride the sulky out to the airport to visit my dad. Imagine two kids trotting down a county road taking up both lanes and passing cars.

And yet, Starfire still thought of himself as a cow and he missed the herd. At least twice a week we would awaken to find that he was gone from the field. He left no notes or phone messages. A few hours later we would get a call from someone three miles down the road that our horse was standing in their rose garden with his head hanging over the fence talking to their cows. Getting in the pickup, we would drive to the farm, tie Starfire’s rope to the trailer hitch and walk him home. Every mailbox we came to, he would swing his butt and knock it off its post.

Finally dad and the rest of the family realized that we weren’t horse people. We kept Starfire until I had my Horsemanship merit badge in Scouts. Then we sold him to a nice family with cows. We were then done with farm animals – that is until I decided to get my Poultry merit badge. But that is a nightmare story of its own.

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