Samantha

After she was weaned, she continued to eat sand but I had enough of chasing her in the arena. I got Cloud Dancer, my main riding gelding, got her, and started to pony her. We all survived doing it in the arena so we headed out on the roads. I generally had the roads to myself whenever I rode, so I started to turn her loose once we were away from home. She loved it. She and the dogs were roam around, galloping here & there, while Cloudy & I walked along.
One lovely spring day, early in her yearling year, we headed out during a record migration of Painted Lady Butterflies. We got to the top of a hill, in a meadow setting, and the butterflies were so heavy in numbers that I saw her through a curtain of butterflies. It was one of those shining moments that shall live forever for me.
Sometime during the summer, she stopped eating sand and I was able to put her in the front lot with other horses. More time passed and after doing ground work with her at home, I sent her out for riding training. She arrived there, looked around, found the feed and chased off the other horses & settled right in. Her training went well and while there her person found her from my ads in California Horsetrader. She is still with that person, riding the trails and doing dressage.

The Vulture Convention

When I was about 1 1/2 mi out my road the other day, I came across a vulture convention. There were four of them on two different electric poles and another 3 flying about. After a while, another landed on a pole, then they all flew off.
From a good authority (someone who used to work at a wild animal park), I have been told that they have soft "kissable" heads.

Samantha--Sandeater!

Round about 2 months or so, I found that Samantha had become a Sandeater, and ever worse, a Dedicated Sandeater. She would stroll around the arena, taking in large mouthfuls of sand. I tried moving her to a less sandy pen but she just found the sand and continued to devour it. For the night, in desperation, I shut her & Rebecca into a stall that had stall mats. The next day, I had delivered a truck load of more stall mats. The stall had a 10' x 20' pen off of it and I was going to stall mat the entire thing. The barn supply truck stacked up the mats right near the pen's back gate & I went to work, dragging those 100 pound mats into place in the pen. Once done, I opened the stall door and let them out. Samantha promptly checked for a spot with sand but she could not find a weakness to exploit in her hunt.
Since young horses need space to run, I got her & Rebecca out into the arena twice a day, every day for a run. Rebecca had a good roll and Samantha would run--until she ran off some energy then started the search for sand. Then I got to run after her and get her moving again. I had also started spooning psyllium into her mouth to clean out what sand she had already gotten and what she was still managing to get. The results of the first day of that was dramatic. Her poop the next day was the unique charcoll gray color of heavy sand. She did not especially like eating the psyllium, but did not really fight it either and most of what I spooned into her mouth did go down into her.
So we all survived. She was weaned at about 5-6 months and then I had to figure out a new way to exercise her as I was now doing more running then her.