Arthur, Arthur, Arthur . . .

I was grooming Arthur this afternoon and he was being SO good - just standing there happily (I thought).   BUT . . . when I moved around behind him and started brushing out his tail, he pulled open the inside gate out of his stall and into the barn and trotted right through the very narrow center hall into the barn before I even realized he had opened the gate!   And unlike the horses who only ever PUSH with their nose, he had to have grabbed the top of the gate and pulled it IN.  Talk about smart . . . and FAST!!!  Thank heaven I did have the gates from the hall into the horses' stalls, and the door from the barn to the front yard closed!  So when he got to the front of the barn he simply backed up (the front is FILLED with storage containers - no room to simply turn around) and trotted back out the hallway into his stall -- shoving HARD on both Duke's and Lizzie's gates to make sure they were in fact locked on his way).  I'm SO glad that didn't happen sometime when I forgot to lock his gate and went back into the house!  And I'm REALLY glad he didn't try and open any of the horse feed containers while he was in there!  (I'm sure he could have done that in a matter of seconds if he had wanted to.)  

The only reason I didn't REALLY panic is that I knew I DID have the front driveway gates locked so that if he had gotten out he couldn't have gone to visit the horses down the road! 

When I saw him leave his stall I didn't remember whether I had closed the outside door or not since I had just filled their water buckets, so if I hadn't been sure those main gates were closed I would have been completely panic-strickened.  Once he went back to his stall, though, I DID go out and add a second chain lower down around the gate from his paddock out into the front yard since he makes it a point to REALLY shove against the gate and with the chain at the top as it is, the bottom does tend to push outward a bit.  Knowing him, who KNOWS if he would try and get down and crawl through there!  And I have to leave the driveway gates open when I go to work so the Fed Ex and UPS guys can get in and not leave my packages out by the street!

Gate now WELL-chained.  Arthur is extremely bright --
he always knows when something has changed. 
He's not pushing against it anymore now.

This evening has been incredibly loud -- even louder than 4th of July's in the past.  Oddly, the horses don't seem to be the least bit disturbed by all the racket.  But poor Boo has been curled up at the bottom of the stairs as far from the front door as he can get since there have been a LOT of fireworks visible out there tonight.

Boo is NOT happy

But it should all settle down shortly.  They're not SUPPOSED to set off fireworks after 10.   Let's hope they pay attention to the rule so Boo can get some sleep!  (Poor guy!)