I sat and watched them this afternoon, with Bay frantically trying to rush that mare when she and the pony would try to greet, and I decided the problem was Bay's possessiveness of the pony. He was acting like he was her mother or guardian. So... I decided to try two things. (1) get the pony out of the equation. We moved the pony into the back forty by herself. She didn't care, it was all Bay's problem. And.... (2) I decided to work the heck out of Bay on the lunge. This both wore him down, and took him down a notch or two in his place in the kingdom. ecurbh lunged Cyn too, just a little ways away.
When we were done, we walked them around together, in close proximity, and they didn't seem too overly interested in each other so we just let them loose. They went separate directions and Bay went for a while to the fence-line where his pony was.
After awhile, when she grazed closer to him, he took a renewed interest in her, and did lunge at her once, biting her and running her off. I missed that on film. ;~D
But after that, they just eyedballed each other while pretending to ignore one other ;~D
They grazed around, at a polite distance, for quite some time. She started showing signs of coming into heat. I had predicted that she might go immediately into heat, since it had been awhile since she had been around a boy.
So about that time, Bay had an epiphany ;~D
"Pony? What pony? Her> She doesn't mean a ~thing to me!"
We separated all three into different places for this first night, but I think tomorrow at breakfast we are going to just open all the gates.
