by Joe Poniatowski

Created on: September 17, 2008   Last Updated: November 18, 2010

Thunder, AKA Houdini
When I was a teenager, my parents owned a boarding farm for horses. At its peak, we boarded around 30 horses. In my memory, one horse stands out from the rest because he was such a trickster. His name was Thunder, and he was a beautiful appaloosa gelding with the personality of a showman. Because he had the uncanny ability to let himself out of stalls and paddocks, we nick-named him "Houdini."

Slide-bolts on stall doors were child's-play to Thunder. Chains with thumb-snaps for the corral gate were no problem, either. Most knots eventually gave way to Thunder's very dexterous lips and teeth.

One day when I was feeling particularly annoyed at his tendency to let himself out of his stall, I used a lead rope to tie the door shut with a triple knot pulled as tightly as I could get it. I never gave a thought to how I was going to untie it later; I just knew Thunder couldn't do it. Imagine my surprise a short while later when I saw him wandering around the corral! I went into the barn to look at the stall. The knot was still tied. Thunder had used his teeth (the marks were still in the wood) to pick the door off its hinges, then he had dropped it on the ground and simply walked over it.

The bigger problems arose when, bored with his own antics, Thunder would let all of the horses out of the pasture. I can remember a few times when the family would come home from somewhere and find the horses grazing in the yard, eating the garden, etc., led by the snickering Thunder. Rounding up the other horses was easy - a pale with a little grain rattling around in it proved irresistible to most of them. Thunder was another story, however. He had to make a game of it. He would graze in the most disinterested fashion until I or one of my brothers got close, then he would go running around the house, laughing hysterically at our vain attempts to head him off or chase him into the corral. Eventually, he would tire of this game and allow himself to be caught. Then he would follow our lead quite willingly, although to this day I have never seen a horse that could adopt such an unmistakably smug look on his face.

Thunder's most memorable incident had nothing to do with his abilities as an escape-artist. An elderly gentleman had three teenage daughters, all of whom owned horses on our farm. Mr. McKinney was what we would call a "city slicker," never having spent much time around horses, but he thought he should look the part of the cowboy while hanging around the corral, waiting for his girls to return from their trail rides. He bought himself some boots and a brand-new straw cowboy hat, and was leaning on the corral fence, petting some of the other horses who had moseyed up to the corral from the pasture.

Thunder shouldered his way up to the fence, pretending that he wanted his turn at getting pet. His true purpose soon became clear, however. When Mr. McKinney reached over the fence to pet him, Thunder reached back over the fence and snatched the poor man's new hat from his head, and proceeded to prance around the pasture with it in his mouth. Sometimes he would approach the corral, but managed to stay just out of reach. My brothers and I were laughing so hard we could hardly stand up. At least for once Thunder's pranks were not at our expense!

In every stable there always seems to be one horse that stands out from the rest in terms of personality and intelligence, but in the 30 plus years since my family had that boarding farm, I have yet to meet another horse whose sense of humor equaled that of good old Thunder, AKA Houdini.

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