National Geographic Kids Chapters: Horse Escape Artist: And More True Stories of Animals Behaving Badly. Ashlee Blewett Brown
unlock this latch hundreds of times. Now, the horse grabbed the bolt with her teeth. She flipped it up and down. Finally, she slid the bolt over. CLICK! The door opened. Mariska escaped into the small paddock (sounds like PAD-ock), or fenced-in area, outside her stall.
A short while later, Mrs. Bonem walked past. That’s strange, she thought. Did I forget to lock the door? She led Mariska into her stall and slid the bolt into place. Mariska slid it back. CLICK! The door opened again.
“You clever horse!” Mrs. Bonem gasped.
The next day, Mr. Bonem attached a second bolt to the bottom of Mariska’s door. There’s no way Mariska can reach this bolt, he thought. Mariska tried another tactic. She unlocked the top bolt. Then she leaned hard against the door.
Mariska knew that if she pushed hard enough, things might break. She had learned this a few years ago, when she and the other Friesians wanted to eat the grass on the other side of their paddock. They craned their necks over the fence. They leaned hard against the wood, trying to reach the grass. Then, SNAP! The fence board broke.
Now one bolt stood between Mariska and the paddock. She leaned hard against the door. Finally, the bottom bolt snapped. Mariska stepped into the paddock. Then she unlocked Trienke and Wietse’s stall doors. Now, all the Friesians were out.
Mr. and Mrs. Bonem’s jaws dropped. They threw their hands in the air. Finally they decided to leave Mariska’s outside stall door unlocked. It was better she escape to the paddock than break another door, they agreed.
What do you do if faced with a problem? Probably you think about how to solve it. That’s what humans do. Not horses, says horse behavior expert Dr. Cindy McCall. Horses learn through trial and error. Dr. McCall thinks Mariska probably first opened her stall door by accident. She was playing with the latch, and it flipped open. “But that doesn’t mean horses aren’t smart,” Dr. McCall says. Horses have good memories. Once Mariska learned to open her door, doing it again was a breeze.
But Mariska had other plans. She shifted her attention to her inside stall door. Instead of leading outside into the paddock, this door led into the main aisle of the barn. That’s where the Bonems kept the grain.
Mariska wrapped her teeth around the thin bar that locked this door in place. The bar was slippery. But Mariska kept trying. Finally, she lifted the bar toward the ceiling. CLICK! The door slid open.
Mariska made a beeline to the grain bin. She flipped open the lid. Chomp, chomp.
Now Mr. and Mrs. Bonem started to worry. Inside the barn, Mariska could make real trouble. She could cross the aisle and open the quarter horses’ stall doors, too. But how could they stop her from escaping? They thought and thought.
Meanwhile, they tried to horse-proof the barn. First, they chained the grain bin under the counter. But Mariska broke the chain. Next, they poured the grain into an empty freezer chest in another room. Mariska quickly sniffed it out. For every move the Bonems made, Mariska had an answer.
That’s enough! thought Mr. Bonem. He slung a heavy chain around the grain-room door and locked it with a padlock. Take that, Mariska!
But Mariska just moved on to another prank. She escaped her stall again. This time she nudged open the large sliding barn door that leads to the Bonems’ backyard. That’s when Mrs. Bonem found Mariska, Trienke, and Wietse looming outside her kitchen window that sunny spring morning.
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