Creatures!!!

Being me, it took me about 20 minutes upon arrival in Romania to start plotting how to go riding again. The owner of the riding center where I worked last year gave me the names of the people to whom he had sold his horses, one of them being quite close to Cluj.

I met Mady, a younger woman who studied and taught at the University, but eventually got irritated with the nepotism and the establishment in general and now works for the philanthropic NGO that owns these horses. 

They live about 40 minutes outside of the city in a very scenic area. I initially worried about how they were being taken care of, but the local man who cares for them seems very kind and gentle, and in Romania, that's saying a lot. 

I am always surprised by the lack of 'horsemanship' or 'connection with the horse' that one sees here, in a country where so many people still rely on horses for daily transportation and farm work. I'm certainly not saying that the nuts in show barns in the U.S. with their badly behaving 70,000$ machines have a much better connection either, but at least those horses tend to have water at all times and an excessive amount of supplements and high quality feed that probably help rather than hurt. 

The attitude towards animals in general is, by US/Western standards, quite harsh. Stray dogs are mincing, terrified little creatures because they are so often abused. Dogs that are owned tend to be chained to barns to live their lives in a 5 meter circle. Even in the city, the purebred dogs live in wooden, makeshift shacks with a chain tying them to it at all times. 

Horses are hitched to wagons, sometimes hit to start, sometimes hit when they don't stop, yelled at to go faster, yelled at to stop. I wonder that they ever learn any sort of commands with those sorts of signals.  They are left outside the local bar for hours as if they were a car that is just turned off and then turned on again to trot home. But they are phenomenally well behaved animals- probably the hard work curtails their mischievous side, but beyond that, they unflinchingly pull a wagon up or down steep, muddy forestry paths, through streams. When they are on the road, they obediently pull the wagon quietly, even when insane Romanian drivers come careening down the road directly at them, only pulling aside or stopping at the last possible moment. 

Poor cows have it the worst- they're such docile, doleful animals, they get the worst treatment and don't react at all. The worst I saw was a small (tiny tiny) pickup truck that had two cows loaded in its bed which had a steel bar about a 2 feet above the sides of the bed. They were so packed in, they couldn't brace themselves against stops and starts, and they were constantly bumping their heads on braking stretches or getting pressed on their tails by the thin, probably painful bar. That sort of thing makes one cringe (even the Romanians I was with cringed). The cows also docilely deal with the traffic. I wish I'd had my camera with me when I saw this perfect Romania-as-it-is-today scene:

Cows walk on the road of a village, casually moseying down the middle of the street while an old grandmother follows behind with a switch. An 18 wheeler is approaching from one direction, which the cows placidly ignore, while from behind, our car (a small SUV driven in the most insane Romanian fashion which had me silently crossing myself over and over while gritting my teeth) ZOOMS up behind them, stopping so close I can see the manure clinging to their haunches. A small traffic jam of modern vehicles and the old-as-time cattle procession occurs amidst babushka grannies and young kids playing on the side of the road. So typical Romanian.