Horses don't like electric water

Here's the story as it was relayed to me: over the weekend Patti and Scott were in the house and all of a sudden they'd hear all sorts of noise and banging. They'd go out and check on the horses and they had been kicking the wood around the water trough. Someone had even ripped a piece of wood off. They figured maybe someone had relieved themselves in the water and the other horses were mad. So they cleaned out the trough and put it back and fixed up the wood surrounding it. The next day, more banging and noise. Gunner was drinking the water but making horrible faces and acting really weird. They come to find out, the tank heater had been electrocuting all of the horses when they went to drink! Though it hadn't been enough to trip the GFI. They replaced the heater only to find out the new one sparked like mad as well. So now they are thinking maybe it's the cord or something. In the meantime they unplugged the heater. Some of the horses would then drink the water and drank the tank down to nothing in the first half day. Kiko will only drink from the exact spot that Gunner drinks and Cody is just pissed off about the whole deal.

Sunday I had noticed his one leg was a bit swollen, turns out it was probably from him kicking the water tank in anger. Now Cody is not one to trust anyone or anything without a lot of convincing. On top of that he is super afraid of the electric fence and won't go anywhere near it. Put those two things together with electric water and he's had enough. Patti got a few of the horses to drink from buckets and then moved the bucket to the water tank. But Cody will have none of it. He'll drink from the bucket but only if it's not any where near the tank. So now she's left to giving the horses buckets of water until they figure out the tank isn't electrified any more. I'm not sure how long that will take Cody. Poor ponies.

That goes along with the email I got a week or so ago. Apparently Axel shows his disgust with no food by going to each hay feeder, checking if there's hay and when there's none, he kicks the hay feeder and moves on to the next one. My horses are so picky!