Zaltana Anatolians

Queen of the straw bale

What's Leydi looking at here?










Can I come up too?













The Queen of the Strawbale, here Ayla is sitting atop 3 bales stacked on top of each other. I don't have any livestock at this time, so when I started piling up straw bales around the property my neighbors were very curious. One by one they would stop by and ask me what I was doing with the strawbales. They seemed a little surprised about my answer, that I got the bales for the dogs, for shade, for protection from the wind, and just for fun to climb around on it.



Ever since Ayla was a little puppy she loved to climb on the bales to take a look from a higher place. When she was just 5 months old she surprised both me and herself by scaling 3 bales stacked on top of each other. When I saw her trying I thought "no way is she able to get up on this", but she got up without much of a problem. Now this was one bale higher than what she was used to, so once she was up there, she looked at me "how am I going to get down?". It took her several minutes to attempt coming down. She never just jumps off, she always lowers herself down with her front as much as possible first before she gets down. She is quite an athlete when it comes to straw bale activities, now almost 11 months old, she comes running up to the bales and jumps up, which sometimes causes the bales to look like they will fall off the top, but Ayla has learned to keep her balance in all this and is totally unshaken about the unstable bales, she just wiggles around with it until it's all stable again. I am curious to see if she can entice anybody else to climb to the top.