Fox bark friendly game

Looking through my cell phone I came across an old MP3 of a fox barking. It reminded me of a problem we've faced last winter.

We were working on-line with our horses in the indoor arena. It was dark, everything was cover in snow. Our indoor arena is right next to the woods so if there are any animals nearby we can hear them inside as the arena is under a big balloon-type roof. That night we've heard a vary strange and quite frightening voice. It sounded a bit like an animal calling for help. All our horses spooked. They went left brain and wouldn't settle down. Even Dum, which was strange cause he is the one that stays calm most of the times. We tried different approaches to calm our horses down, nothing seemed to work as the animal kept calling. We began to worry something bad was going on in the woods. After half an hour of struggling we managed to take our horses back to the stables. Even though the stable is quite far from the indoor arena the horses kept looking out their windows and were still under a great deal of stress.

When I got back home I started searching the net for wild animal sounds and I found the exact same voice we've heard that night. It was a bark of a fox. Some sites said it was a "warning" bark. I downloaded the voice onto my phone and played it to our horses over and over. After roughly a dozen loops of the MP3 the horses started to ignore it. Dum was the last one to settle. It just proves that it is quite hard to spook a left-brain introvert but when they do get scared it takes them longer to get over it. Juliano (left-brain extrovert) is the other way round, he spooks at something, jumps and than he goes "Hey! what a tasty piece of grass next to that scary thing". Anyway, thanks to our MP3 friendly game our horses were desensitized to foxes barking and the next time they heard the bark live they didn't even notice it! We soon forgot about the whole thing but I also forgot that I set my ring tone (only when Magda was calling me) to the "Fox" MP3. Few days later I was leading all 3 horses to the paddock and Magda called me. The fox on my phone started barking and I jumped right up. Juliano, Dum and Wisełka looked at me with a face that said "You stupid human! It's just a fox, relax" :)

Here is the link to MP3 that we used http://www.mscustomcalls.com/mp3/fox/fox%20calling%20out.mp3