The first key to small pasture management is realizing that you’ve got a small pasture.  I’ve got five horses on little over an acre and a quarter of grass.  It’s tall fescue – but pasture blend; the lawn blend will cause mares to throw their colts too early they say.  I only let the horses on the grass in late spring and summer for small amounts of time, and in fall and winter when the grass is dead and the ground is frozen.

In spring, I divide the pasture into 7 slices, and I let the horses out for a limited time each day, a week for each slice.  Honestly, they stay fat on one hour in the early spring—any longer and you risk founder on lush grass.  The time gets longer as the summer wears on and the grass ages, till the fall, when they are out all day, and I begin to open the pastures up so that in late October, the horses have the run of the whole place.

Dividing the pastures up allows each slice a rest period.  i start with seven, but the smaller slices toward the back of my place really can’t sustain the horses for a full week after the first grazing in April.  So I take the back three and make two out of them after that first graze.  That allows each other slice five weeks’ rest and growth.  My grass stays long and strong all summer that way.

When we first got the place, Guy was worried that our acre would simply turn to mud with the five guys on it.  But the way I do it, I don’t have that problem at all.  Works out very nicely.  The trouble is, you have to have access for them to water from each slice, so there’s some design that has to go into the set up.  Still, it’s nice to see one acre work so hard so successfully.

Yesterday, when I put the horses out for the day (I guess I’m not explaining the pasture thing well – the horses are now out all day. But in at night), I noticed that Sophie was moving better (was it the bute?) but that Hickory/Tiger/Baby is not stiff on the fore. I felt Sophie’s hooves, and the front two were quite warm, but so were Tiger’s. Everybody else had hooves like ice. So I was glad Dr. Mike was coming. It’s great to have a vet who was also a farrier – more trust in his understanding of feet – possibly the weirdest part of a horse. Possibly.

So Mike did the hoof testing – and Sophie showed no ouch. He trimmed a little. White line was fine. No evident laminitis. Then he had his assistant run Sophie around, turning sharply, changing directions, for about half an hour. No evidence of lameness. It was like taking your car into the mechanic- “No REALLY, it was making this noise!!”

What he did find was an oddness in her back end. He picked up one back hoof, pulled it out away from her body and put it back on the ground so that she was standing spread eagled. She just looked at him and stayed that way. She is a fairly obedient girl, but this was strange – they usually want to pull that foot right back in, he said. Tried it on the other side – same thing. He’s afraid she’s got some neurological problems back there – not quite aware of her back legs. The fact that she drags those back feet when she walks also suggests this. But whatever it is, it’s slight. And whatever it is, it still doesn’t explain the warm hooves or the stiffness of the past few weeks.

Westin tends to trim very close, so my horses can get a little ouchy after that. But warm hooves?

Tiger was ouchy in the hoof test, but when Mike scraped his hoof, though he found a touch of color at one place in the white line, that scraped right off. So we don’t know what the heck is going on. Tiger was really stiff yesterday – but this morning, he was bucking and sassing and running around like a wild thing. Maybe they just get to chasing each other, and the result is pulled muscles? I don’t know. Cost me $120 not to know. But it’s worth it to keep the vet alive so that when there IS something worth knowing, he’ll be there to teach me.

Thank goodness for Geneva, too. I don’t know, I think I’m beginning to believe that anybody who wants to take on the responsibility for another life – whether it be a child, a dog, a horse or anything – should be required by God himself to take an indepth course in that creature’s reality. We just recklessly buy animals, give birth, whatever – and go our merry ignorant way, doing what we THINK the creature needs (if we even do that much), and cause terrible pain and suffering on the way in our ignorance. Especially with children – but then, they can yell and talk and defend their interests to a certain small degree – so they have a tiny advantage over the animals who, like horses, must suffer in silence.

I wish everybody would just grow up and wake up. Me included.

Scene: the barn, a sick horse. Fall, a reasonably cool day. We have a huge syringe in which I’ve been dissolving two large tablets of chalky Phenylbutazone (better known, but not by many, as “bute”) for some four hours. These are like gigantic human aspirin tablets, used to cut inflammation—which, when it gets a free hand in a horse’s foot (the inflammation, not the bute) can eventually mean a dead horse. The stuff (the bute, not the inflammation) tastes a lot like aspirin. Or so they say. You can try it if you want—let me know.

The whole problem here is that I was afraid Sophie had laminitis – which a horse can get when there’s too much sugar in her diet – meaning, lush green grass, too much grain. I know this is too much info, but you have to know this in order to get at the irony in the story.

Sophie

So what do you do to make the stuff taste better to a horse who will do ANYTHING she can to spit it out right into your hair – or down your sleeves, or anywhere she can reach? You add a little molasses to the syringe, that’s what you do. So we had this bottle of molasses that Geneva left with me: “Just like a dollop,” she said. Or maybe she didn’t actually use the word “dollop.” In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever heard her say that. Anyway, I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to pour molasses – but there used to be this really well-known expression (it came out of the south where they eat a lotta biscuits): “slow as molasses.”

What it means is, once you turn over your bottle, you can run home, take a shower, watch a PBS special, drive back, feed the horses and then go back to the upside down bottle and start worrying about whether the molasses can actually drip down into the syringe without getting all over everything. Only thing is, once molasses is committed to a flow, it’s real hard to stop. Real hard.

So, here we are, dancing around this syringe, trying to get the stuff to stop dolloping. Which it does not do until practically the whole rest of the syringe is full. And then, you can’t scrape out the extra, because by that time, the bute is all mixed into the molasses. So we shoved the stopper in and stuck a finger over the little bitty hole in the front, hoping the whole assembly wouldn’t simply blow up.

Next step: get the mixture into the horse – by the simple expedient of shoving the business end of the syringe into the horse’s mouth, which you are trying to hold way up in the air, so that it is tipped as far away as it can get from your hair. You have to get the syringe up on top of the tongue, which is very busy trying to expel anything that is not grass, hay or a bona fide treat—which means bute and all—and push hard on the plunger.

It all worked fine, that is, until the mass of molasses hit that little bitty hole in the front.

That’s all I will tell you, except to say that when we were finished, I had analgesic molasses running down my sleeves to my elbows, and Sophie, her lips now a nice burgundy-brown, was looking at us with an air of deep reproach.

Then it was left for me to hope she would not simply expire of a sugar spike during the night. I wouldn’t have worried about a dollop. A half cup is another thing altogether. But as it turns out, she survived to see another day. The next morning, the doctor couldn’t find a thing wrong with her. Okay. And now I am left to wonder: what brought about the miraculous change? Was it the bute? Or the molasses?