Went to feed this morning and found that Tiger/Hickory/Baby had slashed his face on something.  A couple of months ago, I got there in the morning to find the jail gate off its hinges – didn’t take a forensics team to figure that one out: somebody had his face under the gate, reaching out those lips to get every single molecule of hay that had been flipped outside of the stall.  In came Dustin.  Up came the startled head – bang into the bottom of the gate – over to the hinge, which sheered off about three inches of hide up the nose.That little patch on his golden face is now blackish.  And I’m sure this new slash – another strip of hide gone, too, too close to that eye – will grow in dark.  He’s going to look like an etcha-sketch.  This time, I can’t figure out how he did it this time.Ah well –  

So last night, Geneva and G and I went to a two hour lecture about laminitis, presented by a vet prof from Colorado State.  We kind of hadn’t expected that many people to show up, but there had to have been two hundred people or more in that room – everybody from chicks in mullets and chewing tobacco jackets, guys with full beards, pearl buttons and cowboy hats to older women in crocs and guys who looked like doctors.
It was an interesting lecture.  He had a power point (yawn), and he went over the same four points about five different times.  And in the end, what he had actually said for two hours was: we don’t really know anything.  The treatment is even swinging back to age-old treatments  (stand the horse in a cold stream to take down the inflammation) once looked down on as just silly. 

But the point was that there is hope, and there are ways to treat horses.  You don’t have to lose a horse once he’s actually gone chronic – which is what they call it when the bone has separated from the hoof wall.What fascinates me about this is the intricate and unlikely construction of the hoof, and its even less likely attachment to the coffin bone.  They are actually more or less zipped together, interfacing ripples lined with little  - I don’t even have the vocab for this.  How a thousand pounds of dynamic horseflesh can be supported by those fragile, complex laminae, I don’t understand – unless you can divide the weight of the horse by the number of ripples in the laminae, each ripple taking part of the pressure of the load. 

By the way, a long toe is a dangerous thing, putting far more pressure on that delicate connection than a normal toe will do.  I went home to look at Sophie’s feet.  I thought that I saw founder rings on her hooves this morning – very tiny ones, four of them.  But when I looked this afternoon, I didn’t see them.  She’s cool and there’s no digital pulse at all in the fetlock, so for now, that girl is sound. I’m going to have to check her every day from the moment it starts to warm up for certain.

 Hickory kicked me today.  Not because he meant to.  He was trying to scratch an itch on the fetlock of his right hind – you know that awkward way they hold the leg up, then reach around hard with the head, till they can scratch with their teeth?  I always try to help.  And I got in there and started scratching.  At first, he was puzzled – still trying to get to it with his teeth.  Then he just stopped and watched me scratching, that leg suspended up under his stomach.  I gave it a good going over – then suddenly, the foot just popped over and caught me sharply on the outside of the knee – like the scratching had just felt so darned good, his leg just jerked.

First time I’ve ever been kicked, and it was purely my own fault. 

 Mark Twain said, “I’ve done eleven good deeds in my life and lived to regret every one of them.”I think the pony was embarrassed.  But we made it up together later. 

We took the guys off the pasture today. We had to. The horses were beginning to look like professional mud-wrestlers, and the pasture more like ground beef than a grass bed. Taking them off sounds easy. It’s not. We had to go buy a new panel for the expanded and wonderful new Jetta Jail, and another gate, then we had to switch one of the big gates with the panel to the south of it (because of the newly expanded and wonderful Jetta Jail) – which means we (and I mean G) had to dig the panel and gate out of six inches of something like permafrost.

When we got that finished, we unloaded the new panel and gate. Then we had to take an ice pick to the last panel, which had wintered on the north side of the barn, and was three feet in ice. At that point, we opened the driveway gate. We have a gate way down at the end, where the drive meets the road, and the driveway is lined with fences. But it’s always thrilling territory to our five guys, who discovered the open arena gate and filed through, eyes huge – as if they’d never escaped before in their lives.

They headed happily down the drive, sure that there must be grass to find, and spent a while sadly standing with their heads over the closed gate at the end of the drive, gazing longingly at the drippy, muddy pasture they’d just left. Then they gave it up, and the rodeo began. Suddenly, here they came, one after the other in a perfect line, pounding back up the drive like lions were after them – heads up, tails up, blood up. They galloped by (no cantering here), back through the arena gate, hooves throwing mud everywhere, and began a mad spring dance. They kicked. They reared. Sophie, who is our most heavy and awkward horse jumped all four feet off the ground at once. They thundered out onto the poor pasture, gouging and slipping and whirling and chasing, then back into the arena, down the driveway, back up the driveway and through the arena into the pasture again.

My Zion stopped his floating trot (tail so high, it was curving over his back like a Malamute’s) and stood tall, alert and lovely, staring at me and doing a series of short, explosive snorts. Blood up indeed. His legs were set to run, his ears were pricked, he was ready for anything, and so was Dustin.

Then we started assembling the jail. And everyone had to come in and examine the tools, and smell the new gate, and gaze in a puzzled manner at the panel which was now where the old gate had been – and check out the old gate in the new place, smelling it, and maybe bravely stepping through it onto the pasture. Tiger could not leave us alone. He wanted to know everything. He wanted to know why. He wanted to know how. He wanted to be inside the new space, and outside the new space, and he wanted to open the new gate with his nose.

It was a very exciting morning. At the end of it, Jetta had a new house, better than a jail, and was safe, eating her dinner, from all gelding or mare depredations. Only one thing I’d forgotten. And since I didn’t go to the pasture to feed the next day – sending the boys out into the drizzle and rain, I didn’t remember for a full day. Last night, more than half asleep, this flash of knowledge came into my head – like a sudden instant messenger thing: Jetta had no water.

I sat up, grabbed Guy, and at one in the morning, went out to rescue the poor girl. I felt like trash. It hadn’t been hot. In fact it had been cool and wet – but my gosh. What an idiot. We walked down the long drive in the cloud diffused light of a hidden moon, answered softly all the questioning nickers, and let the girl out. There was some shuffling around, but soon enough, Sophie took her turn in the jail, and Jetta drank for three minutes straight.

All is fine now. There is water in the mare house. There is safety there, too. And spring is coming. With all its mud and mess and promise, it is finally coming.

Had to haul in another almost $300 worth of squeegee to clean up the stalls – one mucky, wet winter. But everybody’s doing fine. Geneva says not to worry about thrush till it gets warmer – as it will soon enough now. So this year, I’m going to get better at cleaning out hooves. My hay has been super this year, bless my farmer, and it looks like we’re going to have some thirty or so bales left over after the pasture opens up. Bought 162 then 12 more, and it was almost absolutely perfect, which is saying a lot, if you know anything about hay.

The baby is HUGE. Taller than Zi or Jetta – maybe bigger than Dustin, which will not please him at all. The other day, when I was mucking out the open stalls while the great fur-balls were eating, I once again faced the two butt ends of Zion and Tiger (the baby) who share a stall when they eat. They make this V with their heads apart and their back ends together. When I need to get between them, I either have to take my life in my hands, or go around to the barn door and come at them from the front. Neither is acceptable. So I have started going in on Zi’s off side, between the barn wall and his body, then leaning on him with my arm over his back, and pressing on his far side to get him to move into me.

I know that’s chancy – being pinned between the wall and a thousand pound body is not a great experience. But at first, he didn’t get what I wanted him to do at all. So I’d squeeze in further, duck under his neck, come up on his other side, between him and the baby, press on his ribs and get him to move away from me.

A week or so ago, I tried the move-into-me trick again, and lo and behold, he moved right over as I asked. I scooted up to his head so as to be out of the way, and he had the most irritated look to his ears. But he did it. And the next day, he did it again. He doesn’t welcome the intrusion – he IS eating, after all. But he got it.

Yesterday, when I was cleaning once again, I looked at those two great behinds, and at the muddy ground, and didn’t want to do either thing. So I just said, “Zi. I need you to get over. Can you get over?” And he did it. No ears this time, just crossly shifted his weight and moved completely aside for me – no touch, no push on my part. Just language. It was the coolest thing ever.

Sarah Christopherson rode by again today, her horse fetlock deep in the gritty snow on the roadside. That arab mare was on one, tossing her head and dancing. “I think they smell spring,” Sarah laughed. And truly, when I jumped the fence this morning to walk next to Tiger, one hand on the crest of his neck, he turned as if to nip at me. Cheeky indeed. “No,” I said. He turned away, as if he were thinking that over, then did it again. “NO,” I said, and he seemed to settle down. Sometimes, when I try to walk next to him, in his rhythm, it makes him nervous, and he will suddenly speed up – hopefully without kicking as he does. But after I spoke so firmly, he seemed to lose his cheek, and walked with me easily.

Still, even Jetta was bucking and kicking a little the other day in the crisp pre-snow afternoon.

I looked up at Sarah, riding in just a hoodie in sub-thirty degree weather. “Get home before you freeze,” I told her. But I’ve ridden horses in the ice and snow and I know the truth – especially on a fractious mare whose fretted herself sweaty – a person sitting on a horse is almost always going to be warm as toast.

I am told that horses, like some dogs and some cats, pick one particular part of the pasture or the corral to use as a loo. And it’s true – I have the dead spots in my pasture to prove it. Or at least, last year I did. For some reason, this year, the whole entire five horse herd decided that the strip immediately outside the barn – all along the backs of their stalls – was The Place. I’ve had it dug out and filled with tiny, clean, tumbled gravel twice now, hoping to shame them into stopping. But alas, they are dedicated.

And this year, with all the cold and snow – more snow than we’ve seen in a decade (all that global warming, dang those republicans) – they’ve evidently decided to install indoor plumbing. I thought I’d also heard that horses didn’t like to muck up their eating area. This is a dirty lie. Or rather, the truth is the dirty part.

Dustin’s stall stays fairly clean. Nobody really dares even enter that area. I suppose I should explain that these are not real stalls, as my barn is completely open on that side. But I’ve defined several open backed twelve foot square “stalls,” mostly to slow down Dustin and Sophie, who tend to want to chase everybody else out of anywhere at all. And feeding times are more peaceful if Dustin can’t just raise his head and scare the next guy away from his trough.

It’s the baby, mostly. I’ve caught him at it, tail raised and bliss on his face. I spend hours and years of my life raking the stuff up and then shoveling it into the cart, then schlepping it out to where I’m trying to build a dike that will keep the irrigation water out of the back of the barn. Only to come back next day and find a new, fresh supply – usually too frozen to rake. Or at least, frozen enough to give me an excuse to give up and go back home where it’s warm.

Compounding the issue is the fact that every one of the darn horses slops his hay out of his trough – they scoop up the stalks with their noses and throw it several feet away – forgetting, I guess, that sooner or later, they’re going to be interested in eating it. The stuff falls in the muck, which would not pose much of a problem, considering the pick-up sticks stacking it does – except for the fact that the same horse will, a few moments later, shift his position so as to get his nose further into the trough and step on the stuff on the ground. Stamp on it really. Mash it into the gross mud and muck and — I can’t go on.

Isn’t there somewhere in the world where people build houses out of bricks made of straw and manure? Didn’t I see that on Nature or something? Then why, after this entire several months of straw strewing, do I not have have nice, natural brick flooring in those stalls?

At least there’s still snow on the ground. Sooner or later, there’s going to be a thaw. And when it comes, we’ll be up to our knees in the brown, and the sweet smell of a winter’s worth of self expression will probably knock us flat.

I bought 174 small bales – 75-85 pounds – for the winter. Piled them up fourteen feet high and twelve feet across. I’ve learned to keep the stack covered with tarps because the barn, being metal, warms up enough in the sun to drop tons of condensation on the hay, which can get down inside and rot the bale out.

Everybody’s doing fine. Sophie and Hickory are on the thin side – and, of course, the aging Jetta Moon, but the boys are fat and sassy. Mostly sassy. I worry about their hooves being in the muck of the stalls, which I cannot keep dry or clean. Somebody has started using them as an outhouse. I’ve seen Hickory doing it, but I suspect there’s also a herd of something like elephants that comes in the night and mucks everything up. That, mixed with the hay stalks, should actually have more or less cemented in the floors of the stalls. No such luck though. I don’t want thrush again this year. But it’s so darn cold and muddy, I don’t want to get down with those feet. And even if I got them cleaned out, the feet go straight back down into the muck again, so what’s the point?

I love to be with them, though. I love playing the mind games and hearing their requests and demands. When you spend enough time around horses, you can hear them very clearly, even though the communication is all in the look in the eyes, the tilt of the head. Tonight, Dustin had his head over the stall gate, and I nuzzled him over and over, nickering, and he never moved away. He smelled so warm and horsie, I just couldn’t stop doing it.

Hickory-Tiger-Baby is HUGE. And getting pretty darned cocky. He will actually come up and nip Zion’s flanks now. Zion is not much of a fighter, so he simply moves off – but it looks like he’s allowing himself to be driven, ears pinned back. Obviously, he finds the whole thing deeply annoying. But we’ve also seen Hickory take on Dustin, and the biting goes back and forth there. I am hoping that, by spring, I don’t have a real sass-bucket on my hands for training.

I talked to Sarah Christopherson from the barn down the road the other day. She was riding out on her arab mare, coming down the shoulder of the road in the freezing cold, and we had a good talk, very pleasant, about nothing.

It’s almost too icy under the snow for me to take the car down the drive to the barn. Got a huge truck load of squeegee today, though. And hope to put it into the stalls soon, just to life the horses out of the thaw.

Nobody reads this blog but me. But still – it amazes me that I own horses. Like holding magic in my hand.

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?