Our First Horse

It all began with me wondering how much horse manure I shovel each day. So armed with a fish scale (a scale with a handle and a hook used for weighing fish), I filled a few buckets with manure tonight, subtracted the weight of the bucket and discovered that I shovel around 30 pounds of horse manure daily for my 1,000 pound horse, Moonshine. Tomorrow I’ll measure our 1,200 pound horse, Valentine. So just for fun, here are some other measurements to help put things into perspective. Remember, this is for my horse Moonshine only:

Output (manure only)

30 lbs. daily
900 lbs. monthly (almost half a ton)
10,950 lbs. annually (almost 5.5 tons)

*note: this is manure that’s about half a day old. As it dries, I’d guess the weight drops dramatically. Also note this only covers manure inside her stall, where she spends 8-10 hours a day.

Input (food and water)

80 lbs. water daily (10 gallons) or 29,200 lbs. annually (3,650 gallons/14.6 tons)
10 lbs. hay daily or 3,650 lbs. annually (almost 2 tons)
1.5 lbs. oats daily or 548 lbs. annually

*note: hay figure does not include hay fed in pasture. Grazing on grass not included. Does include water consumed in pasture.

Wow, so I’m shoveling about 5.5 tons a year in manure. Horse chores provide good exercise! As my biceps grow I’m looking forward to answering the question “wow, what’s your secret?” with “horse manure!”.

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We were letting the horses in for the night. Bill manned the big outside gate, and I held the stall door in the middle of the barn. As Valentine went by, I lovingly rested my head on his side. Sigh. He ambled by and I inhaled the warm, horsey scent and felt the velvety softness of his new winter coat swish softly over my cheek as he drifted past until WHACK! His hip bone clocked me in the head.

Bonding over.

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Just a funny little story that I like to tell about my childhood.

I grew up in the boonies of western Arizona. A lot of my friends had horses, and frankly, I was friends with a couple of them only because they had horses. One of them, Dean, was actually a bully who liked to pick on my younger brother. I was conflicted when I hung out with him, because I loved my brother, but Dean was always nice to me, and heck, he had a horse!

So one day when I was about 10 or 11, we were taking turns riding Dean’s horse in a round pen. It was Dean’s turn, and I was standing against the fence inside the ring. Just as he rode by, I reached out and patted the horse’s rump. By a curious (and completely accidental) coincidence, I also reached behind me at the same time to lean on the fence. As luck would have it, the round pen was ringed with electric fence, what we called hot wire. That’s what I grabbed. The jolt went through me, through the horse, right to Dean. Horse bucked, Dean fell off (he was riding bareback). He was mad, I was sorry…

But man, that was darn funny. My brother thought so too.

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Someone recently commented on Bill’s post about our horses trying to eat our fingers, and it occurred to me that I really ought to address the issue of horse bites.

Yes, horses do bite; some more than others. Usually, it’s a natural part of horse behavior. Horses have various ways of communicating, and biting each other is a big part of that - from friendly “nips” to show love, to more insistent bites to get another horse to move, to actual biting in an aggressive way. Horses can hurt each other pretty badly this way (always be careful when introducing horses to each other - yet another future post topic), but usually the bites are light enough that they don’t do any serious damage.

It’s a different story, however, when a horse bites a human. Our skin isn’t nearly as tough as horsehide, and I can tell you from personal experience that horse bites hurt. Now, horses bite humans for pretty much the same reasons that they bite each other. We are, after all part of their herd, and they need to communicate with us too. They will nip you in a friendly way to say “hi.” They will nip you if you’re standing somewhere they don’t want you to stand to politely ask you to move. They will nip in anger or to show you they’re the boss. As you can guess, this natural behavior is another way that they can unwittingly hurt us simply because they are so much bigger and more powerful. So naturally, you need to discourage that behavior.

As we have been reminded in comments to our post referenced above, horses will also bite you if you habitually feed them treats by hand. We do indeed feed apples, carrots and other treats to our horses by hand, but this is strongly discouraged by most people. There are couple of reasons for this: one, their aim isn’t all that good and they will accidentally suck in fingers or even a whole hand with their treat. Two, once the treat is gone, they may not realize it because your hand still smells like the treat or they just expect it to be there. Three, even if your hand didn’t recently hold a treat, if you usually offer one when you greet them and didn’t bring one this time, they may just take a bite anyway. So the best advice is to feed all treats out of a bucket. That’s an easy way to prevent injury and bad habits.

So, if your horse already has the bad habit of nipping you, what do you do? Valentine was quite the nipper when we got him. I don’t think he ever meant it in a mean way; all his bites were gentle, “friendly” bites - that unfortunately left me with not-so-friendly bruises. Old-timers we talked to advocate smacking the horse when he bites you, but I personally cannot hit my horses. I yelled “No!” in a loud, firm voice and spread my arms out wide - the idea is to make yourself seem bigger. Valentine startled each time and backed up. I think that was just the reaction he needed to have. It showed that he recognized me as the boss and that he shouldn’t do whatever he just did. It worked - he hasn’t nipped me in months.

The key though, as with any bad behavior, is to not let it go on. Nip it in the bud, so to speak.

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Moonshine is a wood chewer. I think she gets bored and enjoys chewing. I often see her licking the stall doors, the fence and even the steel gates and every once in a while she seems to take a little nibble. She has plenty of salt licks and we’re working on getting her some horse toys to give her tongue something to do when she’s in the barn (I’ll post about that soon) but for now I needed to protect the wooden doors in her stall. Not only is she slowly destroying them, I’m also afraid she might ingest some wood or at the very least get a splinter in her tongue. There are some products out there to help with this problem such as bitter tasting liquids and steel door coverings. But I had an idea about making a stainless steel or aluminum cover myself for the top piece of wood she’s working on the most. So for part one of this experiment, today I spent a few hours shaping aluminum flashing and securing it to one of her doors to see if it helps. If if works I’ll do a more detailed write-up. I did some preliminary testing to make sure the flashing wasn’t easily torn or cut and made sure to smooth edges and corners and secure all edges.

Here’s what one of her doors looked like before:

and after:

I’ll post an update after I see how well it’s working.

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Mikki and are night people. We prefer staying up late and getting up later. Fridays are the worst days to try and resist this tendency because most of the time we don’t have to get up early on Saturday. So here we were 10 minutes ago in the middle of the night diligently cleaning horse stalls. And it occurs to me…what the heck are we doing? It’s the middle of the night, most of the eastern time zone is in bed and here we are mucking horse stalls. That’s some kind of crazy. We mentioned to a friend recently if she ever finds she can’t get to sleep around 2 AM and needs some company, head over to our barn. We’re bound to be there. Any other night time stall cleaners out there?

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