Our First Horse

It’s been a hot few weeks in east Tennessee, with highs around 107 in the sun. Our two horses are consuming water at the rate of about 50 gallons a day. It’s way more than they normally drink. As I mentioned before, we’ve taken to showering the horses once or more a day to cool them off. Today I filled their drinking water barrel up to the top around noon but by three o-clock I noticed they hadn’t been by to drink any. In fact, I don’t remember seeing them all day (our pasture is hilly and the rear part of the property isn’t visible from the barn). Worried, I grabbed Mikki and we headed out to find our horses. We found them up at the old barn taking shelter in its shade. To our relief, they seemed fine and happily followed us down to the barn where we fed them cold watermelon and showered them with cool water.

Now I know there are wild horses roaming the hot desert in Arizona and figure they find a way to deal with the heat there. But today I worried about heat exhaustion. We’re not working or riding our horses in this heat but I wondered how working horses dealt with the heat. Despite global warming claims, 100 degree days are not new to this area so what did farm horses do?

There is a website I visit often that shows pictures of the old days. The website is called Shorpy, named after a child laborer in one of the pictures displayed on the site. Horses are often featured and today I came across the picture below. Apparently in days past, animal rights groups spent a lot of time pushing for ethical treatment of working horses. It’s not something we think much about today since there aren’t nearly as many but it was clearly important back then. Click the photo for more info from Shorpy but be forewarned, the link takes you directly to a page showing the photo of a horse that died on the street from heat exhaustion. The photo below was taken in 1911 in New York and is entitled “free shower baths for horses” from the G.G. Bain Collection of photos.

The photo of the horse that died from heat exhaustion is sad but was probably part of every day life in the city during hot summer days.

Photo courtesy of Shorpy - the 100 year old photo blog (link opens in a new window)

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You may recall we decided to garden this year with special attention being paid to food horses would like. That was months ago so it’s time for an update. Until the heat wave that is gripping the south started a few weeks ago, our garden was loaded with fruit and vegetables and I’d be kidding you if I said they were all for horses. This year we mostly planted carrots for them but since we learned how much our horses love watermelon, we’ve saved some some of those for them, too. All these things take time, lots of weeding and sweat. Buying vegetables at the store is so much easier, though less satisfying. But I did find one thing that’s easy to grow in our garden and VERY low maintenance:

I’m here to tell ya, the easiest horse-friendly garden crop is…GRASS. This time last year, our garden was part of our lawn. One of our neighbors had mercy on us and brought his tractor over to turn the garden this spring, saving us a heap of manual labor. The tractor dug in deep and turned the soil up nicely but months later that grass figured out which end was up and thrived in our little garden. We didn’t weed for a week and the grass and weeds took over! I cut some of the grass with some hand clippers and gave the horses some and they seemed to like it as much as the carrots. Why the heck are we working so hard to produce veggies for them when they love the grass so much and it’s so easy to grow?

Seriously though, we have a tub of carrots we’ve harvested and they love them. I wish they were a little faster growing but we’ll be planting them again next year. Watermelon, too. The heatwave and lack of rain have all but killed our garden now so I guess the summer gardening season is over but we’re already planning for next year and our horses will continue to influence what we plant.

Did you grow some things for your horse this year?

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According to our thermometer, we hit 104 degrees yesterday, in the shade. Everything is dying or dead. The trees are giving up and dropping their leaves, our lawn makes a crunching sound as we walk over it and our horses are draining the water bucket at a record pace. It’s hot and everything outside is miserable. I feel bad for our horses because they’re black and they stand out in the sun for a good portion of the day. I mentioned a few days ago that Moonshine has a patch of sunburn on her nose (thanks to the those who suggested in that thread that we apply waterproof baby sunscreen, SPF50). Despite the plentiful shade in our pasture, they still hang out in the sun. So I grabbed the hose and decided to spray them down for some temporary relief. One thing I’ve learned about horses in general is that they don’t like “spraying” sounds, sudden movements, cold water on their what-nots and in general, things they haven’t pre-approved. I started with Mikki’s ex-show horse, Valentine, since he’s had more experience with things like cold showers. I let them smell the hose first, carefully turned it on so it sprayed a little and let them explore it with their mouths and nostrils. It’s the horse-way. Valentine loved it and began taking a drink from the hose (see picture). In fact he took a 10 minute drink from the hose, during which time I got a good soaking myself. I then gently sprayed his back, neck and undercarriage. He loved it! Moonshine stood nearby, wary. She was curious about the squirty thing, curious enough I was able to bring the hose to her mouth. She took a drink and I rubbed her neck and told her how pretty she was, in an effort to relax her. I tried to spray her down but even on a gentle spray setting, she didn’t really like it.

So for the past few days this has been our routine. Around noon when we see the horses coming to the barn for a drink, we head out to fill up their water bucket and spray them down to cool them off. And since it’s watermelon harvest time, we bring them some chunks of watermelon as a treat.

Have you been doing anything special to get through the heat wave?

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I realize it’s hard to tell from this picture but my poor horse Moonshine came to the barn today with a touch of sunburn on her pink nose. She’s almost entirely black (as is Valentine) but has this pink area on her nose with a little white hair over it. And today it was pink. Our pasture area is probably 40% wooded and there is an old barn that’s open on two sides. But apparently they’re spending enough time in the sun to warrant sunscreen. And that brings me to these questions:

1. Should I apply sunscreen to sensitive pink areas on my horse?
2. If so, what kind? I haven’t seen any horse sunscreens. What do you guys use?

Here’s the picture:

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Last weekend, we attended a major socio-economic event, a veritable cultural phenomenon: The World’s Longest Yard Sale. This thing stretches 630 miles along Highway 127 from Alabama to Ohio, and you can find just about anything there. Like regular old yard sales, most of it is junk. There are a few gems among the knickknacks, VCR tapes and 80’s posters, though, and we found a couple in our price range. Among other things, we got a hand-painted light switch cover; a John Deere hat; an “antique” concrete leveler; and a 17-year-old book about east Tennessee.

But our favorite finds, of course, were horse-related. We got a great lawn sign. It’s a big hunk of sheet metal, cut into the shape of a running horse with “Welcome” laser cut into the middle. It’s about 4 feet high by 5 feet long:

Isn’t it pretty?

My favorite buy of the day, though, is my new saddle. I’ve been borrowing my friend Shari’s saddle for over a year now, and wanted to give it back. We looked at saddles, but most were more than we wanted to pay. Then at the end of the day, at a stand that was selling lemonade, tomatoes and a mish-mash of junk, were two saddles under a table. One was just too worn-out to even consider, but the other was okay. It’s a dark brown western saddle with no silver (I’m not crazy about the silver) and brand-new stirrup leathers, and came with an extra strap and roping cinch. It’s pretty worn but not cracked or torn anywhere, and the tree (the rigid foundation that the saddle is built around, kind of like a car’s frame) is intact. Shari looked at it for me and said it’s okay, and that we didn’t get ripped off. The guy was asking $85; Bill, wonder-negotiator, got him down to $60! What a deal!

See you next year at the World’s Longest Yard Sale!

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