Our First Horse

Yesterday, our horse friend Shari (I know we talk a lot about her, but if it weren’t for her, we may have given up on this horse thing by now) decided that Sunday would be the day that we rode our horses again. So after a trip to a local festival, we came back to our barn and saddled up our horses. It was great! We took them in turns up to the round pen, first Valentine and then Moonshine. Shari used the longe line and whip to get a feel for how they were going to behave (or not!), then hopped on and rode around the arena. She even took Valentine out and rode around our pasture. He was so good! Then I rode Valentine, first around the arena, then outside. He was good for me too! Then Bill rode him, in the arena and out. Guess what? He was good for Bill too! I’m beginning to think he’s not just decorative after all.

Then it was Moonshine’s turn. She was a little spooky, because there were kids running around and yelling, neighbor dogs barking, and - horrors! - cows in the field across the road! (In her defense, the cows are new. Our neighbor just fenced that field to give his cows more pasture.) So she did a lot of head-tossing, stopping and staring, and snorting. She eventually calmed down (when the cows were out of sight), and Shari and then Bill were able to ride her in the arena. Then, alas, it was too late to ride anymore, because it was pretty dark.

All in all, it was a very good and productive afternoon. We are much more confident now, and in fact intend to saddle them up again this evening after dinner, all by ourselves! We’ll let you know tomorrow how it went.

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You can get some really good information from infomercials. You just have to exercise self control when it comes to the signing on the dotted line (or picking up the phone to order) part. We’ve attended Purina Mills’ Horse Owners Workshop events twice in the past, and enjoyed them very much. They presented good information about horse ownership in general, had a great guest speaker (Sam Powell both times), had free samples of various products (not just Purina), and fed us dinner for free!

The event coming up is slightly different. (Here’s a link to Purina’s site.) It’s a live video feed, so I guess there won’t be a guest speaker; I don’t know if there will be samples or not, but I hope so; and since it starts at 7:30 p.m. - and there’s no mention in the flyer - I suspect there will be no free dinner. All the same, we hope to learn some new things. Check out this link to find the Horse Health Fair near you, and if you’re anywhere near Lenoir City, Tennessee on October 18, we’ll be attending the event at Critter Country there that night at 7:30. Come on out!

And yes, the soft sell works pretty well on us…we feed our horses Purina Strategy. Darn infomercials.

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A few weeks ago, our horse friends, the Watsons, told us they had a source for hay. We were pretty excited, because east Tennessee and everywhere around it has been in the grip of a major drought for months, so hay is getting to be alarmingly scarce, and expensive when you can find it. Jeff Watson knew someone at work who was cutting hay for the first time (the VERY first time) and would let us pick it up in the field for $2 a bale! There were wildly varying estimates of how much hay would be available, from about 250 bales to about 1,000 bales. The fact that the hayfield owner couldn’t narrow it down to within 750 bales should have been a red flag, I guess. Shari asked Jeff to make sure that the hay was good stuff; Jeff was assured that it was. So after a couple of weeks of scheduling problems, we finally made it out there about a month ago.

It was about an hour from our house. We brought 3 trailers in case the 1,000-bale estimate was closest. When we got to the field, it was about half the size of, and as hilly as, our own pasture. That is to say, maybe 3 acres with very rolling hills. What we could see looked to be about 150 bales. And the parts that weren’t mowed yet were just as brushy and weedy as our pasture, too.

An hour later, we had 189 bales and were glad there weren’t more. This hay is full of goodness-knows-what. There’s some good hay in there, but there are sticks and twigs and spiky stuff too. And something that we guess is poison ivy, because poor Bill ended up with a rash wherever he wasn’t covered, and I didn’t - it seems that I’m one of those lucky people who aren’t sensitive to poison oak or poison ivy, because whenever Bill, the Kid and I have accidentally blundered into a patch of either one, only Bill suffers (a little bit of trivia: we’re told that Native Americans are naturally resistant to poison oak and poison ivy, and I’m part Cherokee and Osage - as is the Kid, since he’s my…kid).

Anyway…so we have 99 bales of $2 hay, and we may have overpaid. Our barn is full (of hay that only I can touch), and the horses have been eating it for about a month now with no ill effects, but we are definitely going to look elsewhere for good hay for the winter, when their nutritional needs are so dependent on the forage we provide.

I just want to be clear, though - we are VERY glad to have this hay, despite the problems, and relieved that we have some when so many people are having to sell their horses because they can’t find or buy hay.  But, as is the case most of the time, you get what you pay for.

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