Our First Horse

Our feeding routine is a little different these days. With three horses, all of which have different nutritional needs, it’s not as simple as it was with one horse. Still, it’s not three times harder.

First, Moonshine gets her half-scoop of Purina Strategy. As alpha-horse, she gets her ration first. Next, Valentine gets his one and a quarter scoop of Strategy. He likes to hang out up on the hill until the feed hits his bucket. Then he bolts from the top of the hill next to the barn straight for the gate at full speed. He’s serious about supper time. Finally, with Moonshine and Valentine in their stalls, poor bottom-of-the-totem-pole Sinbad can eat freshly tossed hay without being run off. He doesn’t get any grain, just hay, by order of his owner, who is a vet. And don’t worry, we put the daily hay ration in three piles so Sinbad is getting plenty. Fifteen minutes later, when Moonshine is trying to eat her wooden stall (she cribs), I know to let her out. Valentine takes longer, though. Not only does he eat more but he has a bad habit of sloshing the feed out of the bucket and onto the stall floor where he would spend the next ten minutes vacuuming his stall if we didn’t stop him. Yup, he sucks the Strategy pellets off of the ground. This of course increases his chances of getting colic, since ingesting sand is apparently a factor.

Our horses have all kinds of bad habits and this is yet another one. So I guess we’ll be looking into one of those feed buckets that makes it hard to slosh feed onto the ground.

Of course we try and stop him from doing it but he won’t budge without some force. And since it’s hard to push a 1300 pound horse who doesn’t want to move, we often grab some old hay twine to make an impromptu halter and lead him back to the pasture. This works surprisingly well.

Any of you have a horse that vacuums?

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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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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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