Our First Horse

What did your horse do today? Mine ate a pine tree. Filling the pasture water bucket today I noticed something missing. There was a small pine tree growing near the water bucket and I’ve been watering it for months. It was a cute little feller with aspirations for being an equine belly scratcher some day. Its poor little life was cut short (nipped in the bud, you might say) by an apparently very hungry horse. Neither horse had a pine-fresh scent so I couldn’t figure out which one ate it. I’m not sure what I would have done if I did know. Can you Heimlich a horse? Sounds dangerous.

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The weather was beautiful the other day - 70 degrees in the middle of December. I completed horse stall cleaning while it was still light and decided to take a little walk out in the pasture. I don’t do this as often as I should. I have to force myself to even go outside during cold weather. I’m a warm-weather person, really. But today I’m reminded that horse people need to keep an eye on so many things. I discovered this 8 inch wide, 10 inch deep hole next to one of the trails. It almost looked like someone had dug this hole with a post-hole digger. I was aghast. I can just see my horse stepping in this thing and coming up lame. Since the dirt here is as hard as cement right now, I filled the hole with horse manure, packing it nice and tight. I’ll keep an eye on it. The hole didn’t look like a sinkhole and it’s in a place where I can see it from the house. I don’t think anyone dug the hole but it’s a great reminder that we all need to check the pasture occasionally, for obstacles like this. Here’s the hole, with Mikki standing next to it for scale:

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My beautiful four-legged wood chewer finally put too much pressure on the fence and broke the top board. It’s not entirely her fault. This a section of fence where we often stand and pet them and show them off to friends. Horse treats are often dispersed here so they’ve gotten into the habit of leaning into the fence. Very cold weather is coming tonight (wind chill below zero) and this is just when our horses would decide to jump this section of fence and tour the neighborhood. Time for some fence mending. Here’s what I learned about fence mending today:

1. Horses are very curious creatures
2. Horses think almost anything can be food, including hammers, drills, nails (yikes!), fence wood and of course fingers
3. It’s hard to use a hammer when horse nostrils are 2 inches from the handle
4. Although fence mending would be easier with two people, it would be much easier with three. Think rodeo clown.
5. If you need to step away to get another tool, you must remove all other tools, nails, screws and wood supplies from the area before leaving.

Fortunately I had a spare fence board that was just the right length. This time I used screws instead of nails. Screws are less likely to walk out and injure the horses, in my opinion and aren’t that much more expensive. I also decided to use part of the broken board as a center support. I’m seeing this center support idea in a lot of horse fencing and it makes sense to me. These are 10 foot sections and tend to bow eventually in the middle. The center section will help strengthen the center section, which is especially important on this particular section of horse fence in our pasture.

Fence fixed with center support.

We’ve been fence mending a few times now. Here are our other posts about mending fences:

More Fence Mending (2/07)
Mending Horse Fences - Update (5/07)

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Nope, not a Halloween post. The other day Mikki and I were out in the pasture cutting back a large section of a tree that had fallen during a storm. We headed on out with a chainsaw and an ax to clear the tree away from the round bale of hay resting under a nearby tree. The fallen tree presented a hazard to our horses so like good horse parents we were gonna fix it. I figured the horses would be afraid of the loud noises the chainsaw made but was surprised to see they didn’t seem to care. I guess they trusted since the noise was coming from around us, they didn’t have to fear it. At least we didn’t bring any plastic shopping bags with us. Now that would have been scary! Of course I didn’t saw very close to them and had they approached me Mikki would have shooed them off. And I didn’t cut any branches that would have fallen on them or snapped towards them, despite how close they look in the picture (it was a staged photo).

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A month ago I wrote about experimenting with a round bale of hay in the pasture during the cold season and here’s an update on how that’s going for us. Although our horses almost entirely ignored the round bale when the weather was warm, they’ve shown great interest in it once the weather cooled and the green grasses died off for the winter. In fact I’m starting to think we should have purchased a few more round bales. Not only was the price a good deal ($20 for 1,000 pounds of fresh cut hay!), I’m starting to thing the horses really need the supplemental forage until spring. Almost every day now I see at least one horse rear sticking out beside the tree where the round bale rests. The horses don’t seem to like to outer layer which is no doubt moist from all the rain we’ve been having but the chewy center must be delicious, as they’ve managed to carve the middle section of the round bale out (see picture). So I’d say the “experiment” is going quite well. Armed with this information, I’ll probably look for some more round bales, though the prices have almost certainly gone up since I bought this one. If I’m successful in acquiring a few more, I’m going to place them in the old barn to keep the moisture down this time.

I need to point out that the brush you see on the left of that picture isn’t normally there. A nearby tree split during a storm and has since been trimmed. We try to correct fallen trees and other hazards as quickly as possible for the safety of the horses.

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We’ve almost come full circle here with the weather and our horses. Bill brought Valentine home in the dead of winter (28 degrees the night of February 13! Brrr!), experienced a gorgeous spring, survived a hot, relatively dry summer, and now it’s fall. Today, however, already feels like winter - we had our first frost last night and it’s supposed to be below freezing again tonight. So I guess it’s time to winterize around here.

What you need to do depends upon where you live. If we still lived in Arizona, we’d be celebrating right now, because it would finally be cool enough to ride! But around here, we’re dreading the cold and even more so, the MUD. We thought we were making progress with the mud pit outside the barn this summer, but as soon as it cooled off again, the mud came back. Yuck.

So here’s what we need to do, and what we probably actually will do:

It doesn’t get so very cold here. It’s often in the twenties and thirties at night, but usually warms up to the fifties during the day. Our horses are already doing the most important part of getting themselves ready: they are growing the most gorgeous, thick winter coats. They just look stunning, I have to say. All the sunburned summer hair has fallen out, and thick, velvety new hair has come in. They’re also very fortunate to both be all black, it attracts the heat very nicely. Lucky them! If your horse doesn’t grow a good winter coat, or if it’s really cold where you live, you should purchase a good blanket. I’m not sure why they call it a blanket, because it looks more like a coat, but that’s what it’s called. Good luck with this - I’m told that most horses hate them and do everything they can to get them off, from pulling on them with their teeth to rolling in the mud to having their horse friends help them pull them off. But in some climates, they really should be wearing one. Please, though, try to preserve their dignity by choosing one that doesn’t look too goofy.

For our part, the most important consideration for winter is the food supply. The grass in the pasture actually sticks around all winter, but becomes shorter and scarcer and not a good thing to rely on for winter forage. Our ultimate goal is to seed the entire pasture with cold-weather grass in the winter, but you need a tractor for that and we don’t have one yet. Hay also becomes harder and harder to come by as winter drags on. Last year, we had a panicky moment when we actually could not find any more hay (after paying $4.50 a bale for the hay we had last found). Luckily, we mentioned our dilemma to a friend whose mother had a barn full of “old” hay that she sold to us for $1.00 a bale. This year, we are planning ahead. We built a loft in our barn so we could store more hay, and have begun to fill it up. (A note on hay storage here: the biggest risk with stored hay is that it will develop mold. As you dispense hay to your horses every day, check each flake for signs of mold. The easiest method is with your nose - moldy hay smells bad. Never feed moldy hay. You should be checking hay for other stuff anyway - I’ve heard of everything from plastic bags to dead snakes being found in baled hay. Maybe you should be wearing gloves as you’re checking.)

We have also supplemented the hay supply with a round bale of hay, which is in the pasture for the horses to munch on whenever they want. Since they spend most of their time in the pasture, that’s a good place for a supply of hay. Ideally, any hay in the pasture should be protected from the weather. A “run-in shed” is a good thing for this purpose. It’s a three-sided shed that protects your hay - and your horses - from rain, wind, snow, whatever. We have an old barn in our pasture that we intend to use for this purpose, but it needs some serious maintenance right now. So the hay is parked beneath a large evergreen tree.

Another important note about winter feeding is that your horses will need to eat more to keep their weight up. Keeping a body warm in cold weather takes a lot of energy. We give our horses more oats in the winter - they’re higher in calories than hay.

Although your horse won’t need as much water in the winter as in the summer, a supply of clean, fresh water is still just as important. If you live somewhere where water might freeze, you need to invest in a bucket or trough de-icer. You might consider one even if it doesn’t freeze - horses don’t like to drink icy cold water and may avoid drinking if they don’t find the water to their liking.

As for protection from the elements, most of our horse friends laugh at us because we don’t just leave our horses out in the pasture all the time. They say that horses are just fine out in the cold, and I’m sure they’re at least partly right. But we have a nice barn with lots of room, so every night we bring them in to sleep in their stalls, and if it’s cold and/or windy, we close the exterior windows to keep the drafts out. But that’s up to you.

The biggest winter problem for us, though, is the mud. We battled it with straw this summer, piling it on and mixing it in (in Arizona, we’d have adobe by now). The next step is a large load of sand, to help the clay drain better. The best thing to do would be to shovel out the mud, lay down a layer of stone, then gravel, then sand and put the original soil back, but again we’d need a tractor. So we’ll try out the sand and see if it helps.

You’ll be hearing a lot about mud again this winter, I’m sure.

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