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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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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We recently had a recurrencence of a problem with Valentine (see Getting a Room). As you know if you’ve read this blog, we have a mare and a gelding. We have a three-horse barn and their stalls are next to each other. Every once in a while, Valentine for one reason or another decides that he wants to be in her stall. (As for what that reason might be, well, he is a guy - it’s either food or…well, this is a family show.) Since he’s 16.2 hands high (that’s 64.8 inches in people talk) and weighs about 1200 pounds, and there’s an inch of wood slats and a few nails and screws between him and his destination, it’s not too hard for him to accomplish his goal. So a few days ago, we came up to the barn to find one less plank of wood between their stalls. Again.

So this time, in addition to replacing the nails with screws, we took the simple but effective step of switching their stalls. The wall between their stalls is formed by vertical slats nailed to two horizontal planks, one at the top and one at the bottom. Moonshine’s stall was the smooth side of the wall; the nail heads were on her side. So Valentine could simply push on the boards, and presto! Out popped the nails and down went the boards. By putting him in the stall with the smooth side, it made it much harder for him to remove the planks, because he would have to actually break the boards. Of course, if he wanted to, he could easily do it, but shhhh…don’t tell him that.

Anyway, Valentine’s now in the middle stall and Moonshine is in the first stall. Unfortunately, after months of it being the other way around, we were bound to forget the new routine, and tonight we did. We opened the gate and let Moonshine into the middle stall. We could have just left her there, I suppose, but we really didn’t want to risk yet another replay of Getting a Room. At the very least, it’s a pain to put those boards back up, and the worst case scenario is injury to one or both of our horses.

So we needed to switch her into the other stall. Let me tell you, that was easier said than done. There were OATS in the feed trough. Once her head was in there, she wasn’t letting them go. Since we don’t leave halters on our horses (I’ll have to post the reasons for that someday), I couldn’t just grab her and pull her out of the stall. We tried to get her out of the stall by pushing her around. Normally that would work, because she’s actually very obedient, but have I mentioned that she really likes OATS? She wasn’t budging. I risked life and limb and stood in front of the bucket to keep her away from the oats while Bill tried to lure her out with a handful of oats, but she’s no dummy. Trade 2 cups of oats for about a tablespoon? Come on. Eventually Bill went for the halter while I tried to keep Moonshine from eating my jacket till he got back. We got the halter on and pulled her out of that stall into the right stall with no problem, and let a very anxious Valentine into his stall to discover if there were any oats left for him. Needless to say, that bucket required a refill.

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Seriously. You take a couple of 1000+ pound animals with sharp tools on their feet and put them in a structure made of wood and held together with a few thin pieces of metal, and there are going to be incidents. Take our adventure a few weeks ago, and then what happened last night.

Our barn is about 100 yards from our house, and we’re fairly deep sleepers. Luckily for us (or unluckily, depending on how you look at it), we have three canine sensors with keen hearing who aren’t afraid to let us know if something is amiss, at least in their tiny little minds. Like at 4:00 this morning, when Jack, the oldest, went nuts barking. Usually this means that the neighbor dogs down the hill, who live outside, are barking - why we need to know this, I don’t know, but he doesn’t like to miss any opportunity to bark. But when he’s insistent, like he was this time, we always check it out. Bill pointed out later that any good farmer would have been checking it out by standing on the porch with a shotgun in his hand, but we prefer to do it by peeking out the windows in our jammies.

On this occasion, there did appear to be something actually amiss - there was some loud banging coming from the barn. Bill looked out every window that offers a view of the barn, but couldn’t see anything, and that includes horses. There were no horses to be seen. Finally he ventured out on the back porch, sans shotgun, just in time to see the outer door of Valentine’s stall - which in addition to being latched is nailed shut - fly open and reveal Valentine on his back with legs flailing in the air. He ran back to tell me (I wasn’t fully awake yet) and we started pulling clothes and shoes on. I ran up to the barn to see Valentine standing outside his stall, looking pretty much normal, although a bit surprised.

Unfortunately, the outside door of his stall is surrounded by stuff - the tub to a utility trailer and a pile of fence rails. There is no way a horse can get out of there without jumping. He’s apparently not much of a jumper, and decided to turn around. I don’t know how he managed it in that small space, but he did. He went back in his stall and I followed him in. We checked him from head to toe, and with the exception of some bleeding from a pre-existing wound and being pretty sweaty and caked with what I’ll politely call “dirt,” nothing seemed out of the ordinary. We let him and the mare out into the pasture, 4 hours early, and investigated the area to try to figure out what happened.

The evidence: A dirty, sweaty but uninjured horse standing outside his stall; spilled water bucket next to stall door, still hanging on hook; open stall door with scuff marks and small gouges on inside; and stall door latch ripped off, found about 15 feet away from stall door. Also, Bill’s observation of said horse laying on his back in the stall with his legs in the air.

Conclusion: Valentine laid down and at some point maneuvered himself into a position where he couldn’t easily get up. This caused him to panic, so he flailed those long legs around so violently that he burst his stall door open. After it was open, he managed to get himself up, only to discover that, hey! There’s a door open! So he wandered out into the small space but couldn’t go any further.

So, we fixed the stall door, and moved the debris. Hey, if the mare can wander around in the middle of the night and eat grass, Valentine should too, right? Actually, we just thanked our lucky stars that he didn’t injure himself on the stuff out there, and moved it just in case it happened again.

This brought up an issue we’ve been wrestling with: barn security. A previous owner had, as I mentioned, nailed the outside stall door latches shut. This is good in a way, because it’s hard for someone to sneak your horses out that particular door. It’s also bad in case of an emergency - what if the barn is on fire and you can’t get the horses out through the inside doors? There is a fine line between keeping your horses (which are, let’s face it, valuable property) secure, and being prepared to get them out of the barn at a moment’s notice. A lot of people keep an inexpensive halter hanging outside each stall door in case of emergency. We find ourselves unable to do this, for fear of making horse theft that much easier.

For a future installment: Ways to protect your horse from theft and get it back if it is stolen, e.g. branding and microchipping.

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Mikki’s parents are visiting this week and while we were up at the barn, her dad comments “so this is their bedroom and bathroom”. Ha, I guess I hadn’t thought of it that way. Their stalls are a combination of a bedroom, bathroom and dining room, really. Okay, now I’m glad I’m not a horse.

That’s it, carry on. I just thought it was an interesting observation.

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Having a boy horse and a girl horse is interesting, even if it’s a mare (can make baby horses) and a gelding (can’t make baby horses). They still go through most of the motions, especially her and it’s obvious to me she gets quite frustrated when our gelding doesn’t show as much interest as a stallion would. But still they flirt. They nibble eat other, posture and he’s sorta interested. When they’re near the barn I usually tell them to get a room. Well…this week they did that.

The night before it happened we were outside roasting marshmallows and I thought I heard banging in the barn. I went to investigate and I swear the horses were looking out of their stall, whistling, as if to say “nothing to see here, move along human”. I looked around and saw nothing. The next morning I get up, walk to the barn and notice troublemaker Valentine’s head poking out of Moonshine’s stall. When I got to the stall I saw her in the background, eyes wide open as if to say “I told him we’d get in trouble…IT WAS ALL HIM!”. That banging was apparently Valentine, our big gelding, kicking the boards between his stall and hers (see pic). Upon closer inspection, I can’t see how he got through there, as he’s wider than the opening.

So I let the horses out and we re-installed the boards, this time with screws.

Now as funny as this is, a few things have me concerned:

1. I’ve heard horses shouldn’t be in the same stall, even if the stall is pretty large. They’re big, powerful and not graceful in small places.
2. The displaced stall boards were laying on the ground with the nails poking up. Most of the nails were bent over so I imagine they stepped on them.
3. Even with strong screws, if this 16.3 hand gelding wants to visit my mare, a few screws and a 3/4 inch wood slat isn’t going to stop him. I hope this isn’t a trend.

Oh, and to be fair I see how she encourages him so my mare isn’t the least bit innocent in this incident.

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