Posts Tagged ‘horse blankets’
A Thursday
There was an unexpected Asher adventure as we were about to feed the horses yesterday morning, involving a raccoon. While Cyndie and I were focused on the usual chores, Asher vanished without our noticing. His telltale, excited barking in the distance instantly grabbed our attention.
Cyndie stopped what she was doing and hustled in the direction of the hay shed. In the perennial garden just beyond the shed, she found Asher and the raccoon in conflict with each other. I stayed with the horses, trying to pretend that nothing out of the ordinary was going on, despite the angry noises coming from the raccoon.
She reported that Asher had the butt end of the still-complaining raccoon in his mouth and took off running when she showed up. When she caught up to him again, across the road at the end of our driveway, she said he was in the process of burying the no longer living critter.
I don’t remember seeing coon hound in the 18 breeds identified in his DNA.
Our neighbor just south of us was pleased to hear he has some help in controlling the population of nuisance wildlife. When Cyndie stopped by to deliver some Christmas cookies, he told her he had dispatched 19 possums and 25 raccoons this year.
It’s comforting to know that we may have gained some tolerance for occasions when Asher might wander onto their property, now that he’s seen as contributing to pest control in the area.
After a couple of days above freezing, we are facing another Winter Weather Advisory from the National Weather Service, which predicts light snow, wind as high as 40-50 mph, and icy flash freezing conditions. Needless to say, the horse blankets are back on.
Mia needs the added protection more than the others, but she was the most uncooperative about letting us cover her up. She doesn’t grow as thick a winter coat and ends up shivering more quickly than the others, so one would think she’d welcome the blanket.
Instead of chasing her around in an attempt to force compliance, we are inclined to patiently invite her to come to us as we stand holding the blanket. Since they were all eating from their feed buckets while we were putting the blankets on, that just meant standing close to her bucket, and eventually she stayed put while we covered her up and hooked up all the clasps.
I have every confidence that they understand why we are covering them up again. We also move hay nets from out on fence posts to up underneath the overhang. Since we only do these things during periods of stormy weather and always return things to normal afterwards, I believe they read the signals and accept the changes without unwarranted stress.
Lousy weather is stressful enough on its own, especially when high winds are involved. The Weather Service is tossing out phrases like “a conveyor belt of Aleutian low-pressure systems” and “atmospheric rivers.”
To us, it just seems like a Thursday.
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Different Profiles
As Asher was trotting up the driveway the other day, his shadow on the pavement looked like an interesting silhouette. I pulled out my phone and tried to snap a photo, needing to wait for good sunlight through the tree branches while also trying to keep up with him.
The challenge of keeping up with him is that he speeds up as soon as he notices someone closing in on him.
The first shot had him looking rather moose-like to me. At jogging speed, I didn’t get the shadow framed as well as I wanted.
This one didn’t line up so well, either, but it captures a little more of a truer profile of him. I particularly like that it caught one of his front paws in the motion of his scampering.
Yesterday, before the rain really started falling, I took a picture of Mia in her muddy rain slicker.
Since our rain overnight was predicted to turn into snow, I think the horses will understand this morning why we subjected them to the nuisance of blankets again. At least I didn’t find any evidence yesterday that they were rubbing the mud onto the newly braided bale twine we wrapped around the post on Monday.
Cold and wetness are never a good combination for the girls. It would seem most logical to stay beneath the overhang and munch on the hay we hang under there for them. For some reason, at least three of them can’t seem to resist the adventure of exposing themselves to the elements.
Swings is the one who most often demonstrates the ability to remain dry by staying under the roof. She is the oldest of the bunch. Maybe the additional years have produced a more informed intellect.
She be older, so she be wiser.
This would be a good time to be able to tune in to their telepathic frequency to find out what they are thinking. At the very least, I hope they recognize we want what is best for them. We wouldn’t subject them to the rain sheets if we weren’t concerned about their exposure to wet snow and rain when temperatures are cold.
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Adjustment Time
It looks like we have reached the point in our change of seasons where the temperature will drop below freezing and stay there for a while. We have had almost two full winters of temperatures frequently rising above freezing, and it’s reached the point where it’s become my expectation. I’m going to need to adjust my mindset and acclimatize my body for something closer to old-fashioned winters real quick.
When the temps stay below freezing day and night, lake ice finally gets a chance to become thick enough for skaters and ice fishing fans. The ground will begin to freeze, and without snow cover to provide insulation, it will freeze deeper and deeper into the dirt. Then, when we finally do get a decent snowfall, it won’t start melting from the bottom up.
It just might make me feel like a kid again.
Yesterday, I updated the braided bale twine we wrap around one of the posts supporting the barn overhang. Can you tell the difference between the old and the new in the photo?
The horses have proven they like to rub against it. Covering the wooden post protects the horses from getting splinters and keeps them from chewing on the wood. Finding this creative use for the twine cut from hay bales keeps the polypropylene out of the waste stream.
I decided to do the wrapping while the horses were being served their feed for the afternoon, but I started before the feed buckets were brought out. They showed a healthy curiosity about what I was up to. Light seemed to think the new braid I brought out was for them to chew on.
After Cyndie served up their buckets, she helped me with the exercise of going around and around in what felt like an endless number of circles to tightly stretch the braid on every corner.
Now the horses can rub against a wider span of the bumpy braid when the rain blankets we just put on them again become bothersome.
Rubbing against the posts is a much better option than against the hay nets that Mix was trying to use. The metal clips on the blanket were getting snagged in the netting while we were standing there, and unfortunately, they don’t rely on finesse to get themselves out of such situations.
Hopefully, the horses will adjust quickly enough to the cold temperatures that we can remove the blankets when the current bout of precipitation moves off to the east.
Accumulating snow can’t be far off in our future. It would be great if the next batch of precipitation coming our way wouldn’t start as rain.
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Calamities Dodged
Sometimes, I feel as though the horses must think we make the silliest decisions. I have no idea how much sense they have about approaching weather systems. We are greatly influenced by forecasts from meteorologists. When the weather service issues a winter weather advisory, we consider how it will affect the horses.
Monday afternoon, we put their rain covers on due to the likelihood of a rain/sleet/snow mixture falling overnight into Tuesday morning. It held off just to our south overnight, but sleet finally started falling just as we were feeding them yesterday morning.
Invasive Garlic Mustard is easy to spot in November.
It was hard to tell whether they appreciated the extra protection or not. Now the extended forecast is showing highs for the week in the mid-to-upper 40s(F) with mostly sunny skies. When it dried up by late afternoon yesterday, I decided to remove their rain sheets.
Cyndie was in the Cities overnight with friends, so I was on my own with the horses. Mix was first and seemed very eager to have the shell removed. Mia came up as soon as she saw what was happening, so I offered to help her out of her cover next. She was fine with me undoing the clips in front and stood mostly still while I disconnected the two straps around her belly. Then, she decided to bolt before I could unclip the small strap on the back.
With the blanket open at the front, it blew into the air as she took off, and Mia just stepped her back legs free of the rest of it as she ran. I walked down the slope to pick the sheet up off the dusty ground, trying to act like it was the normal procedure.
“Nothing to see here. Carry on.”
Mia’s little burst of energy got Swings and Light to come up to get in on the action. I unclipped the front of Light’s raincoat and one of the two belly straps before she decided to copy Mia and suddenly took off running, kicking her way out of the rest of the still-clipped straps.
“Really?”
Thankfully, Swings, the oldest and calmest of the four, stood in place while I wrangled the clips apart and slid the cover completely off her back. As a group, they seemed like they were of a mind that they didn’t need the extra protection we went through the trouble of providing.
We prefer taking precautions, in contrast to waiting to try and help them after they get wet and cold if conditions turn sour.
So, we dodged a few potential calamities this time, as Light kicked dangerously while Cyndie was in the vicinity, situating the back of Light’s cover, and the two horses bolted with straps still attached while I was in the process of removing them.
It serves as a fresh reminder to keep alert to risks every time we are interacting with these huge and sometimes unpredictable beauties.
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Sound Carries
Continuing with the theme of how serene it can be in our little paradise, particularly in the early morning, Cyndie and I caught ourselves being the “loud family” yesterday on our walk with Asher on the way to feed the horses. Sounds carry, we know that. Our immediate neighbor to the south has a phone ringer on one of his outbuildings that must be out of an old Bell Telephone rotary dial model. When it rings, it seems like it’s coming from within our paddock fence line.
When we emerged from the woods yesterday morning, the cloudy sky was particularly fascinating with a dramatic swirl directly overhead. I knew a photo wouldn’t capture the full essence of what our eyes were perceiving, but snapped a shot anyway.
When we walk and talk in the morning, it is common that one of us will get ahead or fall behind, pulling a weed or vine, so the projection of our voices picks up a bit as we carry on conversations. Suddenly, I’ll become aware that we are shouting at each other on an otherwise silent outdoor morning in such a way that the neighbors and the horses wouldn’t be able to miss.
Anybody outside yesterday would have heard us marveling over the spectacle in the sky, or how Asher was about to chase after a deer that had waited until he and I were only about four feet away before it bolted off through the trees, and our boy perfectly responded to my command to “Leave It!” and stayed with me.
The kind of conversational stories that a person can be so involved in telling that one loses track of how loud their voice has become. Yeah, way too many mornings, we are the loud family marching through the woods and along the back pasture to the barn, carrying on at the top of our lungs in the otherwise blissful serenity of our little valley.
“The Hayses are up and about,” the neighbors will announce.
With a chance of rain in the forecast and verifiably chilly temperatures, we put rain sheets on the horses yesterday morning while they were eating from their feed buckets. The precipitation didn’t show up until much later, but Light had made her own decision about being covered by the time it started to fall.
Cyndie found the blanket wadded up on the ground in the middle of the afternoon, bottom straps still clipped, and nothing ripped open. It must have been a fascinating sight to witness her Houdini performance of getting herself free of that. I’m confused about whether she pulled it up over her head or down off her butt. Had to be over her head. There’s no other way.
I’m glad to have missed it. Catching her in the middle of that would have been frightening. I wonder if she made a lot of noise while wiggling and wrangling it off of herself.
The way sound carries, the neighbors probably knew about it before we did.
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Horse Happenings
For the record, my legs are feeling stiff from Wednesday’s up and down, crouching, kneeling, walking, and bending effort to clear the weeds. Just in time for a planned bicycling outing this Sunday. How soon do I get to say I’m too old for this?
I took a picture of Mix receiving a syringe of medicine in the side of her mouth from Cyndie. Mix makes ridiculous faces after Cyndie squirts the dose into her mouth, vividly demonstrating her disgust at the insult. Cyndie has taken to adding an equal amount of applesauce in hopes of masking the flavor that bothers Mix.
The reaction was less extreme with the flavor enhancer.
Maddy, from This Old Horse, was over yesterday, and she thought Mix looked like she was moving with less pain, so the icky medicine is probably helping to some degree.
The reason Maddy was here was for an appointment with a new (to us) farrier. He seemed like a young guy to me, especially considering his name was Ralph, which aligns more with my dad’s generation. Ralph came across as a man of few words, but he let his work do most of the talking. He was efficient and handled the horses’ occasional resistance with gentle patience. That is a welcome change from the previous person who was doing the job.
We were graced with a day of much-improved weather yesterday. All it takes is a clear blue sky and wind speeds of zero for the sunshine to soften the blow after a night cold enough to produce a block of ice in our rain gauge.
The low sun brought a golden glow to the dry corn stalks in the fields and cast a long shadow in the late afternoon hour.
We removed the rain sheets from the horses for a few days because of the nicer weather. As much as possible, we want to encourage the growth of the horses’ natural winter coats, and providing the artificial warmth of blankets can send their bodies the wrong signal, reducing the need for more insulation.
I don’t know if science supports that idea, but it satisfies our intuitive perceptions, so we go with it. If the horses shiver, they get blankets. In the meantime, they gotta grow more hair.
That’s some horse happenings as we reach the last week of October, 2025.
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That’s October
Now, this is more like it. Although that doesn’t mean we are necessarily enjoying it. Remember how much griping I was doing about the hot weather extending well into September and October this year? There has been a change.
That is what October is expected to look like. It is chilly, rainy, blustery, and miserably dreary-looking outside. That leads to cold and wet animals, as well as the people who need to be outdoors caring for them. Just the way it should be in the tenth month of the year up here in the Northland.
We have successfully completed our most essential winterization steps while it was still comfortable outside, making days like yesterday much easier to endure. The pump was removed from our landscape pond on Monday, and the water line down to the labyrinth was drained and blown out with my air compressor.
The horses all have on rain shells to give them a thin bit of added protection from the battering wind-blown rain showers. There is little that we find sadder than a sopping wet, shivering horse. The rain shells do prevent that result, at the very least.
This blast of real October weather has allowed me to become more sloth-like than usual, and I am taking full advantage of it by doing little to nothing that could be construed as useful or productive unless one considers napping in a recliner as being useful.
At this age, I find that doing nothing produces less guilt than it did when being responsible for raising children or working for someone who was paying for my time. I’m sure that Cyndie would rather I stay as busy as she is every day, but since she sets such a high bar of comparison, I long ago proved my methods fall far short of the examples she sets.
If there are two ways to do anything in this world, Cyndie and I will always choose opposite methods. It makes it all the more special when we succeed at things as a couple. We rely on the magic (flexible) thread of love to keep us together after banging heads trying to execute any version of a metaphoric two-person lift.
The end goal always tends to be the same for both of us, so that helps.
Thirteen years after moving here, our end goal has blurred a bit. Wintervale never became an income generator that could help us cover expenses like we originally envisioned. October has a way of feeling like our beginning, but it also always ushers in the end of so many things growing outdoors.
It’s hard to think about ourselves and the big picture of another year at Wintervale when videos keep surfacing of masked thugs uncontestedly kidnapping people in broad daylight in US cities, while portions of the White House are being demolished by heavy machinery. Rather symbolic of a very scary future for our country.
I wonder how business is going at the inflatable frog costume factory these days. If Cyndie and I were going out for Halloween, we’d probably dress as a masked thug with a military vest handcuffed to an inflatable frog.
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Available Shade
It’s there when they want it.
At different times throughout the day yesterday, I spotted a horse taking advantage of the shade now available. It’s hard to describe how rewarding that is for me.
It was a relief to get their rain blankets off them first thing in the morning. They were rubbing up against everything around, and I noticed one of the metal latches on Light’s blanket catching on a hay net. Thankfully, it let loose before ripping the net apart. Seeing that, I got my explanation of how in the heck they had ripped down a board the night before.
On my last walk of the night with Asher, I spotted a hay net on the ground. I picked it up and carried it back to the overhang, where I found the board it had been attached to lying on the ground. At the time, I had no idea how or why they had pulled hard enough to yank the six screws that had been holding that board. If that net had snagged on the hardware of one of their blankets, I can easily imagine them using their weight to lurch free. That’s more than enough to pop the board loose.
It’s interesting to imagine the brief drama that must have occurred, and how startling it probably was to the horses, since they were all so serenely hanging out in the vicinity as if nothing was amiss when I showed up.
They were all standing around acting as if there wasn’t a board ripped off the wall for all the world to see. None of them moved a muscle as I picked up the long, heavy board and wove my way around them to take it away.
If I were to show up carrying our Wintervale banner flag, their panicked reaction would make you think it was the scariest thing they’d ever seen.
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Weather Wallop
We got smacked to a degree I didn’t anticipate yesterday with a combination of multiple inches of rain in uncomfortably cold temperatures while strong wind gusts blasted us mercilessly. We still had the small paddock closed off, which constrained the horses to having access to only one side of the overhang for shelter.
Just to keep things from being simple to deal with, on Monday, Cyndie got a COVID vaccination booster that had her feeling poorly by yesterday morning. That left it to me to tend to the horses in conditions that were teetering on completely out of control.
The poor girls were shivering desperately and very anxious to get their servings of grain to take their minds off the misery. Serving them became a crazy ad-lib as I tried to maintain some order and control while moving their serving stations on the fly to try giving access out of the rain for each horse.
Thankfully, they were moderately cooperative as they were well aware of the predicament we were all in. After doing my best to give them the bare minimum comforts available in the moment, I took Asher back up to the house for his breakfast.
A short time later, our new person from This Old Horse, Maddy, showed up with doses of dewormer for the horses. She picked up where I left off in trying to find a way to give the horses some advantage against the weather. I joined her and we decided to try moving them inside to the individual stalls.
We got them in, but we couldn’t get Mix to settle down. The other three seemed to figure out they were out of the wind and rain, they had food and water, and no other horse was trying to invade their space. Sadly, I got the impression that Mix was triggered and having a major PTSD reaction to the confinement.
Subsequently, Mix’s prolonged stress, demonstrated in kicking the walls, biting boards, and general flailing about, began to UNsettle the others. We tried changing the horse next to Mix by swapping the positions of Swings and Mia, but it didn’t make enough difference in Mix’s tantruming.
Instead of drying out, Mix was lathering up in her own sweat. We ended up putting blankets on them and letting them back outside after I strung another temporary barrier that at least allowed them access to both sides of the overhang.
A little over a week after setting up fans to cool them in high heat, we now have the horses wearing blankets in the latter half of May.
A windy, rainy, 40°F weather wallop, indeed.
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Bright Morning
The water line in the Ritchie fountain needed a brief shot of hot water to flow this morning, but that will probably be the end of our water worries for a few days. The temperature is climbing swiftly this morning, and we will be heading out to pull off horse blankets as soon as I finish this post. It is easy to see travel patterns now that we’ve had plenty of days without new snow.
Here is the difference between one time down a trail and a frequently used path:
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I’ve pointed out many times the icy patches in the large paddock that the horses avoid. Here is Mia soaking up the morning sun where you can see the horses cover a lot of the ground except for where they don’t:
That manure pile is my attempt to build a mound over the drain tile from the barn water spigot to keep them from squishing it. The water that drains from it creates that icy patch that the horses know to avoid.
This morning, I caught a shot of Mix’s grain mustache when she looked up from cleaning the spillage on Swing’s placemat.
It’s a pretty cheery day here in our oblivion, sequestered from any gloom or doom related to the evils of this world. It makes me feel a little guilty about how nice we have it. I don’t feel any guilt at all about making the horses’ world as blissful as possible for them.
For now, we are taking care of each other.
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Relative Something 