Posts Tagged ‘horses’
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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Welcome Distractions
Yesterday was a day when I wouldn’t have had a clue our government was churning towards a fascist dictatorship if I hadn’t read an accounting of the pertinent details. Laid out the way they were, it seemed pretty obvious.
But my day started with a visit from the farrier before I had even completed the morning chores. It took a lot of energy to coax Asher away from all the scents on the farrier’s tools to get the dog up to the house for his feeding.
Just as had happened the day before, with the Nutritionist reporting that the horses were in excellent condition, the farrier said their hooves were looking really good. The winter growth has slowed enough that the next trimming appointment wasn’t even scheduled. In the summer, we might see him every 6 weeks. It may be more than 10 weeks during the winter.
Maddy gave the horses their dewormer dosage, and so they are now up to date on all their health issues. I think we are more thrilled over the milestone than the horses. They stood really well for the farrier, making the process a relative breeze.
It didn’t hurt that the weather was headed toward a big thaw. It was the first time the temperature rose above the 32°F freezing point since the winter-like cold arrived, and it shot well past that into the mid-40s.
My day ended with an evening of catching up with guys I went to high school with at a brewery in our old hometown.
It’s an annual December ritual that relies on a core of a handful of regulars, plus each year a bonus of a few rare sightings that surprise us by showing up. I think it’s a good exercise, though I am aware it’s not for everyone. Some folks have no interest in revisiting their past. I enjoy it greatly.
Thinking about the days of my youth is more pleasant than examining the sad state of our crumbling democracy. Hanging out with the horses and hanging with the guys yesterday distracted me from how bad things continue to get in this once-great country of ours.
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Hay Challenges
It wasn’t supposed to be complicated. Hay to feed the horses is supplied by This Old Horse, and it is up to their managers to procure the bales from anywhere they can. Our liaison, Maddy, checked with the previous farmer who delivered to us, but he was out of grass hay.
She found another source who delivered 85 bales yesterday. An hour after we’d stacked it in the hay shed, the Nutritionist arrived to check on the condition of the horses. She was following up after having switched the horses’ feed from grains to processed pellets of Senior Feed last summer.
The good news is that she found all the horses are doing very well since the diet change. The bad news is that she didn’t like the looks of the new hay bales at all. Her concern is that the nutritional quality of the new hay looks so poor that feeding them this at this time of year will leave them short of their daily needs.
That leaves poor Maddy in the difficult position of needing to find another source and figure out what to do with the 85 bales now in our shed.
Just to mess up the day a little more after that, the farrier was running behind and asked to move our appointment from the afternoon to first thing this morning.
One bright spot I particularly enjoyed during the Nutritionist’s visit was the surprisingly social demonstration by the horses as we stood in the paddock and talked over their body condition scoring. All four horses brought their heads together around us, peeking over our shoulders and standing close without issue for an uncharacteristic amount of time.
Eventually, Mix brought things back to normal by getting snippy with Mia, forcing her to move away, which prompted the rest of us to break our little huddle. It didn’t spoil how precious it was to see the horses being so present in the moment together and tuned in with us as we chatted.
It was a nice exclamation point on the fact that their body condition scores were ideal for their ages. It means a lot to us that they not only look good physically, but their behaviors reflect that they are doing pretty well emotionally, too.
Now, if we could find a way to give them some better hay to eat this winter, that would be just grand.
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More Munching
One of the many benefits of snow cover is being able to see where the horses have been overnight. While the paddocks will become completely trampled in a matter of days, even though closed gates don’t confine the horses, it takes a lot longer for the pastures to see a lot of traffic.
One or two loops will appear at first, revealing someone’s initial curiosity. The fresh snow allows us to observe how the traffic pattern evolves as the days pass.
While I was enjoying more of the calming aura of the horses munching their feed this morning, I witnessed a pleasing exchange between Mia and Swings. Mia has always been the fastest eater among the four. We used to think that was because she was the lowest on their pecking order and needed to finish before another horse chased her off her food so they could have it.
Maybe it has become her habit, because they all tend to stay put for the most part now, but she still eats fast. Mia was also good at coming around later and cleaning up scraps that had been dropped. Putting those two things together, she now seems to be establishing a relationship with Swings to eat off her placemat while Swings is still there eating from her bucket.
As I watched it unfold this morning, Mia approached tentatively, and Swings’ first response was to pin her ears back to fend Mia off. Mia then waited a minute, as if negotiating permission. My brain picked up a sense of Mia communicating, “You don’t really mean that…”
Then Mia meekly began nibbling away at the pellets dropped on the mat.
Every so often, Swings picks up her head while chewing, and Mia quickly does the same, in case she is going to be chastised. When no aggression is displayed, Mia checks in by putting her nose close to Swings, and then they both go back to heads-down eating again.
It’s a treat to see them growing a more observable bond. Swings never used to tolerate having Mia in her personal space.
I think Mia is showing increasing confidence with all the others (and us, too), as well as Swings is softening her boundaries more.
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Horses Munching
And another thing. I loathe that it’s Russia that has played such a significant role in the collapse of our democracy through its command over our Kleptocrat-in-Chief, using kompromat, disinformation campaigns, cyberattacks, and social media manipulation to sow discord among the American public.
Even more, I am miserable over the fact that so many were gullible enough to be duped by it all and/or so racist as to support all the despicable things that have occurred in the time since you-know-who first rallied the MAGA hordes.
And that’s all I’m going to say about that.
For much of my life, I have been aware of being triggered by the sound of someone eating in an otherwise silent environment. My body responds with an incredible blast of intolerance that can be a challenge to control. Misophonia is the term for the disorder. (Siblings: remember how our sister Linda reacted to teeth scraping on our forks?) Anyway, in a curious contrast, the sound of our horses eating is almost magical in the way it soothes me. How does that work?
Listening to them all munching away is one of my favorite experiences. I captured a shot of each of them last night.
I had to include the shot of Mix looking to see what the heck I was up to before she went back to eating because it makes me smile. Maybe she was asking me why she was the last one to be photographed. Can you hear them in your minds, happily chomping away?
These photos give you a good view of how our “placemats” serve to keep their spillage up off the dust and dirt for smacking up after the buckets are empty. Mia is eating some of what she drops in the snow. She tends to step out and scan the surroundings while chewing.
The other day, while they were eating and I was still scooping up manure around them, I noticed Mia had planted one of her back feet on top of a pile. I scraped up everything around that one hoof and kept watching for her to change her stance so I could scoop up that last bit she mashed.
Every time she turned to look away as she chewed, she only moved her front feet. I’d never paid that close of attention to her feet for that long before, so this was surprising to me. I bet she did that about ten times while I was cleaning the rest of the immediate area. It wasn’t until she finished eating and walked away that she finally picked up that back foot.
I’m pretty certain there is a high probability she was just messing with me.
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Snow Maybe
It’s close. We can see it on the weather radar. Our county is under a Winter Weather Advisory today as a snow system is slowly making its way across our region from west to east. It appears that the bulk of the impact will be to our south, which puts us in the “maybe” category regarding the amount of accumulated snow we will need to shovel or plow.
Just in case it piles up, I spent some time yesterday pulling the plow blade from the back of the garage and getting it mounted on the Grizzly.
It took ‘some time’ because the long arms of the mounting frame, combined with the weight and width of the blade, make it rather unwieldy to maneuver.
The real problem lies in the fact that I can almost move it sufficiently all on my own, so I am too often inclined to try. Yesterday’s effort bordered on ridiculous and held potential for several troublesome failures as I wrestled it around a variety of obstacles to get it to the front of the ATV. Ultimately, I accomplished it without incident.
Once there, I needed to envision a creative way to connect the hook and winch cable that lifts the blade, since the cobbled method from last winter proved to be ill-advised. I’m not confident that my latest iteration will be adequate, but it’s a start.
If history serves as a guide, I will be forced to revise the setup when it fails in the dark, when it is cold, and I am in the middle of a huge plowing effort. That’s always a great time to work on kludged solutions.
Since yesterday’s weather was a perfect calm before the storm type of day, I decided to move a fresh batch of bales from the hay shed to the barn. Upon opening the big door of the hay shed, the aroma of moldy hay was becoming too prominent to ignore.
Our several-year-old ploy of leaving old bales as a base layer on which we stack new hay needs a change. Cyndie swept down cobwebs while we contemplated the effort it will take to remove the nasty bales.
The first challenge will be that the twine will likely have degraded to a point of failure when we try to pick up the bales. The second challenge is where we will dispose of the moldy mass. I may or may not dabble in the project while beautiful flakes are floating down this afternoon.
Light was keeping an eye on the distant horizon between mouthfuls of her feed this morning. The insulating property of her winter growth is visible in the snow that doesn’t melt on her back.
She looks so gorgeous, it’s hard to fathom how skinny she was when rescued as a starving momma in a kill pen in Kansas years back. The tips of her mane look like she has them colored at some fancy salon.
These horses deserve to be fed the best hay we can find, and to keep it stored in a way that keeps it fresh until the last bottom bale is reached.
Cleaning the hay shed today will be a labor of love.
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Feeling Wintry
In case you were wondering what the most recent blast of winter weather was like for us on Tuesday and Wednesday, I present the following that it inspired me to create:
Recipe to make an otherwise beautiful event of falling snowflakes into an angry blast of epic proportions:
- One afternoon of misting rain
- A few hours of actual raindrops
- Cold but not freezing air temperatures
- A few hours of mixed precipitation of rain/sleet/snow
- One large blast of a below-freezing air mass
- A constant 25 mph gale out of the Northwest
- An infinite number of snowflakes of various shapes and sizes
Add the above ingredients in the order listed for the duration indicated. For greatest impact, extend the overall event for longer hours to increase the amount of angry blast desired. To add some *icing* to this cake, don’t allow the sun to be visible for weeks after the storm has passed.
I admit that I got a little carried away with the last line. Overstating the part about not being able to see the sun for weeks is just being rancorous. In reality, we enjoyed a decent mix of scattered sunshine yesterday afternoon. The angry blast of wintry weather turned out to be far short of epic.
We have removed blankets from the horses, and they are showing every indication of being perfectly adjusted to the arrival of the snow and cold.
I pulled out my winter boots and insulated Carhartt overalls to wear while the snow was flying in the gale-force winds, but I need to retrain myself on the intricacies of getting in and out of my winter “spacesuit.”
It’s safe to say that the switch has been flipped, taking us from the genteel conditions of a mild autumn into the harsh reality of winter in the north.
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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November Scenes
The scenery around here has developed a significant November hue now that we are over halfway through the month.
Cyndie’s perennial garden still has a variety of autumn colors on display. The skinny leaves of the willow tree are almost smothering the grass. The grassy plant in the foreground is turning white. The young oak tree on the left is holding onto its dark brown leaves. The farm field in the background that was planted for hay last season and didn’t get tilled after the final cut shows up green, clearly visible behind our natural border fence of brush we’ve cut from fallen trees.
I came upon the horses looking like they were having some kind of meeting. Mix appeared to be losing interest in whatever the topic of discussion was. On second thought, it looks much more like they were just hanging out together on a Tuesday afternoon.
It was beautiful.
I would love to have been able to telepathically view whatever might have been going on in their communication with each other in that moment. Do they engage in idle banter? Seems a little beneath such noble creatures.
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Relative Something 