Catch-Up Post: Driving, Lessons, Vetwork, Kicking Addictions, and More

Let's try to break this massive thing down some, shall we? When I last left you guys, I had a very nice dressage session in the Happy Mouth,  a nice 3 mile light conditioning drive, and an uneventful lunge. That brings us to...

Sunday the 8th:

Another uneventful lunging day. I've pretty much canned the chambon at this point as it is only effective when she is super relaxed. As soon as she gets a little spiced up, she braces against it, and it just doesn't do anything except rub her chest while she zooms around with her head in the air. Kind of the opposite of effective. She was quite quiet today, in no small part thanks to the fact that she went galloping like a wild animal around her pen shortly before I got her out to work her. This usually makes a HUGE difference for her, as otherwise she gets the squealy bucks on the lunge when she canters. Lunging time is work time, not run-like-a-maniac time, so when run-like-a-maniac time happens pre-lunge, it is for the best.

Monday the 9th:

We had an AWESOME drive on Monday. She was just so *there* with her snaffle, and so very pleased by it that she was super ultra mega compliant. She is such a funny case... when she is pleased, she will do ANYTHING you ask, with ease. When something irks her, AKA a bit she doesn't like, she will fuss and fight and be a general hellion nonstop until you do something about it. We only drove for about 20 minutes, because she was just *that good* that I saw no reason to continue. Perfect 40m circles, and 20m circles, and looping serpentines and changes of direction, and lovely quiet transitions. What more can you ask for!

What are you looking at

Tuesday the 10th:

The mares had a vet appointment at 9am with Dr. H to get their Coggins, Rabies, and fecals done, and to give Pmare the pre-foaling once over. Dr. H took one look at P as she stepped off the trailer and went, "so when is she due? Tomorrow?" She is SO HUGE! We weren't even there for 15 minutes... maybe even more like 10. O got her Rabies, and I took P's home with me to administer with her pre-foaling vax. Both mares had completely clean fecals, so the plan for Pmare is to not deworm her again until the day she foals. I'm a deworming minimalist and only go based on what fecals tell me, plus hitting for tapes and encysted strongyles. O has had a clean fecal for almost 2 years now, and while P had strongyles when I got her back from the bad lessee, we eliminated those quickly and she has had clean fecals for almost a year now. 

The plan for P: give her final Prodigy shot on the 15th (which I did), give her full set of shots early to mid-March, and start watching her. 320 days is March 24th (she'll be officially full term at that point). 340 days is April 13th. She could in theory go all the way to May if she really felt like it but I highly doubt she'll make it that far! She is extremely happy at the moment - very comfortable, totally happy in her job of eating and eating some more, and looks great.

So shiny!

80 degrees.... warm, dirty, and sleepy.

Give me a cookie or the gate gets taken down!

Wednesday the 11th:

Today was another conditioning day - slowly ramping it up to 4 trotting miles today. It's easy work for her, and for Training level HDTs/CDEs we don't need to be terribly fit, but I think it is important to break up dressage-type work and be able to trot down the road on a loose rein. She was a lovely girl, and it was a super nice day, warm with a very light breeze and not much happening out on the road (always a good thing).


Thursday the 12th:
I was going to do a dressage day, but I had signed up to trailer to Denton and take a lesson on Saturday, so I decided I needed to do something lighter and then give her Friday off. We opted for another lunge, which was very short and sweet - she was quiet and amicable, which are my two favorite flavors! No need to do any more than a short lunge, if she was perfect.

I decided I like driving enough that I am actually letting the top of her tail grow out instead of pulling it! She has a horrible tail but I am pretty good as disguising it, being the Tailmasta and all.

Friday the 13th:
O had her day off, which was perfect seeing as I worked all day long and didn't get to the barn to feed until dark. I hadn't even cleaned my harness yet for my lesson in the morning! The evening took a turn for the weird when I tried to leave and go home (to have a nice dinner date with Future Hubs for Valentine's Day) and realized my keys were gone. My phone was dead, it was pitch black out, and my keys were not in their usual place - the spot I always put them so that they don't fall out of my pocket and get lost around the barn. A really frantic and fruitless search led me nowhere for two hours - the keys were just NOWHERE to be found. I was almost out of ideas when suddenly it occurred to me that the neighbor's puppy had stolen my driving cones last week and had hidden them in the neighbor's garage. Could it be possible that the puppy had stolen my keys? Turns out, yep.... the puppy had taken my keys, gone all the way back to her house, and hid them in her garage.
Friday the 13th certainly lived up to its reputation.


Saturday the 14th:
Valentine's Day went awfully well if you ask me! I was up early to clean my harness (finally), let the horses eat breakfast and their alf, loaded up the beast, and headed out. O is silent on the trailer and well behaved, but she never touches so much as a mouthful of food when underway, so I try to stuff her full of hay before and after trailer rides, as well as give Ulcergard and Pro CMC if we're going to be away for any period of time. She'd be eaten from mouth to butthole with ulcers if I didn't stay on top of it, I can tell you that much.... so I tend to be pretty overboard with it. Better safe than sorry I figure.
I've spent an awful lot of time trying to make O a solid citizen, as everyone here has seen, but I sometimes still worry that she'll act like a fool whenever we go somewhere new and do something totally different. I've only ever driven her in *her* cart, and at home, aside from the times we went to WD for those fall shows - and she had been to WD a billion times before. This time, we were going to a brand new indoor, using someone else's cart. Would she be a total idiot? Freak out and spook? Kill us all?
Turns out, I didn't need to be worried at all. She walked in like she owned the place, stood placidly in the crossties for tacking, and waited for us while we chatted. G decided to long line her first, just to see where she was (I told him to treat us like rank beginners!). We started with some softening exercises, getting her to yield and drop her head. She picked it up pretty immediately, and would drop her nose right to the ground and stay there, as you can see:

I long lined her for a few minutes, and G has me shorten and lengthen her stride at the walk, as well as place her in several different spots (lengthened out, at the vertical, behind the vertical, bent left, bent right, etc) to help her learn that she is to go out wherever the bit is and stay there. After this, we took her back in the barn, hooked her up, and took her back into the arena. We both took turns driving her, and worked on moving laterally in both directions, spiraling in and out on circles, trying to achieve parking one wheel and getting her to move the cart around it on a pivot. You guys have actually seen me do this a lot, if you've watched any of our videos over the past few months - it was something I guess I was intuitively doing already. I use it almost every drive, especially to the right - she likes to lock up and be stiffer to the right, so I always make sure to spend time parking my right wheel and pivoting around it. I had to laugh when I realized what we were going to be doing to help her be more supple, and told him I already do it a lot, and that it really does help! As it always does, it suppled her up considerably, and before long she was doing lovely little circles in both directions. He had me stop and back her up, which is something I have worked on in the past but stopped doing recently because she was starting to halt and then automatically back up (do not want!!). I had her go back a few steps, and then gave the reins to him so that he could show me how he wanted it to go more efficiently. That was when O decided to show a little more of her um, personality... which I had warned him about when explaining her quirks. She didn't understand his cues (I just taught them differently, so she knows my cues), and he clucked at her a few times. She is CRAZY sensitive to clucks, and then are a go forward cue to her, so when she felt his backwards pressure on the reins but a forward going cluck, she checked out, did the violent headshake, and tries to bull forward away from the pressure. After that, she would not give him one step backwards to save her life - he could have pulled on her til he tore her mouth off and she would not have given him one step.
G looked at me and went "wow, somebody really did a number on her!" You're telling me G... you're telling me.
We moved back off to do some more circles, and O was decidedly more agitated and a bit jiggy. I told him about how this is kind of the way she is - you push her a little bit, then back off and do something simple, and push her a little bit, and back off and do something simple. If she gets too frazzled or upset, which she does sometimes, I always go back to something she understands and chill her out, otherwise you'll just never get anywhere with her. Escalate and de-escalate. He clapped me on the shoulder and told me I was a good smart horsewoman, and that I had the right idea. We finished on a good note, and I definitely have some homework to work on!

They were awesome enough to take me out to lunch, and we had a great time. Back at the barn, G had me jump in the cart to work with him on a really nice Morgan, on a lot of the same principles - lateral work, suppleness, parking the wheel, lengthening and shortening. The Morgan was like driving a little hot rod - SO forward and strong but so fun. We also took him out into the field behind the property, where there were a number of roundbales set up like a cones course. They looked so narrow to me - how in the heck could we even fit through those?? You had to be accurate and you had to get it right. G taught me about driving the water hook of the saddle, which is the part where the overcheck hooks to, if you were to use an overcheck. That is pretty close to the area where your legs would be if they were on either side of your saddle, so he had me think of that as my legs and to steer that part of the horse instead of just the head and neck. (Oh wait duh, you do that in riding too...) If you steer the horse and you put that water hook right in the center of the two cones/roundbales, you'll clear them every time, even on super tight turns where it seems impossible. And he was right... we were flying around that field whipping between the roundbales, clean on every one. I had my go, and even though I brushed a few whisps of hay on a few bales, I was totally surprised to find that I was dead on almost all of the time, even at speed. It was awesome!

The golden loopy swirly hook in the center of the saddle.... yea, drive that part.

It was a great time, and I have another lesson set up in the near future. And have my homework to work on too!


Sunday-Tuesday:
The temps dropped and the rain came in. O had a few well-deserved days off while I worked and froze my tush off. I got off my habit of trying to do one driving-related thing every day, so I am back on that as of today! P got her final Prodigy shot on Sunday.... now the countdown to her full set of shots begins, and then THE BABY COMES!

Pmare, shedding... and sagging. Big time. That's her entire winter coat right there... that's all she ever grows!

Wednesday the 18th:
O got back to work today with a very nice lunge. We did our suppling exercises pre-work like we did with G on Saturday, and I was pleased to find that she retained all of that and immediately complied. I also went ahead and roached her mane again today - this will give her two months to grow a nice new roach in. It was getting sort of out of control, and a roach only really stays nice for about half a year (with regular trimming of course) before it starts to flop around and look stupid. O's was definitely at that point, so off it went. Poor thing looks like a funny looking orange mule, but it will grow back... hopefully sooner than later.

Meet my new mule!

As a bonus, somewhere mid-week last week:
Sometime last week - can't remember which day it was - I was poking my belly and feeling really irritated with the weight I have gained since I moved to TX. I'm not *fat*, not by any means, but I'm not the tiny little stick that I was when I moved here. I realized some time ago that I was drinking a HUGE amount of soda, every day. Like, a ridiculous amount. I was highly addicted and didn't want to stop, because that's how addiction works. Soda isn't exactly heroin or anything, but you get pretty hooked on it and then make up excuses as to why you don't need to quit it. I don't even know what the last straw was, or if there was a last straw, but I decided I just needed to *stop.* So... I did. I just quit soda, cold turkey. I'm not going to lie, I wanted to just flat out die the first day. I think I must have been living in a state of constant dehydration from all the soda though, because I plowed through almost 2 gallons of water the first day, and the second day as well. My body seems to have leveled off a bit, but I probably looked ridiculous as I stood there chugging my 5L giant bottle of water like a camel at an oasis. I was really goddamn thirsty.
Future Hubs says I look thinner already. I don't know about that, but I feel a little bit better. I'm past the hump of craving soda, and have just been drinking water instead. I'm not going to 100% say no to soda forever - like if I go to the movies, I'm getting a giant bucket of popcorn and a big soda, because MOVIES - but I'm not going to slip back into old habits, because I just don't want to. It really is as simple as that, it's just a mind game. I just decided that I don't drink soda anymore, and voila... I don't drink it anymore.

I'm also working heavily on my bad calf, and I think I have some answers. I first thought it was Achilles tendon, but with more experimentation and stretching, I actually think it is more muscle related instead (which is a relief). I think I just limped on this leg for so long that everything in the calf shortened in response. A LOT of stretching has been helpful, but I have to do it every single day, or else I feel it shorten right back up and lose flexibility. Massage and theraplate has helped as well, but not as much as the stretching. I have some KT tape on it today, and I actually think it has alleviated a fair amount of the pain, although it seems to limit my movement a bit. Next up to try: foam rolling, although I feel like that is going to be hella painful.

Damnit though, I want to ride. I want this to be better. So therefore, I'm going to fix it, because I decided so.

Note angry red interior. And Toy Story PJs.

Phew!! I think I am finally caught up!

Tre-inwreck

Good lord. Poor Tre. This little mare can't seem to catch a break.

I did something EXTREMELY STUPID a few days ago, and I am seriously regretting it now. When I first brought Tre home 3 weeks ago, she smelled gross and was slow to eat her food. Part of it was her being picky, but I assumed that she probably had some underlying gastric issues as well. (When horses stand in stalls all the time and are only fed two grain and hay meals a day, they get ulcers. They just do.)

I got her transitioned and to the point where she was snarfing up all her food and supplements, and was gaining weight and doing great. (Our feeding program is centered completely around gastric health, so the more healing supplements she gets into her, the better.) S handed me two dewormers for the girls about three weeks ago, and I hesitated to give Tre one given the fact that she was teetering on the edge of having gastric issues. She finally was eating really well and gaining weigh, so I decided to go ahead and give it a few days ago. What I should have done was to get a fecal and then have a baseline to go off of before just blindly deworming. WHY didn't I do that? How stupid am I? I felt pressured into deworming her right now with the product I was given, and so therefore I did it.

It sent her spiraling into an ulcery tailspin. The next morning, she only ate about half of her food. That evening, she barely ate anything. Yesterday was the same story, except she ate even less in the morning. I dosed her with Ulcergard, and by the evening she ate about 3/4 of her dinner, but picked around the supplements and fat pellets and mostly just stuck to the hay pellets. This morning, she wouldn't eat hardly anything at all, not even hay, and I dosed her with Ulcergard again as well as a few syringes full of aloe. I left her in the small pen with hay and the rest of her breakfast, and it took her about four hours but she did manage to eat everything in her bucket. I'm thinking she may have sneakily spit out some of the Ulcergard though, because this evening she wouldn't eat anything at all... not even plain hay pellets. I got her to pick at some alfalfa, and I gave her another dose of Ulcergard, but I could barely even get her to eat hay. She just stood there looking miserably off into the distance.

Why. WHY did I deworm her. WHY did I do that. WHAT was I thinking.

Hopefully with Ulcergard and a total system reset (no work, no grain, just hay and Ulcergard), I will be able to chill her system out. As a person who has random ulcer flare-ups for no reason, I know all too well just how bad they hurt and how much they suck. Mine are well-controlled with targeted ranitidine, and have been gone for several months now, thankfully... hopefully I can get hers under control soon too. I have a giant tub of ranitidine in my car, so I might be sharing with her for a little while!

Living outside 24/7 with a friend and with free-choice hay is one of the very best things you can do for a horse's gastric system... it really does help just letting them live and eat the way they were designed to. 

Either way, it just sucks, for the both for of us.

Tomorrow, miss O and I trailer out to our first little endurance ride!! I'm feeling completely unprepared, mostly because I've never done this before and don't really know what to expect. It's a whole new sport for me.... the first time is always a bit scary! I REALLY need to stop writing RIGHT NOW and get to bed, or else I will be super exhausted tomorrow.... I can't wait to write about it!

I have been forgiven!

Hooray! I have been forgiven for my deworm-y trespasses. No longer am I the Evil Scary Dewormer Lady... I am now just the regular old Nice Lady that I was before. Last week was a bit of a nightmare, and unless another situation like this arises where I feel like a PowerPac is really needed, I'll be sticking with moxidectin for my encysted strongyle needs. As it stands, the PowerPac did exactly what I needed it to do in this situation.

Following her PowerPac, she went through a few days where she was hard to catch, then when caught she refused to do more than just pick at her grainfoods. Part of this may be due to the fact that she was out of several of her important herbs (note to self: my herb supplier is REALLY SLOW at getting orders to me, so order them sooner than I think I will need them... when I run out, my order will NOT be here in time!) The missing herbs did include the marshmallow root and slippery elm, so potentially her belly was hurting after all the worm die-off and several days worth of chemicals, and she didn't want to eat grainfoods. She is also extremely picky though, and perhaps she just didn't want to eat the foods since they tasted different without her regular herbs. Who knows. Either way, she is now back to completely gobbling down her food, even more so than pre-PowerPac. (This is a huge relief for me... I fret about this like crazy!)

She lost a few pounds in the past week for sure, but will likely gain it back quickly. With luck, our Omeprazole will be in shortly, and we can do a test trial with it to see if it makes a difference for her or not. If it does, great! If it doesn't, then I will have lots of Omeprazole handy to dose her before any sort of major stress or travel. 

It stormed like crazy here last night, so everything is mushy mud, and the mares are both completely encrusted in mud. Immy is enjoying her bit of downtime while her body recoups, and she is back to being her regular old self. 

She was not amused to see the blanket being hauled out AGAIN. It is supposed to be 29 degrees tonight, which is absolutely shocking for nearly mid-March in Texas. I don't even know what to do with myself... this winter has been SO long and rainy and cold and crappy! All the little flowers keep trying to come out, and then they die again because everything keeps refreezing. Ugh!

Winter! Just GO AWAY!

The Great Deworming Debacle

I am pretty sure that deworming a horse who is deathly afraid of dewormers ranks as one of the most horribly unpleasant horse things to do in the history of top-rated unpleasant horse things to do. Seriously, it is right up there with bean-picking, rectal palpation, and scraping foal-heat diarrhea off of baby butts. I'm serious!

Being the neurotic freak that I am about gastric health, it was absolutely guaranteed by the universe that I would end up with a sensitive mare who has probably been gastrointestinally fried for most of her entire life. Longtime readers will remember her huge, swinging, pendulous belly long after she had given birth to the Red Pest, and all along I have been saying that I have suspected ulcers/digestive issues/worms. Here we are a few months later, still trying to perfect the issues - while her last fecals were shown to have only the most trace amounts of strongyles in them (so few that the vet called it a negative fecal), the likelihood of still having encysted strongyles is pretty high. If she does have them, they are likely causing ulcer issues. Deworming can also irritate ulcer issues. What is a girl to do?

Well, fecals will never tell you if your horse has encysted strongyles or not, so much in the way that you still need to hit for tapeworms (which also don't show in fecals), you usually just have to go for the big guns if your horse has suspected issues with encysted creepers. Your two legitimate choices are a Panacur PowerPac, or Quest/Quest Plus. The PowerPac is a huge pain in the butt, a 5-dose pack of megawormers that need to be given once a day for five consecutive days, but it gets all encysted stages of parasites. The Quest does not get Stage 3, but it is only one dose. As I understand it, fenbendazole (PowerPac) is a cousin to omeprazole, the drug used to treat ulcers, and is a slightly milder/safer drug than moxidectin (Quest), and so therefore can be usually given to a somewhat ulcer-prone horse relatively safely. (Or so I hear.... ulcers can be aggravated by pretty much everything in the world, so who knows.) Everywhere you turn, somebody is going to tell you that their horse responded beautifully, or it made their horse horribly ill, or it didn't work, or it was a miracle, or whatever. Sometimes, you just have to go for it and stop listening to what other people have to say about it.

As we all know, Immy is a picky eater. Anything weird in her food, and she won't touch it. If I so much as keep her favorite cookies in my pocket for too long, she thinks they taste like pocket, and won't eat them. (Cookies fresh out of the bag are ok though.) She won't eat apples, carrots, mints, or most types of cookies at all (barring those horrible rock-hard Manna Pro cookies... she loves those!) Getting her to eat nasty things is not a lot of fun. I have had success in the past with mixing a dewormer into her food, but that was before I owned her and she was still on a junky sweet feed. That sugary goodness concealed the taste of the small dewormer, and voila! Down the hatch it went. The last time I dewormed her I had success with the same method, and figured I would shoot for it again this time, seeing as she is SO bad about being dewormed.

Well, so much for that idea! One taste of her dewormer-filled meal and she spit it out and turned up her nose. I convinced her to get about half of it down, and the other half at dinnertime, but she was not happy about it. The next day, I mixed the next tube in with her breakfast, and she refused to touch even one bite. I couldn't even get a bite into her at dinnertime either, so I gave up and decided to just paste her with the next tube. What a horrible nightmare that was... I essentially had to back her up into the corner of a stall and hang on for dear life while she flung dewormer in every direction, getting it all over her face, all over me, all over the walls, and generally everywhere but down her throat. Of course, following this I tied her back out next to her dinner, and came back to find that NOW she was eating it. (She only ate a few bites, but still. Mares.)

Now, of course, I am Scary Dewormer Lady. She did not want to be caught this morning, but I managed to get her so that I could pull her blanket off and offer her up a completely dewormer-free breakfast. She turned her nose up at it, and refused to touch a single bite. Adding insult to injury, she needed her next dewormer tube, so another battle to get it into her ensued. (She was better today, and I got the entire tube in, but no matter how quiet I was about it, she still trembled all over and snorted at me like I was the boogeyman. She is absolutely terrified of dewormers!)


Four tubes down (well, one party consumed...), and only one to go tomorrow. Will we make it through this saga? Is she burning up with ulcers? Am I going to give them to myself as well? Who knows, but I quite imagine that whatever the dewormer is killing in there is making her feel pretty crappy, so she may have a few days off, depending on how she is doing. She is snarfing up her hay like crazy, as usual, which is great... if she starts to turn her nose up at that I am going to kill myself. Either way, despite ALL that I have done for her gut health, I am probably faced with an upcoming ulcer treatment.  I know she's a picky eater, and I know she's a nervous personality, but... I can't not fret about it. I've never had a picky horse who turned away from food before, I can't NOT think ulcers automatically!

Our trial of blue pop rocks is ordered, so now I just have to wait for them to get here... in the meantime, there is UlcerGard to get us through. In terms of other supplements aside from all of the herbs and calming things that we have tried or she is currently on, she is already on EquiShure but someone suggested that I should try RiteTrac or Egusin... has anyone used these? They are not cheap, so any input would be appreciated! I definitely think the EquiShure has helped, but it isn't enough.


The girls getting ready for a ponied trailventure the other night:

And out on the trail:

Immy had to cross a few creeks, splash through mud puddles, and trot alongside P for quite a long ways. She was SO GOOD! (She jumped most of the water crossings instead of just going through then, but she got over them! It's a great start!)

So in reality, it isn't all bad... it is just very, very hard to get all the puzzle pieces to come together properly. We'll get there!!

And..... she's still here

Well.... Immy is still at the main farm, with no word from the owners about when she is going back at ALL. We have no idea why or what is going on. I thought for sure she would have been sent back to the ET facility and would have become mine a month ago, but apparently not. The only thing we heard from Elvis' owners was that Elvis was going to leave our farm last week and move to a new one. Well that didn't happen either... we heard no more about it after that, and Elvis is still here too.

So basically.... I still have no idea when she is going to be mine. She still will be.... I just have no idea when.

Does she not have THE most beautiful face ever? Maybe I'm biased, but that gorgeous eye makes me melt every time I look at her.

By the way, how about that vanishing belly and improving topline? She isn't in work yet, since she is still at the work farm, but she is now turned out in a pasture that has a roundbale at the bottom of a hill, and a water trough at the top. She has to walk back and forth up and down the 4 acre hill all day in order to get food and water. It is definitely helping!!

The plan for her (if she doesn't go back anytime in the immediate future) is this: start playing in the roundpen this week, doing bits of groundwork and leading as well as introducing the idea of lunging. She has a few basics under her belt, but not many. When I first started to work with her, she didn't know (or couldn't deal with) anything at all, not even being haltered. While she was pregnant, we managed to add all these things to the master list of stuff she knows:

Stuff Imogen Knows How To Do:

- Halter

- Lead 

- "Tie" (not hard tie)

- Crosstie

- Pick up all four feet & stand on the hoof stand for trims

- Shots & deworming (with only minimal fuss)

- Stand for sprays

- Stand for grooming & touching of all parts, ears & legs & belly included

- Blanketing (mostly)

- Flymask

- Baths (including water on her face)

- Catch in the field

Stuff Imogen Doesn't Know How To Do:

- Everything else

Considering that the majority of stuff that we worked on was done in the three months I worked with her before she had the Red Pest, I think that's a pretty good start. From here, we continue working on general handling and leading, and introduce the idea of lunging and moving away (and yielding to) pressure. Despite her timidness, she is a very quick study, so care needs to be taken that things get introduced properly the first time around. She is definitely one of the smartest little mares I've ever met in my life. 

And, of course, one of the cutest...

Deworming Crisis, Averted!

Some of you will remember that Imogen (yes, her official new name!) previously had a dewormer-phobia-itis. She was terrified of having things shoved forcefully into her mouth (and who can blame her), and I spent some failed time trying to reestablish some trust by giving her syringes with molasses in them. That did not particularly go over well, and the last thing I wanted to do was frighten or upset her. I left the issue alone until now, when it was time to be dewormed again. When she is mine (why she is still at the work farm is beyond me! Come on people!), we will obviously be doing fecals and whatnot... but this will have to do for now. To be honest, I was not all that keen on getting into a fight with her, so I broke down my options into a series of start goals and end goals:

1) Pick up tube of dewormer
2) Get dewormer into mouth of horse
3) Horse swallows dewormer

It boiled down to a very duh moment - all I have to do is get the dewormer into her system, right? Into her mouth somehow, right? Oh duh... instead of terrifying her with the syringe, why not just mix it into her breakfast?

I made up grains, added dewormer to hers, mixed it in with lots of water and stirred exceedingly well. Then I held my breath to see if she would actually eat it or not.

She licked her bucket clean. Not one bit of the dewormer went to waste... and it would have had I administered it directly into her mouth. She would have spit half of it back into my face like a Jurassic Park style Dilophosaurus.

Sometimes all it takes is a little critical thinking to figure out a solution to a potentially big issue. Crisis averted, and end result achieved. Everybody wins.

Playing Catch-Up, and Quincy

(This is partially crossposted to the Pangea blog! Sorry for the overlap!)
Sorry for my brief absence - I've been out of state at a practicum for a few days and have been insanely busy in the meantime! I didn't even have time to say I was leaving! I made it back all in one piece thankfully, armed with ever-increasing knowledge and a desire to get under even more horses. (I'm glad you all are horse people, because upon reading that sentence for a second time, it could be taken horribly the wrong way.)

The one thing I never even got a chance to mention before I headed frantically off for my journey was Quincy's day. May 3rd marked the 8-year anniversary of his death, and at this point it seems like such a sad, distant memory. He's been gone for so long... sometimes it feels like just yesterday, sometimes it feels like an eternity. Take a little time to go and honor his memory, if you like reading about Pangea, Gogo, and Bay Girl. I wouldn't be here without his love, and neither would any of them.

Tributes to Quincy

I miss you, Fuzzman. Every day, and I always will.







In Bay Girl news, we are up to $686!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The response so far has been completely overwhelming, and I can't thank you guys enough. You guys are THE BEST. THE ABSOLUTE BEST.

Today was deworming day for the entire farm. I long ago strayed away from this practice with my own horse, but the farm horses are still on a rotational program, so first thing in the morning I nailed everyone with their dewormer. If you remember, Bay Girl once had a violent opposition to being dewormed, but today? She stood quietly and let me do it!! I can't hardly believe it... who is this mare and what has she done with Bay Girl??

I also tried at the end of the day to give her a different kind of cookie, a flavor I haven't tried before. I've only just started to get her to accept those rock-hard Manna-Pro cookies (which was what happened to be laying around at the time), but other cookies? With one suspicious sniff, she said no.






Oh well. We'll keep trying.


Now, since all of you have been so amazingly awesome and helpful, I figure you guys should choose what Bay Girl and I work on next! We're essentially stuck working out in the pasture until her colt is weaned, and he is a total pest to work around. (He got an elbow in the esophagus today when he tried to mount me.... colts.) Here are the things Bay Girl knows how to do at this point:

- Catch
- Halter, but needs work
- Be sprayed down from a spray bottle
- Stand for brushing
- Feet handling
- Fly mask
- Lead and back away from pressure, but needs refinement
- Deworming
- Crossties and standing tied, mostly


Things Bay Girl doesn't know how to do:

- Everything else


We're pretty much starting from complete scratch on everything, but that's all right. Remember that we started out with a mare that wouldn't even come near people at all, so the fact that we've gotten this far is astounding!

My basic list of things to work on is something along these lines: introduction to clippers, practice haltering, more refinement of groundwork and leading, backing, etc., and more of this type of stuff. So readers, what would YOU work on with a mare who is limited to pasture-only work, and who has an obnoxious little colt at her side? Let your imaginations run wild!

The Great Molasses Caper (Or, How My Master Plan Was Foiled)

The funniest part about the story of the Great Molasses Caper is that it has absolutely nothing to do with Bay Girl at all. I was foiled completely by my own inability to remember small unimportant details, like where I set my jar of molasses down for the evening.

Hmmm, where should I put this sticky jar? I asked myself as I parked the golf cart for the evening. The oozing molasses had managed to come burbling over the top of the jar while I was dosing out a syringe for Bay Girl's latest come-to-deworming-Jesus meeting, and I felt that leaving a sticky, gooey mess in the cart for someone to step in/sit on/otherwise get stuck in was probably not a good idea. It was late in the evening, I had places to be that night, and I opted to just toss it into the nearest empty stall's feed bucket for the night. No biggie, I thought, I'll just grab that tomorrow and find a better place for it. No harm will come to it there.

Fast forward to the following morning. I was pulling horses up out of their pastures and into stalls so that they could be close at hand for their daily treadmilling when my boss asked if I could bring her little Mustang up for her. No problem, I said, and headed off to get the chubby little guy, taking less than 3 seconds to consider where I'd put him for her. Aaah, right here, I thought to myself as I stopped in front of the stall closest to where the golf cart was regularly parked. He'll be easy to access for her if he's right there waiting! Sorry there's nothing to eat in there old chap, you'll just have to wait until later! With these parting words, I headed off to get the next horse, blissfully unaware of what was about to unfold in the barn behind me.

When I walked back into the barn, all I could hear was Chip bashing his feed bucket around. Huh, that's weird, I thought to myself. There's no food in there, why is he playing with his bucket? It took me probably the better part of a minute to connect the dots and turn back around with a look of horror on my face. The molasses! How could I have forgotten! There's a WHOLE jar in there... but it's sealed, right? No biggie, right?

Wrong! Did you know Mustangs can open tightly sealed jars? I didn't either, but apparently Chip's prehensile flappers managed to pop open the lid with a single crunch, effectively splattering sticky, dark, gooey, smelly molasses ALL over everything in the stall. In the feed bucket. On the floor. All over his face. On the walls. Everywhere. I gaped in horror as he lifted his stained muzzle up from the bucket, white blaze covered in brown goo. He had a show to go to that morning! It was EVERYWHERE!


Lucky, I managed to get him mostly cleaned up and out the door in an appropriate amount of time. The jar of molasses and the mashed up syringe did not fare quite as well as he did, I'm afraid. They were both given a proper garbage bin burial post-eating, like proper barn items deserve.


I'm going to take this as a sign that the powers that be do not recommend we continue to attempt the molasses thing.

Dewormer-Phobia-Itis

For everyone complaining about their horrible winter weather, snowstorms, ice, and subzero temperatures, I'd just like to take this moment and say that it is currently a lovely and sunny 75 degrees outside, and it will be 80 tomorrow. I know I'll hate my life come summertime, but as for today? January is awesome.

In this week's episode of I-Hope-I-Am-Doing-This-Right, we have come to the crux of Bay Girl's problems: deworming. As far as I can tell, the base of her headshyness, uncatchability, and general distrust of humans stems from the fact that prior to her time with me, she's only been caught and handled so that extremely unpleasant things could be done to her (palpations, shots, dewormings, etc). Therefore, whenever anyone went to grab her catch halter, she freaked. And while she now is caught easily, loves to have her face rubbed, and is more than willing for me to walk up and grab her halter at will, we've still not gotten to the actual base of the issue here.... deworming. She is still absolutely horrible about it, and when she sees you coming with the syringe... good luck if you can catch her. And if you CAN catch her, good luck getting it in her mouth! Copious amounts of rapid backing, head flinging, and general panic are the norm for this magical time of month. It's not a lot of fun.

We can't avoid this issue forever. So it's time to push the envelope a little bit and see if we can't get her to at least stand for and and accept getting pasted, even if she doesn't really enjoy it all that much.

Here's what the plan involves: one large tipped 60cc syringe, one jar of molasses, and one Bay Girl. Oh, and one pen for containment purposes. Because this plan would implode out in the open anywhere.

The operation? First, get this:



And do this:



And then syringe this deliciousness into the mouth of this:




Sounds easy, right?
(And healthy.... have fun with this one, insulin! Sorry about the sugar assault! Barefoot practitioners everywhere are gritting their teeth and pulling out their hair, but a girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do!)

And.... it's so not easy. I'm not going to say it went POORLY, but it wasn't the amazing magical lightbulb that I was hoping it would be. She's been such a dang genious for everything else I've done.... and the second time wasn't much better, to be honest.

I showed her the syringe dipped in molasss, and she sniffed it curiously, getting a bit on her mouth in the process. She licked it off in surprise, making "um that tastes weird" faces the entire time. I opted for molasses seeing as the ONLY thing she'll eat as a treat is a handful of sweet feed, so as was pointed out in my treats post, she is familiar with the taste and clearly must enjoy it. Or so I thought... I'm not so convinced anymore that she does!

When she realized what I was about to do, the head-tossing, flailing, and rapid backing began. Luckily, she was in her 10x10 feeding pen (all the mares are separated during feed time so they all can get their individual feeds without fuss from the other herd members), so she didn't really have anywhere to go. Once I managed to get the syringe into her mouth (by some small miracle), she stopped moving abruptly and made confused faces at the taste. I then released her off into the evening, and she wandered nonchalantly away still making the yuck-in-my-mouth face. This morning after breakfast, I did the same thing again, and the same routine of backing and head-slinging ensued. She was more than happy to walk right up to me again pre-breakfast, but she may change her mind about that if she doesn't enjoy getting some tasty molasses in her mouth. This could go either way... either she relaxes about it and enjoys her tasty little treat (and hopefully looks forward to the syringe for the most part), or she decides that this is a bunch of crap and she wants nothing to do with any of it. Obviously the former is what we're shooting for here.

I had planned on doing this every day, once a day after mealtimes, until she gets used to the routine and takes it quietly... but I'm not so sure that I really want to do that until she starts to be quiet about it. If all she associates me with is that nasty molasses crap being forced down her throat, she's not going to want to come spend any more time with me. I'll give it a few more random times to see if she quiets about it, and then we'll reassess and go from there. The last thing I want to do is go backwards in any way.... we've come so far already!


(I also have considered dipping the molasses-covered syringe into the sweet feed as an extra candy-coated treat. Then again, I'm not really keen on calling the owners to tell them their foal and the mare died of colic from swallowing a giant piece of crunched-on plastic syringe. It remains to be seen if I dive that far into the realm of crazy and give that a go or not.)