Welcome Dylan!!!

Dylan the Man arrived today safe and sound! He was a little behind schedule - mid-afternoon instead of mid-morning - but the fact that the shipper got him here today was the main thing. Approvals is tomorrow, and nobody was going to be here to receive him if he showed up tomorrow!

He unloaded fine, and did a manly prance and holler, but that was about the worst of his behavior, and once I told him to put four on the floor he quit. He has no access to my mares but he can see them, and he of course has been spending a lot of time in that corner of the pasture talking to them. None of the mares are remotely interested in him, which is just great for his ego. I'm thankful that none of my girls are troublemakers - the less they pay attention to him, the better. 

He is a bit on the thin side right now, and he definitely needs to fill out. He is also a terrible fencewalker, something that K said started sometime after they moved to SC. He is currently alternating between grabbing some bites out of his haybag, and walking back and forth in his corner. We'll be doing some adjustments - he's changing over from stall/paddock life to turnout 24/7, and he is also changing from grain (TC Senior) to my usual hay pellets/Healthy Glo/vitamin mineral supplement. Removing the hard grains, providing free choice hay, and letting horses be out all the time had really made a huge difference for my herd. Darby is my good current example - she's in her 30's but you almost can't tell her apart from O!

I may not be good at many things, but making horses slick and happy is one of them. And Dylan is my next target!

The Shine

EDITED TO ADD: I went around and looked at 7 of the red horses that live at the farm I was at this morning. ALL of them have that weird yucky retained hair! Most of the bays were largely shed out, but several of the greys had retained hair too. It HAS to be something environmental.

It is no secret that I pride myself on the freakish level of shine that my horses have.

I mean come on. That is some SHINE right there. That is intense.

But unfortunately, and very suddenly, O has lost her freakish shine. She is now kind of a normal horse shine, which to me is a) completely unacceptable and b) indicative that something is wrong. She also has quite a lot of hairs doing that wonky curl/fishhook thing, which is alarming. Usually that is a sign of either parasites or a copper deficiency. Since her vit/min supplement should in theory have the copper covered, we are probably looking at something else.

I have some theories on what it might be.

1) We had some WEIRD weather this spring. 

O's winter coat looked great - I recently talked about how shiny and gleaming she was. She started to shed out in March, and in theory should be long done by now, but she is not. She is hanging on to a lot of curling, yucky old hairs that are standing up and giving her more of the crushed velvet appearance rather than the sleek summer appearance that I would have expected by now. After she had started to shed out, we had a few hard freezes and cold days (after having lots of 90 degree days in a row), and she was left shivering and shell-shocked a few times. This possibly should have freaked her system out and caused her coat to retain... maybe? Hard to say. She is definitely still shedding, slowly but surely, so her coat is by no means fully shed out. Underneath it, I see lots of gleam, but there is a lot of crud still hanging on.

2) The mares are completely off alfalfa for the first time in a long time.

Last year, all through the year, the mares got a 1/2 flake to full flake of alfalfa before meals, along with their freechoice grass hay. They were all gorgeous and shiny. In the late fall, our usual supply of timothy ran out, and we instead got bales that were timothy/alfalfa. They were SUPER full of alfalfa, so much so that we stopped giving actual straight alfalfa. We fed that for awhile, and then our supplier ran out of it again, as well as regular timothy. We actually had to switch to a completely different supplier altogether, and the horses are now on (and have been on) straight timothy with no alfalfa at all. The alfalfa really gives them that extra bloom, and is a bonus to feed right before workouts, so I'll definitely be putting both the girls back on it as per their usual (1/2 flake to full flake before mealtimes, in addition to freechoice timothy).

3) Parasite problems.

When P came back I did a fecal and deworming before she even set foot on the property. She had a small worm load, and she was dewormed again and cleared. O was dewormed as well at the same time, but I haven't done a recent fecal on her. She very well could have picked up any leftover parasites that P had shed. (That typical 'fishhook' type curl that some of her hairs have always makes me think of parasites.) We'll do a fecal and see what we have going on for sure.

4) She has had on and off tummy issues throughout the winter. 

After her first LD when she wasn't quite gastrically right, I went into gut health overkill with her. She had that certain personality that invites an ulcery system, so I'm really, REALLY careful with what I give her and what I do with her. While I think I have everything covered in every different direction, she very well could have some leaky gut issues that are affecting her nutrient uptake. I don't *think* so, but it could be. It is something to keep in the back of my mind for sure.

We'll get it figured out. It's always something, isn't it? HORSES!

Trace the Trails 11/9/13

Endurance riders are really onto something. I had SO MUCH FUN yesterday at our little Intro ride! If it is possible, O had even more fun than I did. Maybe we found her true calling!

As with all good days, the beginning always seems to start out crappy.Yesterday morning didn't exactly go as planned, as usual. I had forgotten to take in my spare trailer tire to the store to have it repaired (flat with a nail in it), so I was worried about that and didn't sleep particularly well. My alarm went off at 3AM, and I managed to drag my sorry carcass up and out of bed. Somehow I got myself going despite being exhausted, and managed to get out the door by 3:45AM. I had originally wanted to spend the night at the ride, but there were some problems with that idea. Firstly, I don't have a hi-tie or a portable paddock system to bring to camp, and therefore I would have to tie her to the trailer all night. She ties well, so that is doable, but that really would suck for her and I really didn't want to do it. Second, I didn't have anyone to feed the horses at home, since S is gone. That is a bit non-negotiable - the horses obviously need to be fed - so I opted to just come in the morning. The Intro riders were not going out until 9am, versus everyone else at 7AM, so I had time to get there. Still, it meant I had to be up and out the door by 3:45AM so that I could feed and unblanket everybody, as well as hook up the trailer and make sure all was well. We managed to leave the property by around 5:15AM, and I spent the next two hours trying desperately to find SOMEWHERE that would serve me some hot breakfast. I also had to stop the rig about a thousand times due to the fact that O kept repeatedly opening her escape door. She figured out how to knock against it hard enough to pop it open, and how to pull the level as well. I tried locking it from the outside, but unfortunately she can still open it from the inside. The key to the bolt was lost many moons ago, and I am loathe to bolt it from the inside since I can't open it from the outside - if we were in a wreck, I couldn't get to her. Therefore, we just kept pulling over and pulling over and pulling over to shut the door and shut it again. Someday I will have a second bolt installed... someday. 

Oh yeah, and did I mention my running lights have been on the fritz? We thought they were fixed, but apparently they are not.... they randomly sputtered out partway there, and I had no more lights to the trailer. Brakes and signals were working, thankfully, but with no actual lights otherwise... that's no good. I traveled most of the way there with my hazards on (which are also working), just to give some light to the trailer. 

By the time I actually got my breakfast, I was pretty ticked off. I just wanted to get there already!

Thankfully, when I got to the ride, all of that crankiness vanished. The folks greeting me at the gate were super helpful and friendly, and gave me directions and pointers for what I needed to be doing for ride prep. I unloaded, got my vet card and number, and took O over to the vet check. She checked out with all A's, and we went back to saddle up and head out. I opted to ride in the barrel saddle, hackamore, and - OH GOD! - JEANS. I had originally decided to ride in the dressage saddle, but I've been having such a hard time with my tall boots and my calf pain that I decided I better not do it after all. I can trot for pretty much forever in the barrel saddle without pain, so I figured that was a better option. Jeans and my roper boots are perfectly comfortable and don't rub or chafe me anywhere, so I stuck with those, as unorthodox as it looked. The Intro riders were told to go on the 9 mile Orange trail loop, and then could add on the 6 mile White loop if we felt so inclined. I spent a few minutes chatting with a couple of Intro riders in front of me who had done a million Intro rides before, but it didn't take long before I wanted to get moving. I said my goodbyes and trotted off, figured that she would be good but probably a bit green, possibly herdbound, and maybe a little spooky.

She was none of those things. She did spook once or twice, sort of, at some funny looking logs (and at the finish line... apparently it was very scary!), but she didn't care that we left the other horses behind. She didn't care when there were horses passing going the other way, or when she saw horses on other trails through the trees. She just got right to it and trotted along on a loopy rein. She was super smart about her footing, and actually put her head down and looked at all footing challenges, always picking the correct answer (go over/go around/slow down) with minimal assistance from me. When the trails opened up, she picked up the pace of her own accord, and when they got rough, she slowed down and found her way through, picking up again when they got better. All I had to do was post and look at all the pretty scenery. I never had to leg her on, slow her down, or do much more than steer and occasionally say, "hey you might want to slow down, there's a log there." She trotted along, ears pricked, very interested in her surroundings and happy to follow the trail on autopilot at speed. I literally did nothing but sit there for 98% of the ride... I didn't have to do any work at all! 

Horrible pictures... sorry about that. I was too busy ooing and aahing at everything to stop and take photos! The fall colors are in peak season down here right now, and while they are not New England colors by any means, they are REALLY great this year for Texas. There was one moment where we passed under a huge tree with neon pink leaves - I swear! - and between all the leaves underneath us and the leaves still on the tree, it felt like we were passing through a gleaming neon tunnel. It was really cool. 

She rode REALLY well in the hackamore! I'm so glad I tried a second one - she loves it and I have control should I ever need it. I need to punch some holes in the headstall and raise it up a few spots, but it's not bad where it currently is. She ate really well along the ride, happy to stuff her gob whenever we stopped. She did not, however, drink ANYTHING the whole way. She dipped her nose in a few of the tanks, but never really drank seriously. That was frustrating for me, but there was nothing I could do about it except have her eat some grass and just move on. (When she got home, she glugged down a ton of water, so I know she was thirsty when we were there. I have some samples of Equine Aid that SheMovedToTexas sent to me and which I hadn't had a chance to try until now.... you bet I'll be cracking those out soon! A friendly passer-by also shared the idea of Hydration Hay. O can be picky about some things, but for the most part she is an oinker, so I bet if I made soup out of her hay pellets she would slurp that up just fine as well.) 

We finished our 9 mile loop on the Orange trail still raring to go, so we headed out for the second 6 mile loop still chugging away. We stopped and dawdled around at each water stop, and I dismounted and let her graze each time. I got turned around a few times on the trails, but was quick to realize my mistakes, and was able to correct them all within short order. The trails were really nice, very sandy and soft, mostly all through the woods with a few wide open pastures to motor on through. She did the ride barefoot, and did just fine - if the trails get worse she will need to be booted for sure, but this one was no problem. She vetted out with all A's and one B for gut sounds (probably due to no drinking). We were grazing when the first vet called us over to check her HR before we went to the trot-out vet - her resting HR was 13bpm. I had to ask the vet twice because I thought I misheard him. 13 is INSANELY LOW. The girl is fit!

It makes me think about just how far she has come in six months... when I first got her, she had probably not been ridden outside of an arena much, and our first few rides were more or less just trying to stay upright on her back. She spooked at everything, had no steering or brakes, and tripped over every little indent in the ground because she hadn't had to worry about her footing before. Without decent steering, she went crashing through uncountable numbers of cactus and brier patches - I couldn't turn her well enough to get around them, and she didn't know what they were, so there were many post-ride cactus thorn removing sessions! I also couldn't ride her alone without her totally melting down. It was a nightmare!

Many, many, many miles of trails later, she is very thoughtful about her footing and is careful to assess situations by herself. She knows how to pick her way around and over things, and can adjust herself to the terrain around her. Water, mud, and other weird obstacles don't bother her. Other horses coming and going don't bother her. Just getting out there and letting her learn how to deal with these things has made her a spectacular trail horse. The fact that she is happiest cruising along at a big fast trot to infinity makes endurance a natural thing for her. 

You can bet we'll be doing this again. I am a trail riding junkie to begin with - who doesn't love to be out enjoying the beauty of nature? And to be able to do it fast? Even better!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I'm also happy to report that Tre seems to already be doing better. I didn't give her any Ulcergard yesterday, I just loaded her bags full of hay before I left and hung her bucket of hay pellets out for her to munch on as she saw fit. When I came home, she had finished all of the pellets and was munching hay. I'm under the impression that she ran around for awhile after we left, as she had dried sweatmarks on her neck. For dinner, I gave her more pellets soaked in aloe juice, and she munched them all up happily. Today she gobbled up a larger portion of breakfast (she ate it all, supplements included. It was about 3/4 the size of her normal breakfast). Here's hoping we get things sorted out within short order!

A few of you also asked about her feet and what I feed, so I thought I'd post a few photos and give a description of my feeding program. Here is what Tre is doing/eating:

• 24/7 turnout with a friend
• 24/7 free-choice slow-fed hay in various spots around her paddock, so she moves from bag to bag to eat
• Hay is very good quality timothy and orchard, with a bit of alfalfa - we have to have it trucked in from Washington and Oregon because down here all we get is crappy coastal!
• "Grain" meals are timothy/alfalfa hay pellets and Healthy Glo fat nuggets measured by weight, which varies for each horse - the horses don't eat a commercial grain product. They eat "grain" twice a day, and always have hay in their bellies before they eat it. They also always have hay in them before they go to work!
• Supplements: Equine Challenge Grass Formula Vitamin/Mineral supplement, raspberry leaf, chia, rosehips, tumeric, lecithin, l-glutamine, Equine-Zyme Plus (pre/probiotic), magnesium, Cosequin, spirulina. Top dressed with aloe juice to make it all stick together. It sounds like an awful lot of crap, and it is, but you've seen how muscular and shiny and healthy O is. It's not for nothing that she is rippling with muscle, gleaming with shine, and finishing super long rides with a bounce still in her step and no soundness or health issues at all. 

O-nald Shwarzen-mare. No juicing required!

As for Tre's feet, they are really going to be nice when they get fully transitioned. She was shod when I got her up front, and was bare behind. She was due and it was showing. Shoes came off, edges of the fronts were lightly rolled to keep any serious ravel at bay, hinds were trimmed, and off she went, looking better with them off than with them on. It doesn't always go that smoothly - it was really nice to see her go back into her turnout and take off bucking and running, looking like a million bucks. 

As with every de-shoeing, the feet go through some really awesome and fantastic changes almost immediately. Here are some solar shots for comparison, the first being in shoes, the second being a few days out of shoes, and the third being this morning:

Remember, this is without being trimmed! She did this all by herself, just with work and with turnout (full of rocks and bushes and things to walk around).

And a side shot, as a 3-week comparison:

Again, that foot was not trimmed! 3 weeks and the nail holes are already gone, and the entire length of the foot has shortened significantly. She has created her own mustang roll - check out the bevel and the concavity in the oblique shot. Over time, the toe will continue to shorten, and the back of the foot will strengthen. 

To say I'm pleased with this progress is a total understatement! I can't wait to see where she is a few months from now! 

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!

Getting Ready

While we all brainstorm and try to figure out a good name for the new Pangea blog (can't really make a new blog without a name), I'll keep posting here on Bay Girl's blog until a name comes to me. Keep sending suggestions!

There is a lot to be done when it comes to getting a new horse! Ordering supplements, picking up feed and hay, signing documents, making sure everyone is on the same page... yikes! And this time, I'm doing things a little bit differently than I have in the past when it comes to feeding. Feeding horses is part science and part artwork... you can calculate all the formulas you want, crunch every number you can think of, and still get it all wrong. There are factors you can't control, such as the mineral content of your water supply, the health of the soil your hay was grown on (unless of course, you grow your own hay), and your own horse's particular digestive process. It gets a bit overwhelming, eh?

I had particularly good luck with Gogo's feeding schedule. It worked great for her, with one notable exception: she always has the tiniest, tiniest bit of white line separation despite her strong, beautiful, sound, healthy feet. Years into feeding her, I finally figured it out: she had a soy sensitivity, attributed to the soy in her ration balancer. That was the only thing we could attribute to the soy... the rest of her looked fantastic:




First picture was taken late in the fall, the second was of her shiny shiny shiny springtime dapples.

She was fed Buckeye's Gro N' Win ration balancer (in varying amounts, somewhere between 1 and 2.5 lbs a day), more or less free-choice timothy/orchard (fed between 6 and 10 times a day), ground flax, and Cosequin ASU (and a few other supplements, but none that I liked enough to stick with). I liked that protocol, except for her particular soy sensitivity, and would use it again.

However, this time around I thought I would try things a bit differently. The hay I am feeding is a mix: there are bales of tim/brome/orchard/alf, and bales of straight timothy. The four-way grass mix is very, very nice, with lots of beautiful soft leaf and color. The tim is a bit more mature with more stalks and seed heads, and will be used more as chew time versus the four-way mix. Both of my suppliers stock hay from the same location year-round, so there will be a fair bit of consistency. Local hay is very hard to get right now due to last year's drought, and all hay grown in the area is coastal. I'm not interested in feeding coastal, so I went for the colder-weather hays brought in from up north. Just about any hay supplied to the area right now is trucked in from outside locations, so it doesn't make all that much of a difference in price.

I'm also not feeding grain. In my area, there seems to be a lot of local emphasis on large grain meals and hay only fed twice a day, which is a recipe for starch overload, ulcers, boredom-induced bad behavior, colic, laminitis, general malaise... the list goes on. There is a general misconception that hay doesn't provide any nutrients for some reason, that only grain can do that... I've heard people say it! (*facepalm!*) I personally am all about supplying my horses with the large majority of their energy and nutrients from their hay, and supplementing with a good vitamin/mineral supplement and possible fat if extra calories are needed. Pangea, being at this moment in time rather sedentary (i.e. not in work), will get the majority of her nutrients through high-quality forage, and be supplemented with a quality vitamin/mineral supplement that is specifically balanced for these particular types of forages. It has a base of flax, added and balanced amino acids, and several strains of viable good bacteria as a probiotic. For her level of work, this and her hay should in theory supply her with everything she needs. We'll see how it works!

She'll also be on Cosequin ASU, and my good old favorite, aloe juice. Instead of a pelleted grain, the carrier for all these supplements will be a small amount of sun-cured timothy hay pellets, just enough to wash everything properly down. I wanted to use molasses-free beet pulp as my carrier, but you have NO idea how hard that is to find around here... not to mention the question of whether or not that would be too much of a hassle for barn staff.

The major flaw in the design of all of this is the feeding schedule at the barn. As is the norm around here, hay is only feed 2x a day, once in the AM and once in the PM. Well that's not gonna fly for me! Horses are browsing grazers, designed to take in small amounts of forage throughout the day, and when their digestive system sits empty all sorts of foul things can happen. I'm not keen to let that happen, so I decided to look into a slow feeder. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, a slow hay feeder allows the horse to eat a controlled amount of hay in a slow trickle fashion, versus just gobbling down their portion and then have nothing to do with the rest of their day.

There is only one problem with slow feeders. They are MAD expensive. Like, several hundred dollars for a feeder. Well, there had be a cheaper option, yeah?

I did some more research, and I found a picture online of this homemade hay feeder. A much better idea! But I could do even better.

Voila:




A garbage bin, an old basketball net, and... that's it! All you do is fasten it to the fence, lift off the lid at mealtimes, and dump in the (fluffed up) hay. Maresie does the rest!

Cost? About $18. If I had used an old haynet or a recycled garbage bin or barrel, it would have been even cheaper.

It was super, super easy to make... all I did was punch holes in the bin and tie the net on, then tie the bottom of the net closed. It's a pretty tough net, but if she chews through it, I will use a tougher small mesh hay net instead.

We'll see how well it ends up working!

(More on slow feeders here if you are interested!)


SHE ARRIVES TOMORROW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Keep those blog name suggestions coming!