She also did the yearly ritual of sedating Rags so she can float his teeth and check a lesion on his sheath. He has had the lesion for years now, without any changes, and the yearly sedation ensures that it isn’t doing anything nasty where we can’t see. As usual, Rags made a pretty good attempt at cow-kicking her despite heavy sedation while she cleaned his sheath. She also said his eyes look good. Since he is the most common breed (Appaloosa) in the most common state (Colorado) for getting sun caused cancers, and won’t wear a fly mask, this was good news.

Magic, the mare I board, was well-behaved and the vet commented on how fat she is for a 28 year old mare. I couldn’t believe she was 28 when I started to do the mental math, but a group of us who were around when her owner bought her agreed that she was close to 12 when she was bought 16 or 17 years ago.

The visit from the vet also led to my yearly ritual of checking my horse medications. I suppose it is a good thing that they expire before I use them, since it means the horses are doing well, but I still have a bit of a twinge when I have to discard them. Despite the cost, I always try to keep the two most commonly used pain-killers on hand.

June 01, 2008 – Click on image for higher resolution version.

March 22, 2008 – Click on image for higher resolution version.

Taken on March 22, 2008.

It may be cheating to say we live in the Rockies, but without a doubt, the Rockies start less than a mile to the west of us.

However, she takes Wednesday as her day off, and asked me if I wanted to go out. Lily had been a little too enthusiastic on Tuesday, since I hadn’t been riding her enough last week due to the heat, but had chilled out again today, so I agreed to a 20 minute trail ride and worked for a while in the arena while my trainer got Havoc ready. Havoc is her 22 year old Thoroughbred and former show hunter. He looks like an old dude horse on the trail most of the time these days, except when he doesn’t. My trainer would probably let me trail ride Havoc if I asked her, but I haven’t ever quite gotten up the nerve to do so. I’ve seen Havoc forget his age and do airs above the ground too many times over the past decade. If I want to trail ride a Thoroughbred, I’ve got Hap.

Lily at six is a better trail horse than Hap was at sixteen. It must be all those quarter horse genes: she is just so sensible about it all. She strolls along calmly looking around at everything, but rarely worried by anything. Hap used to walk along looking for the next thing to be spooked by. On one extremely calm day, he couldn’t find any of his normal triggers. He finally spooked at butterfly drifting up from a bush.

Our 20 minute stretched into much longer because we stopped to let the horses graze occasionally. A lot of people won’t let their horses eat with a bit in their mouth, but I have never known a horse to have trouble choking. Horses that would rather graze than move can be a problem, so I am very clear about when grazing is permitted and when it is not. For horses on dry lot, it is nice to let them get out and graze on “wild grasses” even if they get plenty of good hay.

We did a few little training exercises while we were out. We worked on walking through ditches, which doesn’t sound very exciting. Lily is good about this: I am the one who needs help. While working on crossing ditches not long after I got Hap, he bucked me off and sprained my ankle. I’ve been paranoid about ditches ever since, and not just on Hap. The basic rule for ditches is that when walking, the horse must walk down and walk up, with no scrambling or breaking into a faster gait. When Lily gets to the top of the opposite side of the ditch, she gets a click and a treat if she stayed in a balanced walk throughout.

On the way back, we had another unscheduled training session when Lily abruptly dodged left, almost going into Havoc’s right shoulder. I realized that she had avoided stepping into a slightly damp stretch of darker soil on the path. I asked my trainer if we had time to work on it, and she thought it was a great opportunity for me to learn to direct Lily where she didn’t want to go, and for Lily to learn that she could trust me not to direct her into danger. At first, I couldn’t get Lily to go to the end of the patch, so we started by crossing one end where it was narrow at a ninety degree angle.

Each time she went nearer the worrisome spot, I gave her a click and a treat. One of the advantages of clicker training is that the act of eating itself tends to calm horses, and a clicker trained horse learns to enter a psychological safe zone during a session, probably a form of classical conditioning.

After she started calmly crossing the damp slice of trail at a ninety degree angle, I started approaching it at increasingly oblique angles so she crossed the trail for slightly longer periods of time. Each time she crossed quietly she got a click and a treat. If she scooted or jumped, I just brought her around calmly and made the same approach again. Within ten minutes of the original shy, she walked calmly down the section that had spooked her initially. She took the last treat standing on the patch that had so worried her.

Did she wonder why, with thousands of acres around, I was making such a big deal of walking on one small stretch of trail?

I would like to be a little more erect and have my leg dropped down straighter out of the hip, but I love how relaxed and round Hap looks in this photo.

I took this photo of Smoke and dogs fence fighting last November.

When I bought the bareback pad several years ago, before I bought Lily, I didn’t plan on using it for Hap. I thought it would be a nice thing to have here at home, so when nieces and nephews came out I could put the pad on Smoke and let them ride him in the round pen.

I bought the pad at a now-defunct tack store in Franktown. The guy who sold it to me warned me to be careful. I assured him that I am the most careful person still riding horses.

The pad was a handsome hunter green made of a thick, plushy fleece. I thought how well it would look against Hap’s mahogany bay coat, and decided to see what he thought about it. I spent some time sacking him out with it, and felt rather silly, because he obviously couldn’t see why I was making such a fuss, though he appreciated the treats.

The pad was sufficiently plush that it looked like it could cushion even a Thoroughbred’s unforgiving spine. I had never had the slightest desire to ride Hap bareback. However, as someone who learned to ride as an adult, I had always envied people (like Corinna) whose childhood experience included extensive bareback riding. On the clickryder list, there were a bunch of women, apparently middle-aged enthusiasts like me, who were extolling the benefits of riding without a saddle for their balance and confidence. A week or so previously, I had even hopped on CJ, a small Arabian, without a saddle for a few minutes, to school him when one of the kids was having trouble. I had been surprised how much I enjoyed it.

It was a hot sunny day. My trainer was finishing up with someone else, and I asked her if she would stay around while I experimented. I just wanted to get on Hap and walk around for a few minutes. Oh, and could she help me mount?

No doubt we could have sent video of me mounting to one of the “America’s funniest” shows, because I am not good at getting a leg up, but finally, after a bit of a fuss, I was on Hap. Quite tentatively, I asked him to step off, and then to walk in a circle around my trainer. There was a world of difference between Hap and fat little CJ, but it still felt very cool. I could feel every shift of weight and change of bend. Hap was as calm as if we had been doing this twice a week for the past ten years.

I trotted all the time without stirrups when I rode Hap with a saddle: how hard could it be to do so without a saddle? I quickly discovered that there was a big difference. I had always prided myself on my balance, but I felt quite challenged without the saddle. However, Hap helped by staying in a very slow, smooth jog trot, and kept his back up and soft, so we managed. I didn’t know he had that cute little jog until I rode him with the pad.

After a few minutes, I knew that I would be very sore the next day, since I was stretching muscles in an unusual way. I declared our first session a success, and dismounted, determined to do it again.

The next step was to find some way of getting on Hap that didn’t require the help of another person. Hap would probably stand for me to try to jump up on him, but I didn’t really want to risk my knees (or his back.) On the clickryder list, I had heard about something called the Bareback Buddy. People swore by it, and although it seemed expensive, it came with a money-back guarantee, so I placed an order.

I was quite dubious when I took it out of its package. It didn’t look like anything any self-respecting Thoroughbred would tolerate. Once more, I went through an elaborate sacking out process with a puzzled Hap. I rigged him up in the Buddy, and did everything I could to see if he would react. Once more, I asked for my trainer to stand by and spot me. She was as appalled by the Buddy as I was, but had to admit that Hap didn’t seem to care.

The Buddy is a long strip of wide webbing that goes across the back of the horse behind the withers, and wraps around the offside foreleg. The nearside has a loop which serves as a stirrup.

Quite carefully, I rigged Hap by the mounting block and put all my weight into the loop. Hap stood like a statue. I cautiously mounted, than leaned down and unhooked the Buddy. He didn’t react when I threw it on the ground beside him. I decided the Buddy was a success.

That summer, I rode Hap quite a bit with the bareback pad. I enjoyed what it did for my balance, and even more for what it did for my confidence, both in my riding ability, and in Hap’s new found calmness. At first, I didn’t ride him bareback unless I had ridden him the day before with the saddle, but even that rule slipped after a while, because Hap was always calm when I rode him with the bareback pad.

Now, I use the pad to ride Hap when I feel lazy, and don’t want to work too hard. I use it when it is too hot to wear chaps. I use it when my neck and back feel tight, so the massaging action of bareback riding will help relax them. This past winter, used it once because I didn’t want to get snow on my saddle. I realized how far we had come when I realized I felt confident riding Hap bareback in a snow storm.

Most of all, I use it because there is a sense of connection without a saddle that is not quite there with the saddle. To judge from Hap’s behavior, he enjoys that sense of connection just as much as I do.

Jack is spending most of his time this weekend at XIV-Khan, a local Science Fiction / Gaming Convention. He is promoting and trying to sell memberships to Cosine, a new science fiction convention to be held January 16, 2004 in Colorado Springs. This con is being sponsored by the science club to which we belong, and we feel honored that Barbara Hambly has consented to be our guest of honor.

Enlivened by the moderate temperatures, the dogs are fence-fighting with Smoke. Smoke is a 26 year old Quarter Horse gelding. You would think he would have more sense than to tease large predators. However, he seems to delight in driving the dogs into a screaming frenzy. He trots up and down the fence line, egging them on, and will sometimes gallop, buck and rear as well. For the sake of our peace, and that of the neighbors, we had to block off one end of the dog run, so there is a buffer zone most of the time between Smoke and the dogs. However, the new field shares one long stretch of fence with the dog run, and I have been letting the horses out most of the day the past few days. The grass is no longer so rich that I worry about Rags foundering. (Smoke no longer eats enough grass for me to worry.)

Twenty-six is old for a Quarter Horse. Smoke has almost no teeth left, and gets over 90% of his calories from pelleted feed developed to be a complete source of nutrients, even in the absence of hay and grass. His legs, especially his knees, are so gnarled that it seems miraculous that he is reasonably sound. I hope, when it is time for him to go, he does so quietly in his sleep one night, but doubt that will happen. He is a tough old son-of-a-mare, and my guess is he will go down fighting.

Smoke was my therapy horse for a while: back in the days when Hap could be a daily battle, I would take Smoke out on the trail by himself, drop the reins on his neck, and ride along with my eyes closed. I would tell myself that this was a horrible habit, that even Smoke could step in a hole and fall down, but it just felt so good not to have to be work at riding for a change. Smoke kept me confident in my ability to ride after some particularly soul-destroying episodes with Hap. He was my baby-sitter horse: he seemed to know when we were escorting green horses or green riders that we had to keep things slow and unexciting.

I only ever once came close to coming off of Smoke. We were riding with the Bijou Springs Hunt, and there was a large yucca plant in our way. I decided to go one way, then changed my mind. Smoke, as an old stock horse, worked off of minute shifts of weight, and tried to cooperate. I nearly went off to the right as he headed to the left. After that, I tried to make up my mind in advance and stick to it.

When I was still trail-riding him, I used to joke to my friends that if Smoke ever refused to take a trail, I would turn around and go back. The year of the rains, my trainer brought Havoc, her old show hunter, out to my place for a week’s stay. He was at the end of his convalescence from a bone chip. His last day here we took Smoke and Havoc out on a short trail ride. About one hundred yards along the trail, Smoke started to fuss a bit. Smoke never fussed. He might complain if we weren’t going fast enough, but he never fussed. We were leading and my trainer followed on Havoc. I turned around to comment on Smoke’s behavior to my trainer, and the bottom fell out from underneath of Havoc. He had gone down in quicksand up to his belly. Smoke, the lighter horse, hadn’t broken through, but had obviously detected something he didn’t like. Fortunately, my trainer was able to encourage Havoc to jump to dry ground after several tries, but for a few tense seconds, I thought he was a goner.

Smoke was also reassuring to ride because I never worried about getting lost on him. I knew I could always drop the reins and let him find his way home. This is not unusual: most horses have a good sense of direction for going home. But Smoke seemed to be able to know where the horse trailer was, even when he was someplace he hadn’t been before.

He was close to the perfect trail horse, but far from perfect in other respects. Smoke is prone to panic attacks caused by separation anxiety. This has been exacerbated by being primarily pastured with Rags for the past five or six years. When he was working, it was not a problem, since he was very task focussed, but it has caused a few situations over the years, as when Jack left him in his stall one night. Rags left. So did Smoke, bending and folding a heavy metal gate in the process. Neither we, nor my trainer, nor the vet could believe that he could do that much damage to a metal gate and incur relatively superficial injuries.

In Horse Heaven, Jane Smiley wrote a chapter about a horse suffering colic. When the owner discovered the horse, he reflected that everyone ought to decide whether to pay for colic surgery before calling the vet. I’ve gone one better: I’ve decided in advance for our four horses. My husband knows the decisions, and so does my trainer. It’s a grim little list: who to try to save and who to let go. Colic surgery outcomes have gradually improved over the years, but it is still a costly procedure with a guarded prognosis for a full recovery.

It was a good thing that I had planned to stay at the barn all day. I rode Lily in the morning. My trainer was doing a class for her small horse camp. Lily was very good for me – we warmed up a little, then jumped some cross rails and a small verticals. I joked to my trainer that it was the sort of session that Lily liked – a five minute warm up followed by jumping, with none of this boring flat work. My trainer hoped none of the kids had noticed, since she stress the value of properly warming up the horse before you jump. “Just tell them it is because Lily is young and very fit unlike these middle-aged horses.”

After lunch we played horse charades before going out to the barn to do something else with the horses. I worked helping one of the older kids clicker train a horse to stand still while she mounted. The rest of the kids started learning how to braid a horse’s mane properly for a horse show.

We decided to finish up with a little bareback riding. I had just brought my Hap horse in from the field when my trainer said – “I think Callie may be colicking.”

Callie is a hardworking little chestnut roan Arabian mare. She is smaller than most Arabians, the size called a medium pony. At nineteen, she is my trainer’s hardest working school horse, and has helped teach a lot of kids to ride over the years. She had worked well that morning, and been standing quietly while the kids braided her mane.

I took Callie from my trainer so my trainer could work getting the kids settled. I led her to some grass, and Callie showed no interest. She glanced at her flanks. Annoyance at the flies or pain? Then she did a strange stretch, one that I have only observed in colicking horses, and I told my trainer it was colic. We gave her a painkiller called banamine, and my trainer started walking her. Spasmodic colic, caused by gas, will frequently be relieved by these actions. For her horses, my trainer’s procedure is to give banamine, keep watching and walking the horse, then call the vet if they don’t show signs of responding to the banamine within an hour. So far, this looked like a mild colic, like a dozen others I have observed and worried about over the years in my own horses and those belonging to friends.

I rode Hap with his bareback pad, keeping an eye on my trainer and Callie, and also trying to keep an eye on the kids. They were more subdued by worry than the heat. Callie wasn’t the first pony they rode, because she can be a little too quick for beginners, but she was usually their second.

I saw Callie do one thing that I had never seen a colicking horse do before, a kind of squatting move, and decided to put Hap up. I was about to tell my trainer that I thought this was a bad colic, when my trainer announced she was going to call the vet. It was less than half an hour after we started the banamine.

I quickly turned Hap out and started walking Callie. It was hard to keep her on her feet. Only my trainer and I could do so. It takes a lot of determination to keep a horse up who wants to go down. The one time we called a vet for Hap, he tried to bite his handlers while walked, but most horses seem to go deeply inside themselves, focussed on the pain in their gut.

The vet was there half an hour after we called her, which was forty minutes after Callie started presenting the first faint symptoms. By then, her back legs were buckling and her trim little mid-section had become grossly distorted with gas. She still fighting though. Whenever we headed toward the mare field she would increase her step. She seemed to think that if she could just get to her home she would feel much better.
Although the wait for the vet is always agonizing, this was one of the worst. At one point, neither my trainer nor I thought the little mare would be alive when the vet got there. The vet pulled in a minute later.

Vets have good drugs. When her injections didn’t help alleviate the pain, we knew it was very bad. The vet siphoned off some gas but couldn’t get any water down into Callie’s stomach. She tried to do a rectal exam to identify a twisted intestine, but couldn’t get deep enough. Several times, the mare nearly went collapsed on the vet or the handlers. The vet asked if my trainer was interested in a surgical solution. The only ethical alternative was euthanasia. There is no suffering like a horse suffering torsion, an intestinal twist, and it looked fairly obvious that this was a twist.

My trainer decided that Callie deserved a chance in repayment for her years of hard work, even if she could never return to work as a school pony. I ran to hook up one of the other boarders horse trailer to my truck since my trainer’s two horse trailer was not big enough. I was passionately grateful that I had my truck, since I don’t like pulling larger trailers with my trainer’s truck. Our truck, an 1989 F250 diesel, is a bitch to drive normally, but is a dream tow vehicle. Trying not to rush, since a badly hitched trailer can have fatal consequences, I drove into the arena within less than ten minutes later. Every minute counted, since the outcome for colic surgery improves the earlier it happens, before necrosis can set in for the twisted intestine. The vet was calling ahead to the clinic: the principal of the practice would do the surgery with her assistance.

We had failed to keep Callie on her feet. She lay like a dead thing on her side for a bit, than rolled vigorously several times. Horse people used to think that the rolling caused the twist, but now it seems more likely that the pain of the twist causes the horse to roll. Callie gave up and lay on her side again.

We tried to get Callie to her feet, pushing and pulling. My trainer kept yelling at the kids and other onlookers to stay a way so they wouldn’t get hurt. I had hold of Callie’s lead rope at one point. I pulled as hard as I could and yelled, “get up, you bitch,” forgetting the impressionable young minds. This got through the fog of drugs and pain, and startled, Callie scrambled to her feet.

I kept her walking until we were in the trailer, and undid her lead rope. My trainer was shouting at me to hurry and get out because she didn’t want me trapped by Callie if she started flailing about. I removed the lead rope and hopped out. The vet told us not to worry if Callie went down in the trailer: that was the reason for getting the biggest trailer without partitions we could find. Five minutes later we were on the road, and in fifteen minutes were at the equine clinic. I drove a little faster than I usually do when towing on those country highways, about as fast as I would drive a car. I was slightly encouraged that Callie was on her feet when we got to the clinic, though we felt her go down several times on the trip.

Callie was being prepped for surgery as I started writing this in my paper journal. My trainer watched through the observation window. I have watched a fair number of procedures over the years, but decided I wasn’t up for watching abdominal surgery. I sat in the waiting room, wrote this, and read a book that I happened to have in the truck.

It takes a long time to close after the surgery. My trainer kept reporting “they are still stitching.” Finally, two and a half hours after we unloaded the mare, a little before eight, the principal came out of the operating room. He reported that Callie had suffered a 360 degree twist of the large intestine. He didn’t see any necrosis, but that the gut did not look as healthy as he would have liked, though it continue to improve during the surgery. The prognosis is very guarded for the first 72 hours, not least because endotoxins may develop and cause founder.

My trainer and I were both exhausted and there was still horses to care for her at her place. I had called Jack and told him what was going on so he could care for the critters at our place. Another boarder was there when we got to my trainer’s barn, and she helped us get horses in. Fortunately, though it was past their usual feeding time, none seemed particularly worried or frantic, and it was still light enough to see.
I had a late supper of pizza, the first food I had in eight hours, at my trainer’s before driving home in her car. With hellish timing, we plan with some friends to take some trucks and trailers and pick up some hay this morning. This is hay at a very reasonable price from a guy who hadn’t planned to cut it unless he had a buyer, and hay is expensive enough right now that it seems worth hauling it ourselves.

15:19

When I saw my trainer early this morning, she told me that the vet called her at 11:30 the previous night. He had been with Callie since she came out of anaesthesia. She came out in the same dreadful pain which no painkillers could touch. It did not seem that the gut had retwisted which occasionally happens. Everything he could feel up to the stomach felt normal. His tentative conclusion was that there was something else going on that caused the lower intestine twist. He was prepared to keep trying, but concurred with my trainer’s request to administer euthanasia.

Life really sucks at times.