Category: Horses

I just got a call from our neighbor to the west telling me she had seen one of our horses out of our field.  I didn’t immediately panic because where one horse goes, the others would follow, and I could see Rags calmly grazing from the window.  Even if Hap had jumped out of the field, which Rags couldn’t do, Rags wouldn’t have been so calm about what he would have viewed as abandonment. 

However, as I expected, I counted three heads almost immediately when I got out to the horse field.  I also saw a rider walking near our fence line.  I shouted to make sure she was okay and she said she had dismounted voluntarily but let go of the reins.  The horse, evidently a dark horse like Hap, had headed home for his barn.

So I turned the horses out in the new field for two hours.  We’ve had enough precipitation recently there is actually something resembling grass out there.

The high today was 10F. Days like this make me even more grateful for having electricity (to heat the stock tank) and a cold water hydrant in our small barn. It was brutal taking care of horses without either during the blizzards of 1997-1998. We installed electricity to the barn a year or so later, and kept running hoses out to fill the stock tank in the barn for another winter or so. That changed the day I went to water horses one morning when it was significantly below freezing, and I discovered that Jack had not drained the hose properly when he topped off the spa. (It took several hoses to get to the barn from the house hydrant.) Since we had discussed The Proper Draining of Hoses on several previous occasions, I told him I felt it was only fair that he water the horses until such time as we had water to the barn. I think he found the plumbing contractor within a week, and we had water to the barn within two weeks.

On days like this, it helps a lot. Keeping stock watered properly during extended cold snaps is brutal without running water and stock tank heaters.

Go to Jack’s weblog to see some photos he took of the horses during the the nightly feeding. Despite the difficulty of taking photos of dark (mainly) horses in the dark, you can determine that we don’t have the usual problem of keeping weight on elderly horses.  (I obsess a bit on the subject:  our first boarder was an elderly, very thin, Thoroughbred gelding named Dugan. I felt like hanging a sign on him:  “This horse gets as much food as is safe for him to eat.”)

I don’t do much to get the horses ready for winter.  Because the barn is built with two large stalls opening to the south, the horses are responsible for getting themselves under shelter in foul weather.  I don’t blanket unless I think a horse is cold, and some years I never put a blanket on a horse at all.  Early fall storms and late spring storms tend to be the only time an acclimated horse can’t handle the cold. 

I do keep a stock tank heater in the water tank during the winter.  The tank is in the barn, so the horses don’t have to leave shelter to get water during blizzards.  However, this summer one of the horses (probably Hap)  broke the stock tank heater.  Although the piece broken looked like it ought to be easy to replace, we couldn’t locate one.  So Saturday we bought one at a local feed store, and this morning put it in the stock tank.  Now the forecast lows of the low twenties for the next week no longer worry me.

At our house, it is rarely a good thing when the phone rings before 8:30 am on a Sunday.  This morning my trainer D called to say that Lily was down in her stall when she went out to feed breakfast to the horses, and that she had to beat Lily to get her to stand.  She led Lily out to the observation paddock and Lily went down again.  D had already called the vet’s paging service and wanted me at the barn as soon as I could get there.

I had been puttering around the house for a while but hadn’t fed the critters yet.  I dressed myself and fed in a rush, and was on the road within twenty minutes.

When I got there D was feeding the rest of the horses, and Lily was on her feet chewing slightly.  The gate to the arena was open so I knew the vet was expected. Lily nickered to me, but didn’t come over to the fence.  Her flanks were sucked in and looked rigid.  We looked at each other for a minute and she decided to lay down again.  I pulled up the mounting block and sat where I could watch her.  Watching sick horses is never as boring as you would hope it would be.

In the horse books of my youth, there was a great emphasis on walking colicky horses so they can’t roll and cause a twisted intestine.  Current thinking is that the rolling is a result of the pain of the twist, and not the cause.   I will walk a horse if it looks as though they may cut themselves, but generally leave a quiet horse alone if the vet is on the way.

About ten minutes after I sat down, Lily pushed to her feet, and started nosing around the vegetation in the paddock looking for something to eat.  I went into the paddock and put a halter on her, and led her to a patch of grass by the arena.  My trainer used to joke that you could tell when the vet got in the truck out of reach of the phone because the horse would start to recover.  In these days of cell phones, the horse seems to wait until the vet is within a mile or so of your place.  Sure enough, a few minutes after Lily started nibbling on grass, H pulled into the arena.  She was still slightly tucked through the flanks, but didn’t show signs of the rigidity I had seen earlier.

Lily’s vitals were fine.  Her gut sounds were close to normal.  She responded to being examined with her usual serenity, even looking around for a treat from H.  We had one problem when H tried to close off her nasal passages, and Lily started backing away and half-rearing.  I remembered belatedly that youthful dental problems had made Lily very worried about having her muzzle handled.  I had worked with her to get her over it when being handled by me and D, but the learning had never generalized to other people.  I placed my hand where the the vet had tried to close her nasal passages, and Lily stood quietly while I did so.  She also fussed when the vet tried to examine her gums, but was fine when I lifted her lip instead.  (I can’t decide if I am more impressed or unnerved at her trust in me.)

I trotted Lily in hand and briefly on the longe line so H could be sure it wasn’t an obscure lameness problem making her want to lie down.  We all admired how nice a mover she is.  (And I am in better shape than I was in the spring because I don’t think I could have trotted her in hand then.)

Vets are never happy when they can’t find a story they like.  However Lily had a lot of pseudo colic episodes when she was younger, and D and I finally decided that they were caused by hormonal problems.  We just could never get any of our vets to agree.  H agreed it might be that although it is late in the year for a mare to be cycling. We decided to treat her as though she did have a mild case of colic, .  This involves pain killers and over hydrating and underfeeding the horse until you are sure you aren’t dealing with an impaction colic.  It also involves keeping them under close observation for a day or so. 

Lily doesn’t think much of the underfeeding part of this plan, poor girl. 

Our horses are true Coloradans: two days without sunshine and they start to complain. At one point I went out to check them this afternoon and Hap was gnawing at his wrap, something seen far more often with dogs than horses. I think he was doing it as much from boredom as irritation with the wrap (which was getting a little ragged) or the wounds it is protecting. My trainer came out and re-wrapped it, and it looks nice and tidy again. More to the point, he is continuing to heal well under the wrap.