Squeee!

Horses. My horses are coming to Olive Branch tomorrow!

I'm going to Como around 7:30 tomorrow. I'll halter everybody and lead them from the pasture over to the 1000-yards-away corral. Then when my haulers show up at 9 am, we won't have any horse chasing excitement to contend with.

One of the barn owners, Bill, (the husband of the lady who coached my last two lessons) is bringing the big dually and the 3-horse slant load. My cousin Robert is bringing his 2-horse. Robert will take Poppy, and Bill will take the three Walking Horses. Everybody knows where we're going, so I'll probably just follow the trailers as a safety net.

I am SO EXCITED. Today went sooooo sloooow, and Stephen begged/ordered me to come to work tomorrow afternoon so that's going to be hell, but I have Saturday, Sunday, and Monday to ride. Ride MY HORSES, in Olive Branch, then drive 30 minutes home and sleep and get up and do it again! I put in my 30 days notice here today, too, so in another week or two I'll go find an apartment in Olive Branch.

Ok, last week's dressage lesson. I should post about it before this week's fun gets started and I forget all about last week.

Got to the barn on time - my instructor was still working with the two gals who have the slot before me. I got the Ay-rab (my buddy Clipper) out and started grooming him. Noticed some wee tiny girth galls, so when the instructor came over I showed her.

If it'd been my horse - well, I probably would've cussed a lot and kicked the ground and not ridden him. (One of the few perks of having Too Many Horses is that odds are, at least one is going to be sound to ride - even if it's not the one you wanted to ride.) Anyway, the instructor did the same. She grumbled a bit and felt the tiny little galls and sighed and said "put him up, we'll use Jazz."

Jazz is a huge sorrel QH. He's a little more opinionated than Clipper, but not as experienced or well-trained. I found his itchy spot (crest of his neck) right away so we got along fine.

The very first thing I did was tell her about how unexpectedly hard last week's lesson had been. Basically I said a shorter version of what I'd posted here.

First we worked on neck bends - mount up, get the horse square, then ask him to bend his neck left and right, at a standstill. Jazz was very very stiff to the left - didn't want to bend at all, period, but finally obliged a few times and gave me a tiny bit of left bend. He'd bend to the right no problem.

Then we did quite a bit of riding squares. Ride straight along the rail til you get to a certain point, then look left, then pull* on the left rein only until the horse has made the left turn.

*Ok, I know there are many better verbs than "pull", but basically it boils down to pulling. Not yanking - but not neckreining, which is the only other thing I'm vaguely familiar with. Again with the semantics, I could write an entire post about the amount of force and intent behind it - but yall know I'm not hateful, and when I say "pull left" I mean... pull left.

Pulling just one rein was quite hard for me. I have only ever direct-reined as a prelude to teaching neck-reining, so I had to consciously tell that right hand to STAY STILL. I wanted to pull with left hand and use my right hand to drape the right rein on Jazz's neck. After I consciously mastered not wanting to neck rein, I still wanted to give a little with my left hand. I think I didn't want Jazz to try to turn his head to the left to obey my left hand but run into the right rein/bit. I am scared of contact.

After a little coaxing I managed to try pulling left while keeping right still and you know what? Jazz turned his head to the left, which took up some contact on the right, and turned left without being confused or upset at all. Pretty neat.

(Of course, we did all this in both directions several times. It's just that I know this isn't the clearest example of horsemanship yall have ever read so I'm not going to try to describe it as "the pulling hand and the other hand" or anything. And you know I'm not ready to call it "the opening hand and the giving hand" cause I'll get my terms wrong!)

Then the instructor explained diagonals to me. I never really understood the whole posting diagonals thing, but she walked me through the "why" and I actually get it now. I am feeling particularly clumsy tonight so I am not going to try and relay the explanation to yall.

Then we worked on the bending exercises again, where I'd ask Jazz to bend his neck without walking. He was much more responsive, in both directions. The first thing I thought was what Daun always says about how a good dressage session is supposed to leave the horse more supple than before! (I know she didn't invent that saying and I'm sure the rest of the dressage blogs I read also say that - but honestly, when Jazz bent like Gumby to the left and right I thought about this post first.)

Then my hour lesson had run well over an hour and a half so we quit yapping, much to the bored horses' relief!

I'll update tomorrow about how evil or good my horses were for the move.

Jailbreak!

Part one, in which I Am Brilliant.

So Wednesday I took that awesome picture of Cersei on my cell phone. I turned on the bluetooth, uploaded the picture, made a post, and forgot about it. Then Thursday or Friday I remembered the bluetooth broadcasting was still on, draining a little extra battery, so I turned it off.

Saturday afternoon I noticed that I had not, in fact, turned off the bluetooth. I turned off the phone's ability to send and receive calls, which is on the same screen as the bluetooth. My phone had been a PDA-only for a couple of days. Woops. Turned the phone on (and bluetooth off), checked my voice mail, and got a cryptic message from my uncle.

I called their house and my aunt answered. I told her I was planning to come down Sunday on my way to the exam if that was ok? and she said fine. She didn't mention him calling so I figured it wasn't that important.


Part two, in which I Know My Horses When I See Them!

I always go see the horses first, then visit the house on the way back out. I'd dropped Cersei with my parents, so driving out to the horses was a little lonely. I was bouncing through the field adjacent to the horses when I saw a flash of something that looked an awful lot like the spotted mare's flank in the corral by the barn. I briefly thought "Nah, that's just a new cow getting acclimated in the barn" but it just didn't feel right. I know my horses when I see them. Anybody with pets or kids knows what I'm talking about.

I stopped by the gate to the barn area and got out. Sure enough, it was her. She was sticky with sweat and pacing around, but she wasn't dangerously panicked. I petted her nose, shooed her away to watch her move, and looked really carefully all over her. She had two fresh minor cuts on her legs but was otherwise just fine.

I got back in the truck and drove the 200 yards or so to the horse pasture. The other three were standing at the fence, staring at the direction I'd come from. They were obviously looking for the spotted one, but they were a lot calmer than she was. I guess they still had each other and that made it better. I grabbed a halter and lead rope off the gate and walked the 200 or 300 yards back to the barn area.

The mare (who really needs a real name) was very glad to see me come back and actually stuck her nose right in the halter. Then she walked, like a completely angel, the 400 or 500 yards in the 95 degree muggy heat back to her pasture. When we got close enough that the horses could all see each other, she let out an earsplitting shriek of joy and started dancing in circles around me. Champ and others hollered back at her so I took pity on her and unclipped the lead. She broke into a beautiful canter over to the fence and there was the most adorable reunion scene! Everybody nuzzled over the fence and smelled each other and it was just like a picture.

I told her to come here so I could put her back out with them and she let me catch her with zero fuss. (I really think the "go be a horse and see if you're less of a spaz" strategy is paying off.) I walked her over to the gate, shooed the boys off of it, and led her through. I turned around to fasten the gate behind me and by the time I turned around, she was squealing at Poppy. I hollered at them, got the halter off of her, and they moved a few feet away to start squealing and kicking. Ahhh, horses. It took literally 30 seconds for them to go from "OMG so glad you're back!" to "I hate you! Don't touch me."

Part three, in which All Is Revealed.

I went by the house on my way out. Stupid mare had broken the fence Saturday morning and was CHASING CALVES. She's in heat, which is a decent excuse for horse stupidity, but argh. Chasing cows. That's not cool. And double argh, that my stupid phone was off and I didn't get the call to come help fix the fence. That's the first time anybody else has ever fixed a fence for me, and of course it was my 70 year old uncle doing it! Oh well. He's a farmer, so he wasn't mad - livestock break fences; it's a fact of life.

She was locked up by the barn because she is still as wild as a March hare for other people. She wouldn't let my uncle and his hired guy touch her or even get too near her! It was kind of endearing that she let me catch her so easily. :) More proof, I suppose, that my long term strategy with her is paying off. She does like me. Yay!

Wildlife and Cow Junk

Last post from the Como trip!

I know there's a lot of deer down there - I see their tracks in the dirt all the time. Deer tracks are blase to me now though. (Live deer still leave me breathless with their wildness and beauty.) No deer track pictures for yall.

I do like raccoons though. They're pretty cute. I hear they're annoying as hell if you live in the suburbs, or I suppose if you're in the country and you don't keep your stuff secured. But really now, coon tracks are nothing but cute out in the wild. Little bitty hands!



And the Mystery Burrow! I don't know what lives there. I have yet to see any tracks (other than cow and deer tracks) in the dirt near the burrow, but something keeps the grass beaten back near the hole.

The barbed wire and the creosote fence post in the picture give a pretty good sense of scale.



Here's a close-up of the burrow. Fox? Rabbit? It's too small for a coyote.



Cow Junk.
It's got "Old Scratch" barely visible on the nameplate on the cylinder. That gave me something to google, and I discovered it's a cattle oiler. Apparently one fills it up with insecticidal oil and the cows ... walk into or under it. I think the diagonal things are like backscratchers that dispense the oil. I'm not sure how you convince the cows to go near such a strange looking thing - just further proof that horses are not remotely like cows, I guess. I'm going to make some inquiries and if I figure out how this thing works, I'll update the post.

Anyway, the antique cow equipment!



The other thing I wanted to point out about this picture - and this is going to be a big long horsey observation / rant - this is a prosperous, well kept "hobby" farm in Mississippi. That's what fences LOOK like down here. There's scrap metal propped up against the fence, and there's a giant (broken? off-season? yard art?) cattle oiler sitting out in the open. That's all perfectly normal for me.

I read and love FHOTD. I totally agree with her about 80% of the time, and I think maybe there's some possible excuse for the horrible horses she showcases the other 20% of the time. I think she, like any other really popular author, has an agenda and it's noble and she's mostly right. I just think that just about any time you make a blanket statement, you're wrong for some small percentage of cases.

I don't mean that FHOTD should stop publicly humiliating people for keeping horses in junkyards, or breaking out yearlings, or (ESPECIALLY) running your old horses through an auction because you can't afford to feed them and can't bear to put them to sleep.

But what you see in the background of the Cow Thing is not officially approved horse-safe fencing. Except - it is reasonably safe. Yeah, it's crappy wire that could slice my beloved horses' tendons. But it's a HUGE FRIGGIN PASTURE, with a herd of adult horses who know each other. The smaller the pasture, the safer the fences need to be.

And besides, I'm pretty sure a horse bent on self-destruction (or maxing out his owner's credit cards) could hurt himself in a padded stall. You can't prevent all possible bad outcomes. Everybody has to do his or her own cost/benefit analysis on life, all the time.

This is rather jumbled up in my head, and I don't think it's coming out right. What I mean is that you, each individual person, has to find a balance between infinite safety and pointless cruelty.

Como is really pretty!

This time next Monday, I'll be done with the first day of the bar. Whew.

Last Saturday, I took a bunch of pictures of my uncle's place as I went tooling around on Champ. I was going to post them right away, but, well, I didn't. Here we go...

I went by the farmer's market downtown and picked up some veggies for my aunt. I had the camera with me so I took a couple pictures of my dad, selling his (totally awesome) birdhouses.
Here's Dad:


And here's a couple of his birdhouses. The one on the left is a facade, just a little "pretty" to hang in the house. The one on the right is an actual birdhouse, probably for a wren:


Then Cersei and I drove to Como and caught Champ. The weather was (typically) awful - 90F, with about 65% humidity, and sunny. I wanted to ride, but I didn't want any of us to get heatstroke, so we kept it very slow. We went across a big field to a pond, along the pond, and across another field to a second pond. Champ was greatly displeased with the whole affair. He wanted to turn around and go back to his herd, but I cruelly insisted that he trot part of the time and even gait a little! To top it off, I made him canter for like 20 yards on the gravel road. Can you believe my nerve! It's maybe a mile from the second pond to my uncle's house, and it was just too hot to ask Cersei to trot that far with no water, so we turned around at the second pond.

The second pond is ugly. It's a cow wallerin' pond. The cows love to hang out in that pond, looking like really fat hornless water buffalo. Cersei just loves it because it's shallow, so I let her play in that pond for a bit but didn't take any pictures.

I started taking pictures as we headed back to the first pond, the one closest to the horses' field. Isn't this pasture just gorgeous? There are trees, but not the dreaded Just One Tree.* There's a bunch of different kinds of grass. Unfortunately, I don't have a clue what the species are.


*You never want to put your livestock out in a pasture that has just one tree. The cows/horses will huddle up under the one tree in a storm, and that one tree acts like a lightning rod, and BLAM you come out and find your livestock electrocuted under the tree. One tree bad, no trees bad, several trees GOOD. At least that's what they tell me.

Cersei had a blast playing in the pond.



She looks like a small furry hippo here.


I got a couple pictures of Champ too. Riding him with a group of horses, I have a 50/50 chance of an interesting ride. Half the time he does his "zombie plow horse" imitation and just plods along behind the other horses, and half the time he is offended by the other horses and fights me to pass them, because he is obviously better than them. But regardless of what he thinks of his company, he never pays much attention to what's going on around him.

But when we're alone, it's a different story. Champ is constantly alert, on the lookout, being a Wild Horse and scanning the horizon for lions or bicycles or other Horse Eating Monsters. He feels lighter, he's more responsive, and he's constantly thinking about spooking. He rarely actually spooks, not like Silky or the spotted mare, but he's always thinking about it. A lot more fun!

However, being a feral stallion* is hungry work.

*Domesticated gelding.

I have a few more pictures to share, but I'll save them until tomorrow. I am going to try to post more and bring a little normalcy back to my life.

Horses!

Exam tip: In MS, the jury is entitled to consider insulting or abusive language as a complete defense or a mitigating circumstance for assault or battery cases. Don't cuss somebody and expect them not to hit you.

So last Saturday I went and visited with my horses. I've been going every Saturday and spending some time with them. The fly stuff is actually working! If I remember to get the name of it when I'm in the truck next, I'll post a link to it. The horses are HUGE. They still like me :3 and want to come hang out when I show up. The spotted one is finally calming down - she was so spooky and wild that I figured two months in a pasture would either make her totally wild or let her finally calm down. Glad she calmed down!

Pictures of my fatasses:

First,


Here is gorgeous fat Champ eating oats out of a bucket with Silky.


Silky looks good! She's slender and could use more muscle, but I'm just happy she's plump.


Poppy is EXTREMELY LARGE. He preferred to eat his oats straight out of the bag in the truck. (After everybody had a taste of oats I locked the bag in the truck, which REALLY PISSED OFF Champ.)



The spotted one came and said hi too! She was really very inquisitive last weekend, and she let me touch her pretty much all over, as long as I kept it brief. I didn't even halter her to put the fly stuff on her. Yay!



Here's a body shot of her. Her roan flanks look even more frosted in person.



Here is a bonus picture of a very loud very angry bull. I have thoughtfully chosen the shot which does *not* show his pizzle. You just get to see the drool and the giant balls. He and his brother, in an adjascent pasture, bellowed most of the time I was out there.



And here's poor Cersei, hiding in the truck from the spotted one. Yes, the young'uns chased Cersei a couple of times. I've learned to leave the truck open so she has an escape route.


Next up: Economic torts, then a post about their hooves!

Ok, I admit it, cows scare me.

I got a reasonable amount of studying done today, and my uncle told me that the horseflies were tormenting my horses, so I drove down to Como early this evening to see them. I stopped on the way and picked up a jar of Swat and a bag of oats. The oats were to keep the wild beasts placated as I smeared goo all over them.

(Oats - JESUS CHRIST - are up to $15 a bag at Tractor Supply. And "cheap" horse-n-cattle sweet feed is $8, up from $5-6 this time last year.)

They looked quite good, overall. They're still shiny and in good weight. I swear I think Silky pulled something in her leg doing her Wild Horse Imitation when I got there. They were back in the back corner of their 40 acres, so I had to drive into the pasture, windows down, yelling for them. Of course the mares decided the truck was a monster come to kill them and they all galloped away. I drove alongside hollering til I got the boys' attention. Poppy was finally like "oh hey HEY HEY IT'S THE FOOD LADY!" and once he came charging over they all came to me. Silly beasts. Anyway, Silky wasn't remotely lame as she went flying away across the pasture but she limped coming up to get her oats. Sigh.

I got halters on everybody and checked them each over for ticks. Just a few small deer ticks on each, but I put on a new dose of that two-week fly/tick repellant just in case. Champ's and Silky's ears were just horrible, all crusted over with fly bites. The other two, oddly, were fine. I smeared Swat all over the bays' ears. Champ rolled his eyes and tried to get away, but Silky was quite the lady about me messing with her ears. I think hers itched. She was quite sweet tonight - after everybody else wandered away, she hung out at the truck with me and begged for scritches. She's so quiet and standoffish that it really delights me when she "asks" for scritches.

I checked everybody's feet. They're longish, but they seem to be self-trimming too. If I had any kind of amenities out there I'd rasp everybody, but tying a horse to a tree and trying to trim outdoors doesn't sound like fun. If I need to, I'll do it, but hopefully their feet will take care of themselves.

Quinn was ragingly in heat. Squatting and squealing and kicking at the boys. I decided discretion was the better part of valor and didn't even try to ride her in that kind of mood.

I did ride Champ though. I saddled him up, then went to put the bridle on, and he pitched a HUGE hissy fit about it. His ears really are bothering him, poor guy. :( Well, if there's one horse I can ride anywhere with a halter, it's Champ, so I snapped some roping reins on his halter and we took off.

Riding through the other horses to get to the gate made me really nervous. Nobody kicks Champ (NOBODY puts Baby in a corner!) but like I said, Quinn was in heat and very kicky. I gave her a wide berth.

Champ was a perfect gentle-horse. He was polite about me getting off, leading him through gates, and re-hooking them. He listened to me as we rode! We rode through two empty fields and into a field of cows. I was planning on riding up to my uncle's house, but when we got to the cow pasture Champ decided we'd gone plenty far and started trying to convince me to turn around. Then the cows got curious.

I don't have a lot of cattle experience. I know they taste good, they're herd animals, and they like to butt instead of kick. And momma cows are protective of their calves. And bulls are irritable bastards. My uncle has two bulls that run with his cows, and all the mommas have babies, ranging from one last little wee baby calf to half-grown adolescent cows.

One cow was all MRRROOOOOO and wandered toward us. I did what I usually do when a dog comes up to us - I spun Champ towards the cow and kicked him up to a canter for a second. The cow jumped and ran away a few feet. We stopped and the cow stopped and I remembered point #3 about cows. What if that bastard cow decided it wanted to headbutt us? Shit. Maybe charging it wasn't such a good plan. But the cows in those cutting videos on Youtube never try to butt the cowhorses. What if that cow was one of the bulls? Bulls will chase you. Maybe I shouldn't antagonize the cow.

We turned back around and headed over to the cow pond for Cersei to jump in and cool off. Then I made the executive decision to turn the expedition around, so we circled around the pond to head back the way we'd come.

All the cows were staring at me and the horse and the dog. And wandering toward us. And MRROOOOO-ing. It was a very tense moment. Where was the bull? Were the momma cows feeling like their babies were threatened? Had these cows ever seen a horse before, or did they think we were just a deformed cow? Did they expect me to pull a sack of Horse'n'Cattle out of my ass and offer it to them?

I pointed Champ to the left of the cow herd, hoped he wouldn't get nervous too and bolt, and kicked him up to a trot. As we headed to pass the mass of MRRROOOOOO, I waved my arms and hollered for them to git. Amazingly enough, they did! We went left, the cows ambled right, and Cersei kept Champ between her and the cows. Whew.

I'll need to go back this weekend and check the bays' ears. Might be time to deworm everybody too - I need to check back and see when I did it last. With gas at $3.82 a gallon, it's a $15 round trip. I need a job! I need to pass the bar and get a job and get a new place to live in Mississippi and move my horses back somewhere I can see them every day! Argh!

Oh god, they look great and they actually like me.

Go look at my horses! I don't want to try to link each picture. :effort:

I was going to bring them an apple, but I forgot. So I showed up totally empty handed. I honked when I drove up, and when I got through the gate I whistled and hollered for them to come on up. They stopped eating and started staring when I drove up, and when I hollered for them, they galloped up to see me! It was SO COOL.

I always kind of thought my horses liked me. But I was never positive, you know, if they actually liked me or if they liked the food I so often carried. I didn't think they'd run away when I came to visit, but I wasn't sure if they'd actually come to meet me. I hoped, like a huge dork, that they'd come running to see me, but I never thought they actually would.

Well, they did. They came thundering up, slowed down a respectful distance away, and then the boys walked right on in to sniff me and get the scratchin' started. I took Cersei over to jump in the cow pond, and the entire herd followed me. Then we all walked back over to the fenceline and stood in the shade and I spent two hours laying hands on my boys.

Yep, just the boys. I managed to pet Quinn three times, and each time Poppy came charging out of nowhere to run her off. The mares stayed pretty close the whole time, but they're just not as needy and not as domineering. The geldings took turns getting petted and rubbed on and scratched and talked to. I'd be scratching Champ's mane, and I'd feel a tug on the camera case strap. I'd turn around and Poppy would be looming behind me. "Hey." So I'd rub his big white star for a while, getting some of the itchy old hair off of his face, when a very grumpy bay horse would politely put his head between us, shove Poppy away from me, then open his jaws with a huge wet smacking noise and bite Pops. Poppy would run off to harass Quinn or Cersei and I'd love on Champ some more. Then we'd repeat.

They look amazing. Quinn looked pretty good before, and she just looks a bit better now. Poppy is filling out again. (I hope this is the year he starts to really get stocky. I'm really ready for him to stop growing up and start filling out.) And the bays look like new horses. They've gone from skinny scruffy older horses to sleek shiny healthy weight horses. Neither of them looks old any more.

Problems:

Sunburn.
Quinn is SO SUNBURNED. I'd heard that paints burn in the sun, but I thought she'd acclimate to it. Are all those feral paint mustangs running around with pink noses? Poor guys. Is she going to get skin cancer? If I caught her, tied her up, and put zinc oxide on her nose once a week would it help or just make her even more wary of humans with halters? I need to research sunburn and paints. Stupid spotted horses, grumble grumble.

Ticks.
Everybody is covered in ticks. I'd been scritching the boys for about 30 minutes before I remembered that Poppy is a tick magnet, so I started actually checking his mane. Yep, pulled off three of those horrid swoll up nasty fat ticks and smushed them with a stick. Then I started feeling his chest and between his front legs and I started finding more, this time the horrid tiny little deer ticks. You know the ones that are about the size of a freckle? Yep, tons of them. Then for some reason I wondered if Champ was getting ticks too, even though Poppy is usually the only horse who gets ticks - yep, Champ had tons of horrid little icky deer ticks too. I pulled them off of the boys' chests, and manes, and in between their back legs. I got one fat one off of Quinn, too, before Poppy ran up and bit her.
So what am I going to do about the ticks? I guess I need to do some internet research about those spot-on tick control chemicals. I hate dousing my animals in weird chemicals, but there are a lot of ticks this year and ticks carry horrible diseases.

Also, they've got a ton of bot eggs on their legs. No hope of manually controlling the eggs; I'll just have to deworm for bots when I move them.

Manners.
My god, those are some rude horses.
Let me clarify that. I've always tried to be a benevolent dictator. I do not allow my horses to invade my personal space, unless I invite them in. I feel quite safe out with my horses because they always show me respect. Nobody tries to shove me around, bite me, or run over me to get away from another horse. But I've never tried to make them not fight when they're turned out together. Horses fight. It's like eating - they love to eat and they love to pin their ears and bite other horses.
If I put a halter and lead rope on one horse, I expect the other horses to get out of our way and not bite or kick at the haltered horse. I think that's what I'm going to have to do when I go back - one at a time, halter and tie and groom them.