Horse jail

Lisa wanted to see my ghetto horse jail. :)

There's hot tape on fiberglass poles fencing off the run-in, the hay feeder, and a bucket of water.


The corner poles needed a little help so I tied them to nearby bushes with hay strings.


It's maybe 30 x 30, with the run-in taking up most of the space. If she gets too frisky, I can always make it smaller, but I wanted to leave room enough for her to roll and nap in the sun. So far, she's not moving around a lot.

Yesterday I hoped Dixie was just tired, but today I'm sure she's a little depressed. She knows she's been locked in horse jail, and she knows her leg hurts, but I really don't think she understands that she's locked in horse jail so her leg will heal. PLUS her human keeps squirting utterly vile stuff in her mouth. It's just a lot of inexplicable suckiness in her life.



I felt really bad for her when I had to bute her this morning, so I brought some carrot slices. She kept trying to eat them - she'd take a piece of carrot in her lips, carefully crunch it up with her front teeth, taste it (but only taste the Bute in her mouth), and spit it out. Then - this just kills me - she'd give me a hopeful look and take another carrot piece from me. Only three more days of Bute, sweetie.

I bedded down both "stalls" of the run-in with fresh shavings, in case she wants to snooze there. And I'm trying to get her interest with the clicker stuff. Today I worked on targeting different shapes - "box" and "bucket." Then I put the box up and tried to get her to move the bucket around. I know she's perfectly capable of knocking a bucket on its side then back up on its base when it's full of grain, but she was just so listless about playing with it. But I eventually got her to stick her nose in the tipped-sideways bucket and move it a bit and that was good enough for lots of treats.

Later on, I went out with more carrots and shaped her into the beginning stages of picking things up. I tossed her green nylon halter on the ground and lured her into touching it. Then I just gradually shaped her interactions with it til she was biting it and picking it a couple inches off the ground. By that point we'd almost run out of carrots so I jackpotted her last good try then scratched her neck for a long time.

She did get frustrated and paw a couple times. I really don't want to reinforce that; she does it enough on her own! Plus it's probably terrible for her leg. So instead of just passively not-reinforcing it, like maybe I "should" have, when she'd start to paw I'd spin around and really blatantly cut off contact with her for a few seconds. It seemed to work to indicate that's not what I'm looking for, without shutting down her desire to interact with me.



I don't have a cue for whatever we're doing to the poor green halter. I guess I'd like to put "pick it up" on a cue, and if we're really bored / she's a real prodigy, I'll combine the verb (touch / pick up) with the nouns she's learning (box, bucket, halter). I've always been super jealous of people who have horses that will pick up what the human drops under saddle. Maybe this is our shot at it! Anyway, I think I'd like to shape it a little longer without a cue before I put words to picking up the halter.



Any thoughts on the c/t stuff?

I've got some good/bad points from the ride (GAH! my saddle pad failed me) and some thoughts about risk of injury. Maybe tomorrow for that. Thank you all for your comments/emails/texts/etc - it really means a lot. :)

NASTR - the utterly awful bit

Here's what I never said in the last post: we didn't complete. She's lame. I broke my horse. :(

I think we rode about 90% as well as humanly possible. We all got sucked into riding the technical bit of the trail a little too fast, but then Thunder lost a boot so my little group pulled off and let the speedier people get past us. And Dixie vetted through two checks ok after that, so I really don't think she hurt herself there. After that ride-your-own-ride reminder, I made damn sure I rode my own ride. John and Meredith were averaging the same speed as me, but their horses had a bit faster trot and slower walk, so they'd surge ahead then we'd catch up. Dixie didn't like that - she wanted to canter to keep up with their trot - but I wouldn't let her.

Anyway, we vetted through both checks fine, then rode carefully back down the mountain to camp. We walked the last mile and all was well. I led Dixie over to the trailer, petted my Cersei dog (who was sleeping when we got there!), stripped tack and blanketed, and led Dixie back to the final vet check, about 100 yards away.

She wasn't walking ahead of me or even parallel to me - she was just behind my shoulder, just visible in my peripheral vision. We got maybe halfway there and all of a sudden I could just tell that she was not right. I wheeled around and stared at her and asked "is she off? Did she just come up lame?!?" My friends who were walking with me hadn't been paying attention to her and they kinda laughed it off... but I was not at all surprised when she was damn near three-legged lame at the vet check. She wouldn't even trot - when the scribe chased us, Dixie managed a horrible broken-legged lame canter thing. I wanted to puke.

Honestly, the vets sucked about it. In retrospect I'm pretty pissed. The head vet came over when she saw Dixie not trotting. She did a quick exam, without telling me anything at all, while I stood and cried. She hoof tester'd the front right, flexed it (but didn't have her move out, so not a flex test?), palpated just under the knee, and told us to go home. I said "what should I do?" She said, "call the vet tomorrow or Monday." We walked/limped slowly away, then I remembered my bute and stopped to ask. The head vet was already somewhere else, so the other lady vet came over and discussed hydration with me - bute is BAD in a dehydrated horse, so only bute if she's hydrated and still drinking. I asked about cold hosing and she agreed that'd be a good idea.

So we limped away with me trying not to bawl my eyes out. We stopped at the photographer's, because dammit I rode for eleven hours and I earned that picture. He took pity on the crying girl with the lame horse and gave us all the pix for $10. Here's one:


Yes, I'm doing the \m/ rock-on hand.

After I bought the pictures Dixie really didn't want to walk at all. She picked up the bad leg and wiggled it and gave me this pitiful look and put it back down and wouldn't move. I asked the photographers to please hold her while I brought the trailer around, and of course they agreed. Not that she was going anywhere, but you know, it's bad form to let your horse "wander around" loose.

I gimped back to the trailer. I could seriously barely walk. Found Meredith and John on the way and told them we got pulled and cried on their shoulders. Then I got back to the truck, took the tent down, loaded all my shit, and hauled up the road to where Dixie was.

Then I did the One Really Brilliant Thing Of The Day. I hit my thoroughly rudimentary first aid box and pulled out one of those chemical instant ice packs. Vet wrapped that to her leg, loaded my pitifully gimpy horse, and drove home crying in the rain.

That was one of the lowest points of my life. Probably the awfulest I've felt since the day Champ died.

She unloaded much less lame. Surprisingly less lame. And the swelling had mostly subsided. I think the ice pack really mitigated the damage, I honestly do. I let her get a big drink of her delicious home water, then gave her a gram of bute and cold hosed the leg.

Sunday she was a little off at the walk. There was a tiny bit of thickening below the knee on the right front, but no real heat and no puffiness in any leg. I kept buting her and hosing the leg, just in case. I didn't trot her; what's the point?

Today I called the good expensive lameness vet at 8:01 am and got a 10:30 appointment. Dixie was all "oh HELL naw" when she saw the trailer, but she loaded up with just a tiny bit of insistence.

Lame Dixie at Comstock Large Animal Hospital from Funder on Vimeo.

She was just a little lame, very consistently, at the trot.

I had a good diagnosis/treatment discussion with the vet. We ended up a pretty standard lameness exam: hoof testers, palpation, a nerve block just below the fetlock (abaxial sesamoid), trot-out/lunging before and after the nerve block, and an ultrasound of the suspected damaged area.

I am one of those people who can't even see the human fetus unless it's a false-color "3D" ultrasound, so I was really hoping I wouldn't be able to see anything on the ultrasound. Fortunately I was right. The vets (the one I was paying and two student vets) could only find some very minor damage to her high suspensory ligament. This is fantastic news. I know just enough about tendon/ligament injuries to know that Dixie was showing all the signs of having one, and I was horribly afraid it'd be torn or ruptured or something career/life ending. Minor disruption of the ligament fibers is wonderful. It's like I won the horse lottery.

I told the vet up front that I didn't really want to try any cutting edge therapies. Dixie's not insured, and I don't think the outcome improvement is worth the treatment cost for shockwave/PRP/stem cell treatments. It seems like tendon injuries need time more than anything else.

Anyway, we're looking at a standard 6 week healing/rehab process. Yes, I know it will probably take longer, and that's just fine. But for now, it's 2 weeks confined with bute and cold hosing. Two weeks handwalking, two weeks walking under saddle, then a recheck.

I'm not actually putting Dixie in a stall; I'm really not set up for that. I hot taped off a small area around her run-in and hay feeder. It's big enough for her to roll and walk, but hopefully not trot. It is totally ghetto looking - those fiberglass step-in posts are not very sturdy so, uh, I kinda tied the corner posts to some dead shrubs with hay twine to keep them upright.

I'd love for Dixie to recover 100% so that we can pick up endurance again, but if she doesn't, no big deal. She can stay in my backyard in all her bad-tempered supermodel glory for the rest of her life, either way.

So - anybody have any good clicker tricks to teach a bored angry confined slightly lame horse?