Nerd alert - hoof pictures galore.

So I just checked the mail. There was some goofy catalog for clothing and jewelry featuring horses - stuff I'd never buy. (How do these people find me? I haven't ordered ANYTHING at this address.) But anyway, on the cover was a cute paint horse walking through a shallow pond. She had a foot raised to take the next step and the first thing I thought was "talk about underrun heels!" Then I flipped through the catalog to make sure they weren't selling anything useful, like tack, and threw it away.

Anyway, I haven't been trimming my horses. The last time I trimmed was at the end of April. It's a bit of an ongoing experiment - I've checked their hooves every time I've seen them, and if anybody seemed too long or uncomfortable, I would've dragged my rasp and stand down and fixed the problem. But Carmon's horses live on a mountain and self-trim. And there are wild horses in non-rocky areas who self-trim. I wondered how mine would do with a lot of room to roam but only dirt to wear their hooves down.

It's actually a success, as far as I can tell! Champ's feet looked pretty good before, and they look AMAZING now. Here's a blurry pic of his RF in March 07 (barefoot for 3 months, IIRC.)



Here's his LF from last week. The wall looks horrible and ragged, but it's wearing off. Not chipping off nicely into a mustang roll like if he lived on rock, but somehow wearing off nonetheless. And his FROGS! I really had no idea that his frogs could and would expand so much, ever! He wore keg shoes from when he was probably 2 til 13, and he had nice-ish shod feet with puny frogs.



Here's his rear from March 07. His rears have always looked better (most horses' do), even though he wore shoes on the rears too. I thought he had nicer frogs, but high inside heels.



LOOK AT THE DIFFERENCE! (Yeah, I know I'm yelling, but I'm a nerd and I get really excited about pretty frogs.) I even think the high inside heel is not as prominent.
At first, when I was looking through the pictures I'd taken, I really thought that was a picture of Poppy's feet. But I *know* I didn't pick up anybody's feet except Champ, and Poppy has a longer thicker tail and hairier fetlocks, so... that must be Champ's foot.



And I didn't pick up Dixie Quinn's feet, but I don't have any old pictures of solar views anyway. We'll compare apples to apples with her. Here's her feet, shortly after I got her. The short back story is that she was a padded show horse for a season, then shod (fronts only) with heavy keg shoes. Her hoof capsules were horribly distorted - padded TWHs are the very definition of long toes / underrun heels. This is about a month after I got her and had her shoes pulled. You can see how much I pulled her toes back.



Here they are today. Down in the grass you can see a tiny bit of ski-tip still growing out, but otherwise, her feet have healed really nicely.

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!

I'm still alive, really!

Still studying. Just under 4 weeks to go!

Dog update first. I've been taking Cersei to the unofficial dog park to play instead of out to the barn to play. There's several reasons - Sam the Barn Dog has fleas and keeps giving them to Cersei; it's twice as far to the barn as to the park; seeing other people's horses and not mine is kinda :(

Memphis in general is weird, yall. It's not just ghetto Frayser. The whole town is permeated with weirdness.

The Overton Park "dog park." First, it's not a dog park. I think we only have one official dog park, on the other side of the city in Shelby Farms. This is just an area in Overton Park where, by consensus, everybody brings their dogs to play off leash. The Not A Dog Park (NDP) is part of a large field, with a truly nasty concrete pond. There's a treasured patch of old-growth forest nearby, and a golf course all around.

The forest is another Memphis oddity. Back in the 60s, the highway dept wanted to build I-40 through the park, to connect East Memphis to Downtown. The Midtown hippies were up in arms (and rightly so, it's not just a park. It really is as close as you can get to untouched forest in any city). There was a lawsuit that dragged on for ten years, and finally the highway dept lost. In honor of this historic decision, they left the uncompleted access ramps and bridges to nowhere standing for the next 30 years. Seriously, two years ago there was a big renovation of part of our highways, and the Bridges to Nowhere were finally torn down. Just a surreal bit of Memphis history.

Back to the dog park. Cersei really loves to swim in the horrid nasty concrete pond, and she's warming up to the dogs who play there. She'll play with any given dog after she's met it twice, so she's starting to get some "friends." Notable characters and dogs I've met:

• The Asian guy with the intact boxer. Not a show dog or a wonderful specimen of boxer-ness. I suspect he just doesn't want to genitally mutilate his dog. Whatever.
• The sweet gay guy with that odd-looking black GSD. Well, I thought Diablo was a GSD until yesterday, when he admitted that the dog is half GSD and half timberwolf. Normally I'd call bullshit, but he wasn't bragging, just kind of matter of fact about it. Someone asked him about Diablo, and he told us. (I still don't think Diablo is an F1. He's SO laid back and SO doggy.)
• The girl with the enormous BYB pit bull. Her dog is really sweet, and just a puppy who wants to play, but at 9 months the dog is already like 80 lbs. HUGE.
  
• The guy with the two tiny perfect little pit bulls. His are both rescues, and they look to my untrained eye exactly like pit bulls should look. Maybe 50-60 lbs, shorter than Cersei, alligator jaws and built like tanks. I'm glad Cersei's taken a liking to them.
• The girl with the out of control huge 80 lb Rottweiler puppy. Another one Cersei's age, but this dog really initimidates / bullies / annoys her. The Rott wants to play tackle football with every dog out there. Whenever the Rott knocks Cersei down, I go over and make the Rott back off and let my girl up.
  
• And Cersei has a Chihuahua buddy! At first I was really reluctant to let her play chase games with a 5 lb dog, but the owners swore that the Chi loves big dogs and Cersei isn't very prey-drivey. And damn that little dude is FAST. Even if she wanted to chase him down and kill him she wouldn't have a chance.
  

The dogs are about half mutts or rescues and half purebreds. I've seen a Bouvier des Flandres, a couple of Ridgebacks, a (super cute!) Visla puppy, a couple of Great Danes, lots of Weimeraners and Dobermans and pibbles.

It's very strange. A very libertarian dog park. You can't yell at somebody for not controlling her dog (coughRottweilergirlcough) because none of us are supposed to be there. Non dog people wander through all the time. It is very odd to me when pit bulls run off to lick non dog owner kids, but nobody seems to mind. There are so many pits in Memphis that the general awareness about them is much higher - odds are that the non dog people at the park have friends or family with a pit, so they know that pits aren't actually babyeaters. And the pit owners are actually more aware of possible dog aggression than the non pit owners.

Cersei's number one favorite thing to do is still just to go swim around in circles by herself. She doesn't really want to retrieve, she just wants to swim in circles. About a quarter of the time she'll come out of the water and play with her "friends." She's getting more comfortable with the other dogs every day, and honestly, as long as she's having a good time, she can do what she wants out there.

I'm going to write out some notes and when my hand gets tired of writing, I'll come post HORSE PICTURES and write about my large useless beggars.

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, shit

I'm still alive. Studying for the bar is about all I do right now. It's such a long test, and such a vast array of weird specialized knowledge... Ugh. If I stay on track, I should pass with no problem though.

Cersei is such a good patient dog. I know this has been hard for her - she went from going to the barn every single day to all of a sudden we won't go anywhere exciting for three or four days in a row. I play with her in the apt and take her on little trips - to the grocery or whatever - but some days I just have to stick to my "plan" for the day. If it takes me all day to review property, I just can't stop what I'm doing and take her out to play, or I'll never get started again. Ahh, well. She's a good girl and this won't last much longer.

I'm gonna go to the Germantown Charity Horse Show tonight, and if it's fun, tomorrow night too. And I'm planning on going to visit my own scruffy wild horses this weekend, maybe Saturday or Sunday evening. Just too hot during the day.

Otherwise, it's the rational basis test, Article 2 of the UCC, and common law larceny.

R.I.P. Girlie

Well, a horse at my former barn died today. Goldie was the dam of the horse James often rides, Surprise.* She was a lovely very pale palomino, grade but gaited. She'd been colicking for two days, but the owner was convinced that she was getting better and refused to call the vet. He did, however, try to give her some mineral oil. By putting it in her drinking water. After she stopped drinking. He was further convinced that she'd be ok because she'd been given two shots of Banamine the day before, and as we all know, Banamine cures colic.

What a fucking dumbass. What a waste of a horse's life. I can only hope he learned something, anything, about taking care of a horse or calling the vet.

*James isn't the owner of either horse.

In other news, I am grimly plowing through property law. Fee simple, life estate, possibility of reverter, and the good old Rule Against Perpetuties. Ugh. I'm going to cook dinner, try and get through the types of concurrent estates (joint tenancy, JT w/right of survivorship, etc) and then watch Battlestar Galactica and drink. If I can get through concurrent estates I'll deserve it.

Tomorrow afternoon I'm going to go ride lil' Lily again. Yay!

Lily, ride 3

Such a sweet little horse. I didn't even gait her, we just walked around, stopped and started, turned, and I got off and on from both sides a lot. Then I let her graze for a while and put her back up with some extra hay. Maybe tomorrow I'll take her across the street on a short trail ride? She's so laid back that I will love seeing her "discover the world."



Oh - apparently redneck horses impale themselves on t-posts just like Internet Horses. One of the rednecks took his horse Hydro (yes, named after the type of weed) to somebody's friend's uncle's place and the damn horse impaled himself. Prognosis uncertain. Looks like The Internet is right about t-posts!