HORSES
Horse Care
DAISY AND MOLLY
Forty years after our last ride together,
Betty and I bought a horse for our golden
years. I was working for TI and she was
working for a veterinarian who had moved in
down the road from us. The Vet and his wife
had a couple of horses and we thought about
all the fun we had when we first met and rode
horses together and decided to get a couple
also.
We located a fellow who had this
four year old mare, a beautiful sixteen hand
line-back dun quarterhorse. I fell in love
with her and bought her after the vet checked
her out. Betty noticed a black grade mare in
the shed and she asked if she was for sale
and the man said no, that's my barrel racing
horse. So we got Daisy (my wife named her)
home and about a week later the horse fellow
called and asked if we still wanted Molly
(the black mare). Betty got all excited and
grabbed her check book and got Molly home
with Daisy. The horse fellow told us that on
the last barrel race, Molly pulled up lame.
As it turned out she had arthritis in the
left leg. But she became an
excellent riding horse for Betty. I rode
Daisy because she was so big.
When Molly's
arthritis acted up, we would give her two
grams of
bute (Phenylbutazone) twice a day
for a couple of days. It is an
anti-inflamatory paste and relieves pain. It
comes in a one and half inch diameter tube
that you have to stick in the horses mouth to
dispense the paste. It has to go way back on
the tongue or it will slide out of the horses
mouth. You can't give them too much of this
medicine or it will damage their liver. We
now give her a handful of yucca pellets with
her feed every morning to relieve her of any
pain she may be having. The pellets have an
extract from the yucca plant that the native
Americans discovered years ago to be a
natural pain killer. If your horse has
arthritis, I recommend a daily dose of yucca
pellets. I buy my pellets in a twenty lb.
bucket from Jeffers Equine. They have a
catalog of all kinds of good products for the
horse owner. Their phone number is 1-800-533-3377.
The only trouble we had with
Daisy was her unwillingness to go out for a
ride without another horse along. She was
what we call "herd bound". Molly, on the
other hand, was "barn sour". She didn't like
to get too far from the barn. These are bad
habits that horses get when young in their
training years. It just makes riding them
less enjoyable than it could be. They are
continually trying to turn back to the herd
or the barn. To keep going the way you want
to, you have to rein them in a complete
circle and back in the direction you want to
go. Also Molly, who had won several blue
ribbons for barrel racing, was so use to
going into a full run when someone got in her
saddle, was always hell bent for leather
whenever my wife mounted her. She had
developed a "hard" mouth because of the
riders' continual hard pulls on the reins to
slow her down.
You don't want to give the
horse it's head when returning to the barn or
it will take off in a dead run. When they
try that, turn them completely around. This
slows them down for a while. You may have to
do it several times before you get back to
the barn.
RUSTY
We decided to get another horse because of
Molly's arthritis and settled on Rusty, a
pretty sorrel gelding with a flaxen mane. He
was a mustang with a sweet temperament. But
he had to be put down because he became
parallyzed in the hind quarters. I had two
vets look at him and they didn't know what
was wrong and suggested putting him down.
We had a back hoe come out and bury
him.
PATTI JO
Next came little Patti
Jo. We went to the BLM corrals in Liberty
Hills, Texas and looked at more Mustangs.
The BLM (Bureau of Land Management) rounds
'em up and ships them all over the country to
corrals run by individuals for adoption.
Betty saw Patti and had to have her. The
little black mare was only four years old at
the time. We had some lady try to gentle her
for riding after we got her but it didn't
work out, so we gave her a nice place to
live. She is still with
us.
JO AND MAUDE
How we came about
these two mares is a sad story. They are
registered quarter-horses and were bought by
this man for breeding puposes. He had a
leopard spotted Appaloosa stalion that he was
going to breed to about twenty-five
registered quarter horses. But he and his
wife decided to get a divorce and the wife
insisted on half the value of the horses. He
said he would starve them before she got any
part of them. That's exactly what he
did. The Humane Society got the county to
seize the horses. They arranged for the
Williamson County Sheriffs Possee to set up a
horse trailer convoy and all horses including
the stalion were transported to Georgetown
where a veterinarian agreed to shelter them
temporarily. The sheriffs department then
arranged for foster owners to care for the
horses until the court decided what action to
take. My wife and I became foster owners for
Jo and Maude. After about two months, the
court approved auctioning off the horses and
the owner had to turn over all of the
registration papers. We got our two for $100
each and also got the registration papers.
Our herd had now grown to six.
We fed the
mares good and they started putting on
weight. After a few more months during an
examination, the vet announced that both were
with foal. A few more months after this
announcement the foals (fillies) were born
within one month of each other. Now our herd
had increased to eight. This forced us to
sell our 2.5 acre patch and buy a 30 acre
spread.
DEE DEE and KO KO
Dee Dee was
the first arrival around midnite. I could
hear
hooves hitting the shed walls. I took my
lantern out to the shed and there she was. I
went back in and got my syringe of penicillin
and vial of
iodine. I gave her the shot and
doused her umbilical cord/navel with iodine.
This was to protect her from infection due to
the barn environment. About six weeks later,
Ko Ko followed and she got the same
treatment. Maude delivered Ko Ko and was
very protective of her. Her ears layed back
everytime I got near the little filly. Jo,
however, was the opposite. She welcomed the
attention we gave Dee Dee.
HAPPENI
NGS
So we started out with two
horses and after a while we had a herd of
eight. Time to move off of this two and a
half acre patch so the horses could stretch
their legs. We found this 30 acres about 60
miles east of where we lived. We hired a
fellow to trailer the horses to the new site.
Unfortunately, the fences that were here
were which is a no no when
horses
are involved.
We have
been here 12 years and
have had a multitude of fence wrecks and cut
legs, ankles and chests. Where fence
replacement was necesssary, I put up smooth
wire or field fencing, still not the best,
but much better than barbed wire.
When Ko
Ko and Dee Dee were four years old I had a
local fellow gentle them. They had to be
removed from their mares for weaning purposes
so he worked with them on a ranch he was
managing. He did a good job and charged only
$300 for the both of them which included
stalling and feed.
My wife had a wreck on
Jo one day
and ended up in the
hospital with
a concussion, four broke ribs and a mashed
leg. EMS had to come out and take her to the
hospital.
I mentioned
having to put Rusty
down
because of paralysis of the hind quarters.
We had another casualty. That was Maude who
broke an ankle while tangled up in a string
of barbed
wire. This is the reason I hate
the stuff. The vet gave up on her and put
her down too. The backhoe man came out again
and buried her.
The
cost for
the vet coming
out and euthanising is
$60. The backhoe cost $60
also.
All
herds have a lead mare who
bosses all the other mares. Molly was that
mare for years until she became too old and
the younger mares started picking on her. In
fact, she was kicked out of the herd. She
was picked on so much, I had to separate her
from the others by giving her a patch of her
own. Now Ko Ko, the youngest, has assumed
that roll. There is a pecking order amongst
horses. The next in line is Patti Jo the
Mustang, and then Dee Dee and then Dee Dee's
mare Jo and then Daisy. It's not a true
pecking order because Daisy dominates Dee Dee
but Jo dominates Daisy. At feeding time
those three go around in circles intimidating
each other. Daisy picks on Dee Dee, Dee Dee
picks on Jo and Jo picks on Daisy and on and
on until they get hungry enough to
concentrate on eating. Sometimes Ko Ko
breaks up the sillyness and eats their
food.
Ko Ko has had her encounters
with barbed wire
also.She tried to walk through a
downed barbed wire fence layed over, which I
wasn't aware of, by a
flood . She peeled a
large patch of her chest down--just the skin
luckily enough. I called the vet to come out
and do a stitch job. To keep the skin from
drying up before the vet arrived, I rubbed it
with petroleum
jelly. We had to tie her up in stocks,
which I had built for that purpose.
The stocks were made out of four 10', 4"
treated poles set in 24" of concrete. Each
pair of poles were tied together with a
double paneling of treated 2"x 6" lumber 8'
long. They were bolted together with lag
bolts. Every horse owner needs stocks for
emergencies.
Daisy had her leg injured
badly when she kicked back through a fence.
When she brought her leg back, it hung up in
the wire and cut a 3" chunk out of her leg.
In all these wire cut situations, the vet
usually recommends
penicillin and tetanus shots. When
there are chunks of flesh missing, he
recommends an aerosol spray of Granulex®.It's amazing to
see the hole fill back in with flesh over the
next two to four months of treatments (twice
a day). After the hole fills in, the use of
Granulex® is discontinued and any other spray
is used to keep infection down.
I think
that is enough about horses. There is a lot
more such as deworming and regular shots but
that should be between you and your vet.
Take care of those wonderful
critters.
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