Our First Horse

Resting horses look dead

June 6, 2007 Bill Comments 3 comments

A horse owner in Arizona regularly fields calls from concerned drivers over what appear to be dead horses in his pasture. Although this wasn’t always the case, a population boom now locates his pasture smack in the middle of the city and all these city folk aren’t familiar with seeing resting horses. If you’ve ever seen a colt resting/sleeping, you know it looks a lot like a dead horse, all sprawled out and still. Bob Eggers rescues, raises and sells horses so there is a sign on his fence with his phone number on it. Apparently he also gets complaints about abused or malnourished horses, too. Since he rescues abused horses, they often look poor when he first gets them, causing concerned drivers to call the Arizona Department of Agriculture. The State responds to every complaint but has never found abuse or neglect.

Although we once lived two miles from this particular pasture, we know live in rural Tennessee. Many of our friends and neighbors have horses here but that isn’t the case in suburban Arizona. As the city expands its reach into rural areas, the impact goes far beyond inconvenient complaint calls from well-meaning city folk. People complain about the dust horses kick up, the smell of manure, the flies, etc. Kinda like moving next to an airport and then complaining about airplane noise. And then all the land is developed so horse owners need to trailer their horses to the horse trails. It’s sad to see.

A friend of mine sent me a link to the Arizona Republic article for this story (click the link for the original article).

The Wild Horses of Maricopa, Arizona

June 3, 2007 Bill Comments 0 Comment

We’ve been visiting our newborn grand-daughter in Maricopa, Arizona these past few weeks and one day while driving near town Mikki saw a small band of wild horses. Over the course of the past few weeks, she saw these wild horses a few times. Finally, today, Mikki’s dad was able to snap a photo.

The term “wild horses” is used frequently here in the Phoenix area to name developments, a casino, gas stations, etc. but now it makes more sense to me. There really are wild horses still in Arizona and throughout the west.

Wild horses are believed to be descendants of horses brought here by Spanish conquistadors between the 1400’s and 1600’s. Today, there are thought to be less than 25,000 wild mustangs in the U.S. The horses we saw in Maricopa are managed by the Gila River Indian Community. Approximately 2,000 horses exist across their 370,000 acre reservation near Maricopa.

I like to think the west still has some wild in it and for us these horses prove it.

Funny Horse Pic: Holding it in

May 28, 2007 Bill Comments 0 Comment

I was snapping pictures one day and accidentally caught Moonshine changing positions to walk the other way. The picture makes it look like she’s crossing her legs.

Mending Horse Fences – update

May 25, 2007 Bill Comments 0 Comment

Fence bracket concept Over the past year we’ve spent time mending horse fences. Some repairs worked, some didn’t last. Here’s what we’ve learned:

Screws work better than nails. Eventually nails creep out, especially since horses tend to lean against fence boards pretty hard. At least ours do.
When using screws, drill pilot holes first. Otherwise you end up with wood splitting. In fact, many of the boards that were nailed in actually split from the nail.
Have spares – never know when you need them, such as in the middle of the night. There have been a few times this year when we heard a loud bang outside and it turned out the horses had broken a fence board. It’s important to have spares around for emergency repairs.
Save broken fence pieces for other repairs. We occasionally have a break in the middle of our 12 foot fence boards. We’ll take the two halves and trim them for use as center supports.
Center supports work and look nice. A center support is simply a small section of board attached across the center of the three fence boards. Lots of people don’t use them but I find our 12 foot sections tend to sag over time in the middle. The center support ties the three boards together in the middle to prevent that and to spread the force of a horse leaning on the middle across all three boards. They also look nice.
Fences are expensive! We discovered our 3 board fence costs about $40 per 12 foot section. That really adds up when you’re looking to put in 150 foot of fencing. We may need to replace a few sections of barbed wire fence at a time.

I have an idea for a fence strengthening brace that might also look really nice. The idea came to me while I brainstormed about how to save the fence boards that had split at their nail holes. I wanted to see if there was a way I could repair them using easy-to-find and inexpensive hardware items. What I came up with is a simple piece of flat steel brace with three holes in it. If I screw the fence boards into the posts through one of these, it would spread the grip of those three screws across the entire brace, essentially clamping the board onto the post. And if I painted it black and maybe rounded the corners, it would like nice against the wood. Here’s my concept photo:

The braces should cost less than $.50 each, or about $3 per 12 foot section. I’m still toying with the idea but I’m thinking about trying it on a small section of fence to see what it looks like.

The Incredible Disappearing Horse

May 23, 2007 Mikki Comments 2 comments

Okay, I admit it. I struggled with certain subjects in school, such as math and physics. But I’m pretty good at spatial relationships and figuring out what can fit where (I’m a mean packer – especially after 10 moves in 12 years – and I can fit more in a freezer than the average person can). But this one stumps me. Take a 16.2-hand, 1200-pound horse and put him in a 12×12 stall with a bucket of feed. Let him position himself in his favorite spot in the corner. Now standoff to the side of the window about a foot and say “Abracadabra!” (Okay, “abracadabra” is optional.) And ta-da! No horse! It’s amazing!

I don’t know why he has to hide to eat, but there you have it.

Funny Horse Pic: Brake Check!

May 22, 2007 Bill Comments 0 Comment

Okay, life is a little too serious at the moment so how about some fun? Moonshine likes to chase Valentine. Valentine likes to run full bore towards the fence and then slam on the brakes at the last minute. In this picture, it looks like Moonshine might have been following a little too closely. I don’t think she ran into him but the picture sure looks like a rear-end collision! He has never actually hit the fence or the barn to my knowledge. The fence and barn wall is just to the right of this cropped photo.

Death in the family

May 21, 2007 Bill Comments 2 comments

We’ve had a death in the family. We’ll be back posting shortly.

Thanks,
Bill

Advertising on this horse blog

May 18, 2007 Bill Comments 0 Comment

No obnoxious ads You may have noticed that there have been almost no ads on our blog. It’s been this way for well over a year now. We have a few Google ads that appear at the bottom of our links list and if you search for something and no results are returned, you get a Google search box. But other than that there have been no ads. We also haven’t been sponsored by anyone or paid to write a product or service review. We didn’t start Our First Horse to make lots of money. The objective of this blog was to force us to document the experience, for our own benefit. If anyone else is entertained along the way or learns something with us, great!

But as anyone who operates a blog like this knows, there are expenses when running a website. They’re not very high but we lease a dedicated server and that cost comes out of our pockets each month. To help recoup that expense we’ve thought of selling some advertising space. We looked at all kind of blogs and other websites for ideas on how many ads to have on each page and what layouts were attractive. The problem is, most websites and blogs have LOTS of advertising. Too much. We never want our readers to have to wade through advertising to see our articles and posts. We’ve decided we’re going to experiment with just a few ads here and there. Small, unobtrusive and hopefully complimentary to the theme of our site.

Starting as early as today you might see a small ad at the top of our menu and another small ad at the bottom of the site near the footer. At some point you may see us review a few products that we’re paid to review. We promise: 1) there won’t be many, 2) we’ll pick relevant products/services, 3) we’ll be 100% objective (even if it costs us the sponsorship) and 4) we’ll clearly mark paid reviews. We’ll never try to trick you.

Most blogs have advertising so this probably isn’t a surprise to you. We’ve resisted for as long as we could but we’re caving in gracefully and with a commitment to keep it to a minimum.

Thanks for understanding (we hope you do) and if you see something of interest in these ads, remember that viewing and clicking them helps us and them.

Finally, if you have a horse-related product/service or something complimentary to the horse lifestyle and you’d like information about advertising on the Our First Horse blog, please contact us.

Mystery Pasture Flat Spot

May 17, 2007 Bill Comments 0 Comment

We had rain yesterday in east Tennessee. When I went out to check the water bucket I noticed two shiny flat spots near the barn. I got a little closer to investigate and then went for my camera. I know what caused it. What’s your guess? I’ll edit the post later with some “evidence” and the answer.

Well, thanks for playing guys! Laura was the first to nail it…it took me a minute but I recalled a photo I took in about this same spot:

And this is what our horses looked like:

Rediculous…I mean look at this:

She’s suddenly a redhead! Horses are so funny. I rarely see Valentine muddy but I think it’s pretty clear from the two distinct flat spots in the top picture that both horses rolled.

One Year with Moonshine

May 16, 2007 Bill Comments 0 Comment

Mikki wrote recently about one year with Valentine, her Tennessee Walking Horse. And a few weeks ago we celebrated one year with Moonshine, my solid paint. It’s hard to believe a year has gone by already. Although I introduced her in October of 2006, we actually picked her up at the end of April. And over the course of the past year, she has been mostly predictable, in a good way. She did dump me off one time, an incident I have yet to write about. It’s not entirely her fault me and my ego experienced some pain and I’ve ridden her since, though cautiously. But mostly she’s a sweet, lovable horse who buries her face in my chest when she’s being shoed, loves to boss the much bigger Valentine, loves to chase him around the pasture occasionally (she can run circles around him), enjoys carrots and gracefully puts up with being saddled and ridden, except that one time :-).

Moonshine with muddy mane — Moonshine after a bath…a mud bath.

Moonshine is my first horse so this past year has been a huge learning experience for me. I’ve learned about horse behavior, health, maintenance, and expense. I’ve experienced joy and frustration. And in the past week, I’ve even experienced the healing comfort a horse can bring during times of personal trial. Sometimes you just need to hug a horse. But now that I have some of the basics of horse “ownership” down, this next year I’ll be focusing on the next phase of our relationship in the roles of horse and rider. Mikki and I hope to soon build our round pen, to facilitate training. We’re going to saddle our horses up more often. And we’re going to absorb all we can from more experienced horse owners about riding and then competing. Yes, this will be the year we “get our money’s worth.” Our weekly horse duties are changing to include a training regimen. Realistically we won’t probably feel comfortable showing until next year but that gives us a year to practice and get our horses familiar with going to shows. None of us are getting any younger and we have no idea what the future holds. So we’re going to grab the saddle by the horn and hold on for dear life as we try to get the most from this horse ownership experience.

Hopefully next year about this time we’ll be writing positive notes about our second year of horse ownership.