Our First Horse

Turning out two horses by yourself

February 15, 2007 Bill Comments 8 comments

I’m told we baby our horses by letting them into the barn each night for a meal and sleep. That may be true but we feel safer knowing they’re not out in the dark pasture, far from sight. I’m more confident in the structural integrity of the barn than I am of the fence, especially given our latest fence incident. Of course, when you bring your horses in for the night, you also have to let them out in the morning. Mikki and I are fortunate enough to not have to leave the house for work each day, usually, so letting them out in the morning is pretty simple. With carrots in my back pocket, I head for the fence and Mikki opens the stall doors. This works great, as the presence of treats is made known by my calling out “carrots, come and get em!”. Alas, the lure of carrots is all the motivation they need to move along. But occasionally our routine is altered when Mikki has to leave for a work assignment or when she’s sick. In this case, I head up to the barn alone, open the stall doors one at a time and wait 20 minutes while both horses mosey along, investigating every little piece of hay along the way, sniffing me up and down for snacks. Then, just when I get one out and open the stall for the other, the first horse turns around and wants to check out the other horse’s stall. Great. But after much experimentation, I think I have finally discovered the solution.

It turns out horses are smart but not necessarily brilliant. They seem to really like routine, though. When I go to the barn to let them out, they don’t hear my voice down at the gate. So as simple as it seems, one day I went to the gate first, called out “carrots! Come and get em!” and then ran around to the inside stall doors, opened them one at a time and marveled as both horses made a beeline for the fence. I closed the gates inside the barn, ran back to the fence and finished the routine to their satisfaction (except for the whole “eating of fingers” thing). The next day I figured they would have figured out the trick by now but they didn’t. I’ve tried it five or six times now and it’s worked every time. I’m a visual person so here’s a diagram of our barn to help imagine the scenario:

Now we know we should teach our horses to leave their stalls without treats but it’s so much easier this way and I can’t see any harm in it. Does it look silly running around the barn like that? Yeah. Add this to the list of things that make me feel like a goofy horse owner (Geek light?) but I’m sticking with what works, even in the absence of style.

If you let your horses out each day like us, what’s your routine like?

More Fence Mending

February 13, 2007 Mikki Comments 3 comments

We walked up to the barn the other night and the horses were waiting at a section of fence that kind of comes to a “V” right next to the road. It’s kind of tight quarters there and apparently, someone felt crowded because there was some kicking and/or shoving. We didn’t see exactly what happened but there was a horse squeak, sudden movement and then a loud bang and voila! Two fence boards were missing, right next to the road. Luckily, we were right there when it happened because the next thing to happen would be for our two horses to step over the one remaining board and out to freedom. Needless to say, we did an emergency fence repair. At this point, whenever a fence repair is needed, we are replacing nails with screws. They stay in much better.

This is kind of a weak section of the fence anyway, probably because of the aforementioned tight quarters and the also mentioned proximity to the road. Valentine in particular likes to hang out at the shortest part of the V (as in the photo) and push on the boards. We’ve had to repair the top slat three times. The last time, we added vertical support and another board on the pasture side. Even with the reinforcements, though, we check that section pretty frequently.

I just want to say two things about this most recent incident: One – it seems to me that when building a fence, the fence slats should be on the “horse” side of the poles, and not the other way around. It’s much harder for the horses to push nails out that way. And two – Bill’s horse Moonshine is a big bully and picks on my poor Valentine all the time. Meanie.

Fence Mending (12/06)
Mending Horse Fences – Update (5/07)

Poopsicles; or, the Hazards of Winter Horsekeeping

February 12, 2007 Mikki Comments 0 Comment

Thermometer in winter I know ya’ll up north are probably getting tired of us complaining about the “cold” weather, but you have to understand that we are desert people. We have only been in the Southeast for a little over a year, and it was not this cold here last year. It got pretty cold on a couple of nights, but we have had unrelenting below-freezing weather at night for weeks now. (In case you doubt our idea of cold, please note the photo to the right that shows the current time, date, inside temp of 56.3 and outside temp of 17.6. Ack!!) Yeah, yeah, we don’t have to shovel snow – yet – but the rest of it is getting to be a little old. Scraping ice off the windshield every morning, bundling up to go up to the barn (have you seen A Christmas Story? “I can’t put my arms down!” Ha ha ha!), leaving the water running at night so the pipes don’t freeze, picking ice from all the buckets…and poopsicles. When you pick up a shovelful of poo and drop it in the wheelbarrow and it goes CLUNK! and you’re afraid it’s going to knock a hole in the side of the wheelbarrow. That’s just plain weird. It is kind of pretty, though, with all those ice sparkles on it. (Okay, that’s even more weird.)

Anyway, suffice it to say that we are not used to this kind of weather, and still not equipped for it. Here are some tricks we’ve used to help us (and the horses) survive until spring:

Get the stall cleaning done early. It’s so much more pleasant to muck out stalls at noon when it’s 40 degrees out than to wait until after dark when it’s 28 or so.
Dress warm. Even if you feel silly wearing long underwear, two pairs of socks, three shirts and a dorky hat, this is one time when function should take precedence over style. Heck, we even have ski masks for when it’s really cold – you can’t get much goofier than that.
Good gloves are a must. I personally hate to wear gloves, and my fingers are kind of short, so there’s a little extra glove past the end of my fingers that gets caught in gate latches, but warm fingers are happy fingers!
If you don’t have bucket warmers, improvise. We often put the “barn buckets” out in the sun when we let the horses out, so the ice will be melted by the time we let them back in. Also, we sometimes fill the buckets with warm water from out bathtub right before we let them in, so they’ll have a few minutes, anyway, of water at a reasonable temp. Alternately, we’ll boil water on the stove and pour some into the cold water to warm it up a bit. It doesn’t keep it from freezing, of course, but it holds it off for a while. Bill discussed some other ideas in Horses and the Frozen Tundra of the South.

So those are some ideas. Just remember, no matter how tempting, do not set anything on fire near your barn or use any sort of radiant heat device in or near the barn. I know it’s cold, but it’s not worth the risk of burning your barn down. Oh, and one more suggestion: think back to what it was like in August when you were mucking out the stall, pouring with sweat and wishing for fall. Remember what that feeling was like and know that those days are coming again.

I can’t wait.

No more rusty metal gate

February 8, 2007 Bill Comments 0 Comment

This week I was looking through pictures from last year, longing for warmer days when I found pictures of our pasture access gate. It was a rusty mess. We’ve looked at and walked through this gate a million times and couldn’t take the rust any more. It was ugly, it made my hands red, it made noise and was in danger of disintegrating into a pile of rust. The solution was a simple one.

Our pasture has three gate access points: 1) through our back yard using this small rusty gate, 2) through our barn using a galvanized metal gate (no rust) and 3) via the road going past our place using a large rusty gate, big enough for a truck, tractor, etc. to get through. One summer day, we decided we had enough of the smaller rusty gate and picked up some primer and green Rustoleum at Walmart. The gate (pictured) took 2 cans of primer and 2 cans of paint. We selected green because it matched the color of the grass back then. What a huge difference it made in the appearance of our back yard.

A few thoughts when painting pasture fence and gate stuff:

Horses are curious creatures and have large nostrils with which to inhale psychedelic paint fumes (careful, those of you who have a horse that cribs/sucks wind/wood).
It’s easier to avoid getting paint on you with gloves than it is to wash paint off of your skin
Keep the horses away, especially if you’re using non-horse colors like white primer and green. Yes, horses come in white sometimes but mine are black.
You think you know this but trust me when I say – don’t spray into the wind. Lesson learned…again.

10 months later, this gate looks about as good as it did when I painted it. Next, we’ll do the big rusty gate, though it’s a lower priority since I don’t look at it every day from the house.

We’re in need of some more gates and we’re thinking of building our round pen with these 12-foot gate sections. But I’m at the point where I need to decide on painted or galvanized. Painted looks nicer…at first. I don’t know how long this paint job of ours will last but I sure don’t want to paint gates every year. I don’t want to spend the time or money. Paint for this little gate cost us almost $20 and a new, painted gate isn’t much more than that. I’m strongly considering galvanized. I think in the long run we’ll save money.

Why Our Horses Are Naked

February 5, 2007 Mikki Comments 2 comments

We’ve mentioned in several earlier posts that we don’t keep halters on our horses while they’re out in the pasture and promised to explain why. Well, now we finally will.

We often see horses in pastures wearing a halter, and many of our friends keep their horses haltered all the time. In the movies, certainly, the horses are always wearing something or another. We loved the fancy halters in “Racing Stripes,” for instance – they were dark leather with a brass nameplate on the side. And it makes sense, don’t you think, to have a halter on your horse? That way, if you need to catch a horse in a hurry, all you do is grab it and snap on a lead rope. So why don’t we leave halters on our horses?

Well, we leave them bare for safety reasons. There’s our paranoia about theft, of course – why make it easier for a horse thief to nab your horse? But that’s a very minor consideration, really. The biggest thing is that the halter is so easy to catch on things. Our pasture is very woodsy, and the horses love to wander through the trails between the trees. It would only be a matter of time before one of them snagged a branch with the halter, panicked and injured him- or herself.

Another scenario we’ve read about is horses getting a hoof caught in the halter when scratching themselves. I’ve seen my horse rubbing his chin with a rear hoof, believe it or not, and halters are pretty loose in that area. It seems like a remote possibility that he could get his hoof caught, but a possibility nonetheless.

And, last but not least, there’s the fact that our horses cannot leave anything on themselves or each other alone. When we got their fancy new personalized halters and went out into the pasture to try them on the horses, Moonshine did her best to pull Valentine’s off. (Yet another reason why blankets wouldn’t work out for our horses.)

So they’ll just go around in the buff. Better safe than sorry – which pretty much sums up our horsekeeping doctrine.

The round bale hay experiment – Part 3

February 2, 2007 Bill Comments 0 Comment

Round bale by tree Gone. That’s how I’d explain the round bale I mentioned in Part 1 (October 13) and Part 2 (November 21). Our horses totally decimated it and seem offended they actually needed to forage for grass again. But as the weather got colder and the grass in our pasture became less and less, I started realizing that supplemental forage seems like a necessity. We seemed to “get away with it” last year because we bought Valentine in mid-February and prior to that only had a single boarding horse on our 5+ acre pasture. This year is different. We have two permanent horses sharing one pasture of dead or missing grass. So here at the end of the “experiment” I can tell you it has been a total success. $20 worth of hay supplemented our horses forage needs for almost three months (October-January). I don’t expect to get nearly as much time out of the next round bale because our natural forage supply is almost gone.

Based on our experience these past few months, here are some notes I’ve made on round bales:

I’m a little concerned that our horses stand in one small area and eat from it all day. Will they get fat this way? I thought horses always wanted to keep moving for safety.
I came across an interesting report concerning round bale hay spoilage. The government of Alberta, BC, Canada funded a study of how round bale storage techniques affect spoilage. Although the report was conducted in 1988, the data remains relevant today. The results showed that, with the exception of round bales stored inside, there were no differences in hay spoilage where round bales were stored outside in rows versus wrapped in plastic. Round bales stored outside, according to the study, may lose up to 10% of the hay to spoilage, after 16 months, amazingly. Round bales stored away from the weather experienced no spoilage. For more information, visit the Round Bale Storage Techniques report at the Alberta government website.
Although I purchased this last round bale for $20, delivered straight off of the hay baler wagon, I wonder how much price will fluctuate in winter. Supply and demand and all.
Delivery was great but there is no hay cutting going on these days so I can’t count on free delivery. I’m sure I could pay for delivery but I have a car hauler trailer and am inclined to save a few bucks and pick it up myself. I wonder if this is a good idea. At 1,000 pounds, how difficult will each be to move around at home, since we don’t have a tractor?
Location – the spoilage report mentioned above notwithstanding, I’m still considering putting the new round bale in our old barn out in the pasture. I wonder if I’ll be able to get it in there without the aforementioned uncontrollable 1,000 round bale rolling through our barn and knocking it down. Sure, it would be funny later but barns aren’t cheap.

I made some calls to try and get another round bale, as the grass in our east Tennessee pasture becomes less and less with colder weather. Fortunately, I have a friend who was willing to sell me 2 round bales for $30 total, provided we pick them up. So we picked up two round bales from an open field on 1/12/07 with our F150 and a 16-foot car hauler, which worked nicely. I think we could have pulled three round bales home if we wanted to. “Picked up” means we went to the field and my friend loaded both round bales onto our trailer with a tractor and hay spear.

We brought the round bales home and figured since our pasture is hilly, we’d use that to our advantage. I backed the trailer up with the rear-facing downhill next to a tree and Mikki and I were able to roll off one of the round bales. The horses found this whole process quite interesting!

Next, I backed our trailer up to the barn to unload the second round bale. This proved much more difficult. I keep calling these “round” bales but in reality, they’re flat on the bottom from sitting for 6 months. We also didn’t have the downhill advantage. But eventually we unloaded it. Man, I wish we had a tractor.

So now our horses have their faces in the “new” hay every day for most of the day, though they do roam the pasture in-between “meals”. The quality of these round bales looked pretty poor on the outside, with lots of visible mold. Since the bales are in layers (think pecan swirls), the moldy layer was easily unwrapped to reveal the good hay. The inside looked much better. The outside peeled off as we rolled the bale into place. Our horses are picky about their hay and forage so we don’t expect they’ll be interested in any of the moldy hay, as long as there is good hay to be had.

As of today, February 2nd, the first bale in the pasture is almost entirely gone. That’s 3 weeks for $20 ($15 plus gas to get it here). Not bad for winter forage, I suppose. The horses don’t seem to have touched the bale in the old barn for some reason. We might have to push it out.

Knowing how well round bales are working for us, we have a plan for later this year. This summer/early fall when the round bales are plentiful, cheap and not moldy, we’re going to stock up, putting them in the old barn protected from the elements. I’m sold on round bales!

Thanks to David who commented in The round bale hay experiment – Part 2 about using a hay ring, specifically a horse hay ring. Apparently one of these devices reduces the amount of wasted hay by keeping the round bale contained. Horses simply reach their necks over and feed out of the middle. We’re doing some more research on price, etc. and will bring it up in a later post. David says it extends the life of the bale up to a week or more. Sounds good to me, provided the price is reasonable.

Big Texan Horse Hotel

February 1, 2007 Bill Comments 6 comments

A friend of mine is getting ready to take his first solo car trip across the U.S. While planning his trip, he came across the Big Texan Steak Ranch and Horse Hotel and sent me a link because they have horse stalls for traveling horse owners. We’ve driven across the U.S. multiple times now and recall seeing all the billboards for the Big Texan (eat this giant steak in an hour and it’s free!) but never paid attention to their equine features. We don’t plan on traveling to Texas with our horses but if we did, this looks like a fun place to stay! They have (from their website):

20 “Texas Size” Stalls 12′ X 12′ (Sand or Dirt)
A 60-foot round pen
4 Gated Runs Complimentary During Day Use
Secondary 6-foot Perimeter Chain Link Fence
55 Room Motel open 24 hours
Truck & Trailer Parking
Giant steaks!

I’m sure there are others but this is the first time I’ve ever seen mention of a “horse hotel”. Do you know of any others? Have any of you ever stayed at the Big Texan?

By the way, if you have 12×12 stalls in your barn, you can impress your horses by telling them their stalls are “Texas Size”!

For more information on the Big Texan Steak Ranch and Horse Hotel, visit their website: http://www.bigtexan.com/

Discussion Forum Reminder

January 29, 2007 Bill Comments 1 comment

We’re thankful for all of you who stop by Our First Horse each day to read about our adventure. Interestingly, hardly any of you seem to view our discussion forum. I’m wondering if it’s because we’ve buried the link too far down on the sidebar. Just in case you didn’t know about it, we added a discussion forum to Our First Horse months ago and have an “active topics” list of the last 5 active discussion topics to the right of the screen below the menu. On a lot of computer screens you need to scroll down before you see this link on the menu bar on the right side. We’re not trying to compete with the big horse forums, like those found on Horse City or Horsetopia. We just figured this would be a good place for some first-timer discussions, general horse talk with our visitors and stuff we want to mention that doesn’t necessarily warrant a fancy blog post.
Here’s a big old link to our forum:

Our First Horse Discussion Forum

And here’s a list of some of the posts in the forum:

Uses for hay bale string – (General Horse Talk)
Warmer Weather = Easier Work – (General Horse Talk)
How much do you pay for hay? – (General Horse Talk)
Urine Treatment – (Barn and Pasture)
Local Hobby Farm Coop – (Barn and Pasture)
Alfalfa cubes – yes or no? – (Horse Health)

Please stop by our horse forum when you have a moment and drop a note on anything you find interesting. Or start your own post/discussion. And if you have any suggestions on making the forum more useful, please let us know either there or in the comments of this post.

EDIT: the discussion forum is no longer available.

Taking your horse for a walk

January 28, 2007 Bill Comments 9 comments

Temperatures were in the upper 50’s today, warm enough to make me want to be outside, doing chores I’ve been putting off. One of the fun chores I’ve been putting off is saddling up my horse Moonshine to get her familiar with having a saddle on her back. She had been ridden by previous owners but not often. In fact, the first time I “rode” her, she reared up and dumped me off the back. I’ll have to write about that someday. I’ve ridden her since without incident, but hardly at all. It’s time to start enjoying this pony from a saddle. In the absence of a round pen, which we’re working on buying/building, we have a few options for working our horses. We could longe them (halter and lead them in around in a circle with the lead rope, using a whip to gently coax) and saddle them and walk them around to get them familiar with having a saddle on their backs again. We did some walking today. I have this new saddle and wanted to attach everything and adjust it for my horse. The first thing I noticed was just how stiff my new saddle is. I mean it’s like a pair of new cowboy boots that needs breaking in before it’s comfortable. Next, it occurred to me that riding horses is probably not something you decide to do when you have a half-hour to spare. It takes that long just to brush your horse and strap a saddle on. (We weren’t in a rush or anything – I just had this revelation that horseback riding isn’t something you could probably do on your work lunch break.) Although it took us a while to strap this new saddle on, Moonshine was patient. This is the first time in a while she’s had access to all the yummy green grass in our yard so she was content just standing there eating. Once we had the saddle on and adjusted, of course I had to sit on her to make sure the stirrups were long enough. I admit, I’m still a little nervous getting on this bolt of lightning but this time I had my cowboy boots and long jeans on and figured our lawn was soft. I didn’t ride her but I mounted her 3 times without incident. Mikki and I then walked her down the street past some neighbor homes. She seemed to not want to go near the caged yappy dogs down the road but reluctantly agreed after some coaxing. We’ll have to keep up the walking to desensitize her to barking dogs.

As I mentioned in Vacationing with horses on my mind, I recently spent some time in Arizona and got to ride a horse while I was there. As I’m riding along at dusk, some pit bull comes running over to us and the first thing I think is “crap, what if this horse is afraid of dogs and takes off?” Fortunately for me, that didn’t happen. The horse I rode was pretty laid back and didn’t mind all the other dogs we encountered on that ride, including lots that would wait until we were near their fence and then run out towards us, barking viciously. That’s how I need Moonshine to be.

So for now, we’ll be walking our horse like a dog. In fact, Mona over at the Horse Approved blog wrote about that very subject earlier this month in her post Walk Your Horse Like a Dog. Not only does it get them familiar with your neighborhood and your tack, I have to agree with Mona that it’s good bonding time.

Frozen Hoses

January 27, 2007 Bill Comments 3 comments

Frozen hose with wrap We’ve had a few days where the weather has been freezing much of the time and we’re having trouble getting water through our hoses now. When we know the temperature will dip below freezing, we open the nozzle end and turn the water supply off at the spigot so when ice forms inside the hose and expands the water, it has a place to go. We also cover the spigot end with some fabric and a bucket. The pipes are already insulated. Now we don’t normally need water in the morning because we fill all the horse buckets when we clean stalls. The hoses sit out in the sun all day but lately don’t always thaw before we need to use them for water. What seems to work is not only opening the nozzle end when we’re done but also disconnecting the hose end at the spigot. It helps that our property slopes where the hose lays; the water mostly drains on it’s own. The reason this is a pain is because the spigot end always has lots of water in it so my hands/gloves always get wet and I don’t like being wet AND cold. I don’t mean to whine. I know you guys up north have it WAY colder than we do in the south. I’m just so looking forward to spring. Come on spring!

I did try one thing that helps, though. I had some pipe insulation (Home Depot or Lowes for around $2 for 6 feet) collecting dust so I wrapped it around the nozzle end of the hose (see picture above). I don’t know if it helps keep the ice away but it’s so much nicer holding onto the pipe foam than our ratty old garden hose.

Do you have any tips on dealing with garden hoses in the winter? For us, they are a necessity since we don’t have faucets everywhere we need water each day.