Our First Horse

Hay Consumption – Early Rain to Blame?

November 12, 2010 Bill Comments 4 comments

In my last post, I spoke of how quickly our horses are going through hay and the weather hasn’t even turned very cold yet. I spoke with a local large animal veterinarian about this and he mentioned that the weather earlier this year might be to blame. East Tennessee started out the year with a lot of rain. In his estimation, too much rain over a short period of time. What this does, he says, is flush the soil nutrients. So even though the grass grew pretty well this year, the quality of the grasses and resulting hay was relatively poor. Horses and other large animals have a built-in nutrient and mineral detectors that cause them to throttle food consumption to regulate nutrient intake according to what they need. His educated guess was that our horses were eating more because the hay wasn’t as full of nutrients as in previous years. That also seems to explain why our horses LOVE the square bales from last year and don’t seem to consume it as quickly as these newer round bales.

This just reminds me how much there is to know and learn about our horses!

Hay consumption doubles

November 5, 2010 Bill Comments 2 comments

I opened the back door to our house this morning to let the dogs out and the first thing I see is our horse Cash staring at me as if to say “hey human, our hay feeders are empty.” Nearby, Valentine and Moonshine echo the sentiment with looks of sadness. Romeo is out of sight, probably looking for ways to escape to find more food. Since Saturday, five and a half days ago, our four horses have mostly consumed 1,500 pounds of hay. That’s about 60-70 pounds of hay per horse per day, just about double what they ate during the summer. I say “mostly” because the quality of one of the bales must not have been entirely up to their high standards, as part of it was pulled out and stomped into the ground. It’s a horse thing and I got the message. Even so, they did eat most of it and are now hungry…again.

It stands to reason that hay consumption increases when the weather turns cold. For one thing, there is less green grass. There wasn’t much in our pasture to begin with but now there is even less. When they’re not foraging for fresh grass, our horses are usually standing at a hay feeder munching grass all day. They spend more time there these days. Eating hay also generates internal heat so as the weather turns cold (down into the 30’s Fahrenheit last night), their body heaters required fuel.

At this rate of consumption they’ll probably go through almost 11 full round bales of hay per month. At $25 per round bale, that’s…good grief…$275 a month. In addition to daily grain. Horses are expensive!

Horse Toys – Exercise Ball

November 1, 2010 Bill Comments 4 comments

I’ve often wondered if our horses would play with one of these horse exerciser balls. We’ve tried the giant hanging apple with a treat in it and no one seemed to care about it. But here’s a video of one little horse who seems to like his exercise ball. I bet he was sore after this session.

What toys have you used that your horse(s) seem to enjoy?

Purina Goes Pink

October 28, 2010 Bill Comments 0 Comment

If you use Purina feeds, by now you’ve noticed the pink bags. About a month ago we noticed the first batch and ended up coming back from the feed store with a trunk full of pink (we primarily use Purina Strategy and Equine Senior). I was surprised and impressed at how big a commitment they made – all of their livestock feeds at the feed store are pink right now in support of breast cancer awareness and in support of breast cancer research as part of their Pink 50 campaign in September and October this year.

Are the bags pink in your area?

Horse Bucket Cleaning

October 26, 2010 Bill Comments 4 comments

Soap Pads The mad rush is on to complete our horse farm projects before winter sets in. There is so much competing for our time in the fall. Festivals, leaf-viewing car trips, etc., not to mention the occasional rainy weekend where outside work isn’t pleasant. One of our projects today was bucket cleaning. This is much more pleasant to do when the weather is warm and the sun is shining. It’s an important task to keep horses healthy and to keep them drinking without worrying that their water is foul. It’s also surprisingly easy.

This was my small project today so I asked Mikki for advice (she usually does the bucket cleaning) and she recommended soap pads. I’ve used steel wool before, mostly for plugging holes around pipes that mice can get through, but didn’t realize what a great cleaning tool they could be. Especially the ones with build-in soap. Put a little water in the bucket, throw in a disposable soap pad and 2-3 minutes later I had a clean bucket. The only one it didn’t work on is an old bucket we don’t use for horses that we let sit too long. The algae or whatever that green junk is was so caked on that I might just replace it with a new bucket.

Do you use anything special in your bucket cleaning routine?

Server Move

October 22, 2010 Bill Comments 0 Comment

Server In response to a growing fan base and complaints about slow performance, we’ve upgraded our server hardware. We’re also taking the opportunity to upgrade our software and apply security patches. Upgrades like this take a little while so please bear with us for a few days. When we’re done, you should notice a considerable improvement in the speed and reliability of our site.

In addition to the site being occasionally offline, you may notice some of our images not loading or the design being off. Thanks for your patience!

10/23/10 Update: Posts, pages and comments are all restored and the site is functional, though a few pages that require special coding aren’t working just yet. And as you can tell, the design is a little different. I may use this as an opportunity to update the style but at the moment it’s kind of ugly. Expect some design changes over the coming days and feel free to make suggestions and offer constructive criticisms.

We’re also enabling some new features, such as post tagging and automatic mobile versions of the site when you view it on an iPhone, Blackberry, Windows 7 smart phone or other mobile device. Starting with this post, we’re also bringing back representative images. The new software update made is considerably easier to add images to our posts and as long as we don’t overdo it, I think images add a lot.

Cool nights return

September 28, 2010 Bill Comments 5 comments

Late summer was very warm here in east Tennessee. With temperatures in the 90s (Fahrenheit) and humidity greater than 70%, I admit I haven’t been very interested in doing much with our horses for a while. Tonight, as we headed out to feed horses, a noticeable change was in the air. If the weather forecast is right, cooler temperatures have returned, at least for the next 10 days, with highs in the 70s and lows in the upper 40s. I’m not a fan of winter, but fall is a nice break from the humidity of summer and now that cooler weather is returning, we’re looking forward to completing some projects around the farm and to riding our horses again.

How about you? Have you been waiting for the return of cooler weather to get out and ride/finish barn projects or are you a hardcore, ride anytime of year kind of of person?

Now I Feel a Little Bad About Deworming My Horses

August 31, 2010 Mikki Comments 2 comments

I have a bad habit of holding things in my mouth to free up both my hands. This afternoon I stuck the cap to a tube of Quest Plus dewormer in my mouth – with the inside of the cap facing my tongue. I couldn’t even see a trace of the gel (it’s orange) on the cap, but I sure did taste it. NASTY!! Made my tongue and lips numb too. I did feel bad giving it to Valentine after that – but keeping him parasite-free is more important than saving him from nasty-tasting stuff. So be sure to worm your horses on a regular schedule, preferably under your vet’s advice…just don’t put the cap in your mouth.

3 fence breaches in one week

August 6, 2010 Bill Comments 6 comments

I guess I should have expected it because it seems just about every year our vacation is interrupted by a phone call from a concerned neighbor about our horses roaming the streets. This one was no exception. We were 400 miles away in Savannah, GA and the phone rings. Luckily our backup system worked this time. The last time this happened, all of our horse contacts were away also.

Now you might think that our fence is pretty crappy after reading our posts about fence breaches but in truth it’s a good fence, a mixture of a three board wood fence (double boarded on the top layer) with barbed wire. The barbed wire isn’t horse-friendly so we’re replacing it over time but normally it works to keep animals inside pasture and is very common where we live in east Tennessee.

The first break was just Romeo, our small Appaloosa. A neighbor called to inform us he was down the road in an open pasture by himself. A horse friend led him home and Mikki’s dad patched where we thought he got out. Romeo is a barrel horse, flexy and nimble. There was one strand of barbed wire that was spread a little far so he patched it up very well. The next day, another call comes in telling us that Romeo is walking down the highway between two open pastures. Ack! After being led to the barn, a quick check revealed the previous patch job was still intact but a more thorough perimeter sweep identified that a tree had fallen way out back in a place that was difficult for humans to detect. Romeo simply stepped over the fence and went on his merry way. Why the other 3 horses didn’t follow, we don’t know. Mikki’s dad got a crash course in barbed wire fence repair with the help of a horse friend and everything was fine. Until tonight.

We waited a little late to feed the horses tonight. As I looked up at the fence next to the barn, I stopped in my tracks as I saw the carnage. Fence was everywhere. With my flashlight, I pointed in the direction I thought the horses would have gone and saw lots of shiny eyes reflecting the light. They were eating grass from my neighbor’s lush green lawn. It wasn’t hard to get them to return to the barn since it was feeding time but darn if they didn’t have to spend a few of the hottest days this summer in the barn while we bought wood and planned our next move.

The next day I was able to see what they had done and get a picture. Two 4×4 posts were snapped as well as some of the fence boards. This is the area we call the peninsula and it’s a problem spot in our pasture. Our horses congregate here and when a fight breaks out, there aren’t many options for escape. I think this is likely what happened versus the horses leaning against the fence for greener grass. This break seems like it was pretty violent.

We’ve decided to move the fence to eliminate this peninsula and to make way for our manure composting system. This is now much higher on our priority list.

By the way, it’s a good idea to always have some emergency repair supplies around. These kinds of things almost always happen to us at night or on a Sunday when the lumber yards are closed.

If I could do it all over again, here’s what I would change

July 5, 2010 Bill Comments 12 comments

Hindsight - horse looking behind Many of you have followed the Our First Horse blog for the more than four years we’ve been around. You’ve read about us starting with our first horse (Valentine), purchasing our second horse (Moonshine) soon after and later our third and fourth horses (Romeo and Cash). We started out as total newbies with a nice horse barn and a decent fenced property and gradually, slowly we gained knowledge and experience. And I’d like to think along that way we gained wisdom, as well. It’s a piece of that wisdom I’d like to share with you today.

Someone once said that hindsight is 20/20 and this we have all proven in our lives. After more than four years of horse ownership, I’ve come to the conclusion that we’ve made some poor decisions, especially early on. I love all of our horses and have no interest in selling any of them. We’re emotionally attached to them now. But even though we can ride any ride-able horse and even though we know how to take care of them, we’re in a way still beginners, unskilled and without a lot of time. I had an epiphany recently. For people like us who don’t have much time but love horses enough that they want their own, it’s better to buy a well-trained, excellent horse right in the beginning. What we should have done was spend $5,000-$10,000 each on two already-trained, “good” horses. There, I said it. Our horses are great but they need a lot of training. The trouble is, I need training, too, and I don’t have a lot of time for me to learn, become an expert and then train my horses.

So if I could do it all over again, I’d start out with better trained horses. I’m certainly not giving up on our horses and we will invest time and money into training them. But there are days I wish I could just saddle up any of them and head off on the trails (we can mostly do this with Romeo). So my advice to you if you’re a beginner looking for your first horse – save your money and invest in lessons for you (critical) and a well-trained horse.

For those of you with horses, do you agree/disagree? What would you do differently in hindsight?